Michelle Yeoh’s best actress Oscar win has shed a light on her long-standing connection to Australia, where she won a beauty pageant at Melbourne’s Moomba festival and got her start on screen, shooting a commercial with Jackie Chan.
Yeoh had been studying ballet at London’s Royal Academy of Dance in the 1980s when a spinal injury ended her chances of performing. On return to her homeland, Yeoh’s mother entered her into the Miss World Malaysia beauty pageant.
Michelle Yeoh at the Miss World pageant in London, November 1983. She went with her Chinese name “Yeoh Choo-Kheng”. Credit:YouTube
Though a tomboy, Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng – as the Everything Everywhere All At Once star was then known – reluctantly agreed to compete and won the event.
Her 12-month stint took her to the Miss World competition in London (where she finished 18th), and in early 1984 to Australia, where she was crowned Miss Moomba International.
That title – which had many names over the years, including Miss International Tourism and Pacific Queen – was conferred on the winner of the international pageant competition, and was distinct from the Queen of Moomba. It was last awarded in 1987.
Coincidentally, the crowning moment of Yeoh’s career – winning the best actress Oscar for her performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once – came on Monday (AEDT) while the Moomba was in full swing.
Michelle Yeoh with her Oscar which she won for best actress.Credit:AP
According to some accounts, it was while she was in Melbourne that Yeoh first caught the eye of Jackie Chan, who was well on his way to becoming the biggest martial arts movie star in the world.
It’s certainly possible — Chan’s parents had lived in Australia since the early 1960s (the actor has claimed that his father, who had worked at the French and the US embassies in Hong Kong, was a spy) — but there is no clear evidence to support it.
At any rate, Yeoh’s first screen role was in Australia. “My first working job was a commercial, and of all things, with Jackie Chan,” she told an interviewer last year.
It was a watch ad, for luxury brand Guy Laroche. In it, she catches the eye of Chan while riding a scooter past him, as he comes the other way on a bicycle. Naturally, his head is turned and he falls off. And thus an enduring action-comedy-romance screen partnership was born; over the years, the pair would make 15 movies together.
The ad brought Yeoh to the attention of a start-up production company in Hong Kong, and though she was first cast in the typical damsel-in-distress role, she quickly convinced them to give her a chance as an action hero capable of standing alongside her leading men as an equal.
It proved to be the making of her. Though she had not been trained in martial arts, Yeoh was able to bring her choreographic skills to the new discipline.
“Because of the years of training as a ballerina, as a dancer, I was able to learn movements in a very short period of time,” she said.
Chan took some convincing, though. “He always believes that women should stay at home and cook and don’t do anything and be the victim,” she told an interviewer in the 1980s.
But she soon set him straight. “I said to him, ‘if you say that again I’m gonna kick your ass’,” she said recently.
These days the pair are, she insists, great friends. But, she added, “He does say I am one of only two women he’s afraid of”.
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