Michelle Yeoh

There’s no business like Yeoh business – indeed, it’s almost impossible to remember a time when Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh hasn’t been Everything, Everywhere, All at Once – this year’s science-fiction black-comedy celluloid obsession – in matters of global moviedom. While many actresses experience a moment, Yeoh has parlayed an extended career into one. She arrived klieg-lit and her current trajectory is stratospheric. Already playing a lead role by her third movie Yes, Madam (1985) and performing her own action stunts alongside Jackie Chan, by the year of Hong Kong’s handover to China, 1997, she’d become the first Asian actress to play a Bond girl, alongside Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies. Films with Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Steven Spielberg (Memoirs of a Geisha) followed, along with Star Trek: Discovery, in which she played Captain Philippa Georgia of the starship USS Shenzhou. And then came her matriarchal turn in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, and this year’s Daniels-directed global must-go, Everything, Everywhere. Yeoh calls the role (and multiple guises) of her downtrodden laundromat owner Evelyn Wang the pinnacle of her acting career – but wait, she’s been cast in Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot film A Haunting in Venice, and there are projects with Disney+ and Netflix. Time magazine this year named her as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. And, ahem, Prestige made her the cover star of our launch issue in 2005. With so much star power in her hands, Yeoh has just one motto to share: “What is truly powerful is to always be kind.”