by Wade Major

   If someone had told me 12 years ago that I'd have a movie screened in America," says Michelle Khan, "I would have fallen over laughing my head off."
   Seated yoga-style on the floor of her Beverly Hills hotel suite, the actress who stateside is best known as Jackie Chan's "Supercop" co-star glows with enthusiasm at the prospect of a Hollywood career. After more than a decade as one of Hong Kong's pre-eminent action stars, success in America would be a perfect coda to a career path characterized by crushing setbacks and triumphant comebacks. "I literally just go with the flow of my life," the actress says in impeccable English. "If I look back at the last 12 years in Hong Kong, nothing went as planned--because I never planned anything to begin with."
   Trained as a dancer since childhood, Khan saw her hopes for a career in dance come to an abrupt halt when she was sidelined by a ballet injury during postgraduate studies at London's Royal Academy of Dance. Returning to her native Malaysia, she discovered that her mother had enrolled her in a beauty pageant and reluctantly followed through. Several months later, she was crowned 1983's Miss Malaysia. As part of her subsequent celebrity chores, Khan was invited to Hong Kong to appear in a TV commercial with Jackie Chan. Impressed by her talent, director Po Chi-Leung arranged for a contract with D&B Films, and Khan made her entry into the chaotic, hazardous world of Hong Kong action filmmaking.
   "As a dancer, you have to be disciplined and very dedicated," she says. "You have to learn to live with a lot of pain and injuries, much like martial artists do. Because athletics had always been in my blood, when they suggested action movies it just seemed natural." The next seven years, however, proved anything but natural. After four years and five films (a meager output by Hong Kong standards) Khan announced her impending marriage and retirement. But the marriage failed and she returned to films three years later with "Supercop." Four years after that, "Supercop" was finally released in the U.S. by Miramax.
   "It was my comeback movie," she says. "And to have it be such a big success was so gratifying. My career escalated again. It's not often that people get a second chance. To retire at my peak, come back and still have the chance to work with the best talent in Hong Kong--I still can't believe it."
   Women have always figured prominently in Hong Kong action films, but colleagues credit Khan with earning them the same attention for fighting skills and stunt work as their male counterparts. "When I made my second film, `Yes, Madam,' for director Yuen Kwai, he came to the gym to see if I was someone who was not afraid to get a few bruises, a few knocks. Then, in my first scene, I had to do a running leap onto the back of a car, land with a gun in my hand and shoot. After we did a couple takes, he came up to me and said, `Your arm is getting dirty from all that jumping around.' When he tried to wipe it off, he realized it wasn't dirt but bruises. That's when he saw I was a fighter."
   In addition to working frequently with Hong Kong's leading male action stars Jackie Chan and Jet Li, Khan has scored notable solo successes with "Wing Chun" and "Once a Cop." Her role as Invisible Woman, one of a trio of female superheroes in "The Heroic Trio" and "Executioners," is one Khan is especially fond of. "We had so much fun on those movies," she says of working with co-stars Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung. "The three of us are such good friends. When we started, they said, `Now, don't do anything crazy, because if you do the director will expect us to do it, too!'"
   On one of her more recent films, director Ann Hui's "Stuntwoman: The Story of Ah Kam," Khan suffered her first major injury. "I thought it was the end of my career, to be honest," Khan says. "The movie was my own little tribute to the stunt people of Hong Kong, because I wouldn't be here without them as my mentors, watching out for me. In one stunt I landed on my head, and my legs came out from behind me. I thought I'd snapped my back. I just thank God I'm so agile after all these years of training. The doctors are flabbergasted. I shouldn't even be walking. But I am."
   During her recovery, Khan began to reflect on the future course of her career. "I think that time lying in the hospital with a cast around me--not able to do anything, a complete invalid--is when I started to think, `Yes. It's time to move on.' And that's when America opened up." While her agents and managers cautiously field offers and consider her options, Khan is simply grateful that she has made it this far.
   "I'm very excited that people have voiced an interest in having me do dramatic roles as well, which is very fulfilling as an actress," Khan says. "Being a Buddhist, I believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe that, if a chance comes, you had better work very hard to make sure something comes of it.
   "If it doesn't, it's nobody's fault but your own."