|
||||
|
The actor who soared with Jackie Chan (in Police Story III: Supercop, released in the U.S. in 1996) and Pierce Brosnan's James Bond (in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies) is sitting in a sunny alcove on the fourth floor of Shanghai Tang, the Hong Kong-based luxury-goods chain, detailing the intense mental and physical preparation required to pull off the wire-engineered fight scenes in her latest film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In it, as always, she performed her own high-flying stunts. She gestures toward the adjoining balcony. "I wouldn't stand there just to look out," she says. "But when I'm on the set doing things for the role, the anxiety just shuts off." Okay, so Asia's action queen can conquer her fears. But who would have guessed she had any in the first place? Yeoh, 38, has made her reputation by being fearless and fabulous. In the gallery of cinematic types, some girls are pretty, some are smart and some are nice; Yeoh, the daughter of English-speaking ethnic Chinese Malaysians, is all three-abundantly so, both onscreen and off. And her more obvious and pleasant assets are reinforced by an iron will. Just by being herself, she has forged a fierce new model for women in film. Her preshowbiz career may look frilly on the surface-studying ballet at London's Royal Academy of Dancing, winning a 1983 Miss Malaysia title-but those endeavors required a dedication and toughness that came in handy when she landed her first starring role in the 1985 Hong Kong actioner Yes, Madam. The 23-year-old Yeoh had no martial-arts skills, and when she got to the set she was surrounded by male crew members who were openly doubtful of her ability to handle the stunts. But she worked hard and mastered the moves. Though her first attempts weren't pretty, she says, they proved a point: "So I got a few bumps and bruises. The hardest part was earning their respect."
Most onlookers assumed that, once she'd established a foothold in Hollywood, she'd remain there and try to capitalize on her gains. But for her next major role, Yeoh returned to China to film Ang Lee's Mandarin-language epic Crouching Tiger, which is set during the 19th-century Qing Dynasty. Choreographed by The Matrix's Hong Kong action maestro, Yuen Woping, the film's stunts-especially those staged high atop roofs and trees-are visually stunning. But Lee, the Taiwan-born director of such stately dramas as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, brings a new narrative depth to the genre. Crouching Tiger won raves at this year's Cannes and New York film festivals, and Lee is considering making both a prequel and a sequel. Yeoh stars as Yu Shu Lien, a renowned sword fighter who tutors a headstrong female martial-arts prodigy, Jen (Zhang Ziyi), and balances her professional obligations with her unexplored attraction to a fellow warrior, played by Chow Yun Fat. Yeoh's eye-catching performance has put her in contention to costar with Harrison Ford in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones 4, and the heretofore little-seen subtleness and gravity she displays under Lee's tutelage have raised her stock as a serious actor. Deservedly so, says Lee: "She doesn't get to show off dramatically a lot, but I knew she could do it." For all its rewards, Crouching Tiger was Yeoh's most difficult shoot yet. She broke her knee early on, the latest in a series of injuries she's sustained on various sets over the years. (She was banged up doing a motorcycle stunt for Supercop and broke her back on an 18-foot tumble while filming The Stunt Woman.) "We had been fighting at night, and I was on and off wires-it got to a point where my brain wasn't quite sure when I was off the wire and when I was not," she says. "It was a mistiming. The person I was fighting with went under my legs a little bit, and we weren't even aware of it. When I landed, my leg collapsed." The recuperation period was pure misery, but just one day after surgery, she was in therapy. "It taught me great patience," she says, sighing. "All the teachings of Taoism and Zen came to me, and I thought, Okay-I can cope with this." Within a month, she was back on the set, rounding out her acting duties by teaching her younger costars how to throw punches. Yeoh helped Zhang, in private, to gain the confidence she would need when shooting began. "It's very intimidating when someone is charging at you with a sword," Yeoh explains. "Punches don't come slow-they come fast and furious. You have to learn to be calm. I would take her aside and tell her to throw punches at me; then, I would do the same to her so that she would learn how to take it and not look scared. If you don't have the confidence, you cannot do it. There are so many movements to remember, but you cannot anticipate the blow or kick that's coming-you have to react at the final half second." Despite the brutal physical hurdles, the real stretch for Yeoh (who speaks Cantonese but does not read Chinese) was learning the Mandarin dialect phonetically and then portraying a character unlike herself or any she'd played before. "Yu Shu Lien was daunting at first," says Yeoh. "I'm naturally very animated, but she was Zen-like. She had to be commanding and at the same time a woman. It was very, very challenging." Actually, Yeoh has been quite adept at balancing her femininity with her take-charge activities onscreen. It was the sexy curtain of ebony hair whipping about as she and Brosnan raced through the streets by motorcycle in Tomorrow Never Dies, for example, that made the stunt scenes truly spectacular-even though Yeoh's mane, which now sports fashionable honey-colored streaks, can present a logistical nightmare. "It does get in my way," she says. "But that makes the movie!" As that remark would indicate, Yeoh is as savvy as any celebrity about managing the image that "makes the movie." She trains extensively in order to perform her stunts, but she's careful to keep her five-foot-four-inch frame shapely and lithe. "It defeats the purpose if you walk into the room and everybody thinks 'action' because you're going boom, boom, boom," she says, pantomiming the rumbling gait of musclebound WWF gals like Chyna. But Lee notes that she is not overly conscious of her appearance on the set. "She has such an innocence before the camera," he says. "Other big stars, they're always aware of their camera angles and such, but she does nothing like that." Restrictive gender roles have given her more trouble offscreen. Her 1988 marriage to Hong Kong mogul Dickson Poon ended because he wanted her to give up her career. She agreed, but three years later divorced him and returned to filmmaking. Over the summer, as Crouching Tiger began to heat up international interest in her and secured her a three-picture deal with Media Asia, Yeoh broke her engagement to a Maryland cardiologist who also wanted her to settle down. She recently told Hong Kong's Ming Pao Weekly, "I can't possibly ask the other party, 'Hey, wait for me for three years,' can I?" Right now, Yeoh's dogged focus remains on her work. She plans to nurture budding creative talent though her Hong Kong-based production company, Mythical Films, and she also wants to tackle English-language romantic comedies and dramas, though she insists she has no plans to ditch the action genre. Even though Hollywood is catching on to the idea that girls look cool kicking ass-and can be knockouts at the box office doing so-Yeoh still has a thing or two to teach Western cinema about its depictions of women, Asian women in particular. "It's starting to come out that a Chinese woman is not just a Ming vase and that we do not just demurely follow behind the man," she says. "But there are still lots of walls to break down." Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is now playing in theaters.
|
||||
Over the course of 20 films in the next decade, she went on to win great fame in her native hemisphere. But being one of the most popular actors (and the highest-paid female star) back home meant little when Yeoh made the leap to L.A. in 1995. "There is this thinking [in Hollywood], 'She's Chinese? How do we explain a Chinese face in all of this?' " Yeoh says. "Fortunately, it's getting so that more Asian faces are seen in American films. When I first came out here, however, it was like going back to kindergarten. But I thought, What have I got to lose? It may be a little humiliating, but that's good for the soul." Thanks in part to supporters such as Hong Kong director John Woo, who was making Broken Arrow with John Travolta at the time, she was cast in Tomorrow Never Dies as a Chinese spy, the first female to keep pace with James Bond.