With her long, delicate arms and legs and ready laugh, Michelle Yeoh -- dressed in an elegant, pale-green silk suit -- doesn't seem like a world-class, no-holds-barred action star. That she was once Miss Malaysia (she's ethnically Chinese, but was raised in Malaysia) is easy to believe. But she can kick your butt: She's been called the female Jackie Chan, has costarred with the martial-arts dynamo in several pictures and does all her own stunts. She's already won a cadre of smitten fans with such Hong Kong pictures as Yes, Madam (1985, with U.S. martial-artist Cynthia Rothrock); the outrageous Heroic Trio (1992, with Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui) and its sequel, Executioners (1993); and Police Story 3: Supercop, released in the U.S. last year. Now Yeoh (like many Hong Kong stars, she's billed several ways -- look for her as Michelle Khan and Yeung Chi Keung as well) is costarring with Pierce Brosnan in her first Western picture, the James Bond epic Tomorrow Never Dies. In her flawless, British-accented English -- the legacy of college in the UK -- Yeoh talks about image vs. perception, Jackie Chan and being a woman in the rough-and-tumble world of Hong Kong action movies.

How did you get involved in martial-arts films?

I had zero martial-arts background when I first started in the industry. I was very fortunate to have been trained in ballet and all that, and that as a kid I played all kinds of sports. In Hong Kong -- in Asia generally -- action movies are the biggest thing. So I wound up in action movies. And Jackie Chan and I go back... my God, he was the very first person I met in Hong Kong, the very first person I ever worked with. This was like -- dare I say it -- 12 years ago now, when I went over to Hong Kong to do a television commercial.

I think that has worked definitely to my advantage. I do work hard to keep it that way: I don't want to be all buffed up, so that when I walk into the room it's like, "Oh, OK -- she's going to start doing something action." A lot of people just wouldn't have imagined that a woman could do the kind of things I do in Supercop, for example. If I'd been a guy, more likely than not they would just have sat back and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah... that's very nice." And you know what? Even when they see me doing all those stunts, a lot of them will come up to me and go, "Did you really do that?" You know, one time as a joke, [director] Stanley Tong [Jackie Chan's First Strike, Rumble in the Bronx, Supercop] told [director] Robert Rodriguez, "No, she doesn't do that stuff herself -- I superimposed her face on someone else!"

The one and only. Stanley had a part in that -- he's an old friend; he was a stuntman when I first started to work in movies. I said to him, "Look, I've seen other of Jackie's movies before. If you have me playing next to him, and it's like the roles other women have played in his movies, then what is the point of me being there?" But the way we wound up doing it, the audience is gonna go, "Whoa, man! Whoa, woman!" Jackie was always very skeptical about women fighters, and I remember shooting the very first fighting scene you see me do in Supercop. That was the first time Jackie had seen me in person actually doing arm-to-arm combat, and I'm sure he was standing there going, "OK, I heard you were good. Let's see." Then, when I started to do my thing, first he was standing back. Then he sort of edged forward and he was like, "OK, kick it! Try this." That sequence of things I do, that's Jackie's part. He was like, "You know, I think you can do it." And then we just had a blast! "Try this! Try this! Try that!" There are some kicks I would do that would just make the men go, "Ouch!" Both Stanley and Jackie know there are things -- like those kicks that go over the head -- that can be done, but they're not gonna do it. And suddenly they had someone to whom they could say, "OK, you do it. You try it out."

Like a big brother, Jackie would always be hovering around me, like, "That's too dangerous, don't do it." Then I would turn around and say, "Well you're doing the same thing. It's too dangerous? Then you don't do it either." [Laughs] All we could do was watch out for each other. And thank God he was there! If you watch the outtakes at the end of Supercop, there's a scene in which if he hadn't been sitting at the back there and just pulled up my gown by the scruff of the neck, I would have gone crashing down -- I would have been really hurt. So whenever I do a stunt, it's like, "So, where's Jackie? OK you're there. OK, Stanley, you're there. OK, now I can do my stunt." It's fantastic when you have people that you trust, people you get on with.

Fantastic. I mean, it's so good to be able to do that, because this stereotype has a long history. Anyone expecting a passive Asian woman is going to be taken by surprise when they see me! They already know about Jackie, especially after Rumble in the Bronx. The surprise element here is, "Look, there's someone else just as crazy." That's a very important element in my movies: The audience starts getting very complacent, then suddenly they sit up and go, "Whoa, did she really do that?"

The best thing that's happened to me while I've been here is meeting the women! I mean, the men kind of go, "Hi, nice to meet you," and I say, "Wow, you're the bravest one I've met" -- most of them are sitting back in the corner. But the women, they rush forward and they go, "Yes!" Suddenly, finally, they're seeing a woman who's been allowed to do something exciting. Why do men get all the fun all the time? I think we should get some fun, too, and what I do is a lot of fun.

Maitland McDonagh is the editor of Motion Picture.

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