Top 10 Best Michelle Yeoh Movies (And Where To Stream Them)
The original version of this article was written by Jenni Russell and published in 2024.
Michelle Yeoh is a Malaysia-born cinema ico who, in 2023, became the first Asian woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. Yeoh originally aspired to be a dancer—she even trained for a while at the Royal Academy of Dance—before an injury forced a change of path. First came a movie into modelling (she was Miss Malaysia World at one point), then the beginning of an acting career in the Hong Kong film industry. Her first screen appearance was in The Owl vs Bombo in 1984, but her first starring role came in Yes, Madam a year later—a performance that announced her as an up-and-coming star of martial arts cinema and a movie that set her on the road to international fame.
More recently, Yeoh has appeared in a number of major Hollywood franchises such as Star Trek, Avatar and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). With 40 eclectic years of movies under her belt, Yeoh’s body of work is not the easiest to whittle down, but following the release of Wicked: For Good last Christmas, it feels like as good a time as any to give it a try. Read on to discover more about Yeoh's greatest roles—which I’ve arranged in ascending order—and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
No matter what happens in the next few years or decades, it’s hard to imagine anything topping the tree-line heights Yeoh reached in Ang Lee’s critical and commercial marvel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This is the movie that brought Wuxia fight scenes to Western cinema in all their glory (think The Matrix or Kill Bill), and if you like the director’s other movies (Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility), you really need to see it.
The story takes place during the Qing dynasty, in 19th Century China, with Yeoh as the lover of a warrior (played by Chow Yun-Fat) who gives her his sword for safe keeping. Various things don’t go to plan.
In 2022, Yeoh’s run of always being cast in supporting roles (at leats in American movies) was firmly sent out to pasture with Everything Everywhere All At Once, a movie that rode a wave of critical acclaim and word-of-mouth buzz all the way from the Sundance Film Festival in January 2022 to the following year’s Academy Awards. It famously went on to win seven of them, including Best Picture as well as Yeoh’s landmark Best Actress prize—a wonderful crowning moment for her singular career.
If you’ve yet to see it, the movie is am inventive romp that take a kaleidoscopic journey through the multiverse to tell a story about a mother and daughter’s love—it’s a little bit Parpika, a little bit Eternal Sunshine, but it’s resolutely and proudly its own thing from beginning to end.
It’s not overstating it to say that Crazy Rich Asians is a significant movie in the history of cinema. Never before had Asian actors appeared front and centre like this in a Hollywood rom com; and never before had a movie about a contemporary Asian experience been both a critical darling and a huge commercial hit at the box office.
Is it too much to say that without Crazy Rich Asians there would be no Shang Chi? Perhaps, but it definitely made life easier for movies like that to get made. Of course, Yeoh is magnificent in it—not playing the lead, unfortunately, but typically steadfast and funny in a crucial supporting role.
Yeoh had already appeared in a couple of movies in the Yes, Madam franchise before being cast in Police Story 3: Supercop, but thanks to Jackie Chan’s global reach this was the movie that really put her on the map.
If you’re not familiar with the Police Story trilogy, you’re in for a real treat. These are some of the wildest martial arts movies ever put to camera and if you appreciate Jackie Chan’s English language work in movies like Rush Hour and Karate Kid: Legends, you’ll want to see what he was capable of in his absolute prime.
Ten years after appearing in Bond, Yeoh collaborated with another icon of British cinema when she took the part of Corazon in Danny Boyle’s science fiction movie Sunshine. This was Boyle’s third collaboration with Alex Garland, so if you’re a fan of the movies they’ve made as a duo (think 28 Years Later or, to a lesser extent, The Beach) I highly recommend seeking it out.
The movie, which focuses on a mission to reignite the sun, famously falls apart in the final act; but the setup is quite phenomenal. The cast includes Cillian Murphy, Benedict Wong and Rose Byrne, but it’s Yeoh’s anguished face as her oxygen garden goes up in flames that sticks with you the most.
Despite the success of some of her martial arts movies on the international stage, Yeoh rose to a completely new kind of prominence in 1997 when she was cast as a Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies. This was Yeoh’s first ever Hollywood feature yet her performance as the Chinese secret agent Wai Lin was highly memorable.
Tomorrow Never Dies is the second installment in Pierce Brosnan’s era as Bond, so if you appreciate the slightly silly excess of Die Another Day and slick thrills of GoldenEye, you’ll probably be into it!
It’s probably worth noting that 2005’s Memoirs of a Geisha, a movie from a less culturally sensitive time, probably hasn’t aged as well as some others on this list. Keeping that in mind, it’s still a gorgeous period romance and boasts a wonderful performance by Yeoh as the rival Geisha to the protagonist, Chiyo.
Produced by Steven Spielberg, Memoirs came out around the same time as Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, but in terms of comparable movies it’s more in the lineage of Anna Karenina and Atonement—a world of swooning romance and period detail that fans of that genre of cinema will adore.
Speaking of the kind of project that confirms an actor’s status, nothing says A-list these quite like a central supporting role in the MCU. Whatever the case, when it was announced that Destin Daniel Kretin would be helming the first martial arts inspired movie in the MCU, it only made sense that Yeoh would be called on to play the matriarch.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a movie that works with the same kind of magical and fantastical elements as Doctor Strange and its sequel, Multiverse of Madness—so if you’re a fan of those Benedict Cumberbatch-starring adventures, you’ll probably like this one, too.
The most recent megahit involving Yeoh was the 2024 smash Wicked, an all-singing, all-dancing, multicoloured extravaganza based on the long-running Broadway musical. If reports are to be believed, Yeoh was allegedly hesitant to take on the role of Madame Morrible, the Dean of Sorcery Studies at Shiz University, as she wasn’t sure if she had the voice—but like most things the actress has taken on in her career, she pulled it off with grace and charm.
Directed by Jon M. Chu (Yeoh’s collaborator on Crazy Rich Asians), this is a musical that fans of The Wizard of Oz will naturally love, but it’s also the story of how a famous antagonist broke bad—so if you appreciate movies like Cruella and Maleficent, you’ll probably be into this one, too.
Few things confirm an actor’s popularity quite like appearing in a starry whodunnit like A Haunting in Venice. Directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh and based on the Agatha Christie novel of the same name, this is the kind of glitzy crime caper that only seems interested in Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Though completely out of fashion for quite some time, the genre has been enjoying a resurgence in recent years thanks to movies like Knives Out and Branagh’s previous Christie outing, Murder on the Orient Express—so, if you like the two of them, you’ll probably be into this.
