Why did Michelle Yeoh take so long to win an Oscar?

At a costume fitting for Tomorrow Never Dies in early 1997, Michelle Yeoh found herself standing next to a Pierce Brosnan lookalike. While the real Brosnan was filming elsewhere, this was a chance for the filmmakers to gauge how the then-34-year-old Malaysian actress would look next to him on camera, in the classic Bond girl pose.

Almost exactly 26 years before she would find herself on the stage of the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles holding her Best Actress Oscar, Yeoh was dressed in a sleeveless, silver-sequinned cocktail gown slashed to the waist. The lookalike, meanwhile, was in the trademark 007 tuxedo. The director Roger Spottiswoode mulled this tableau, while a camera flashed and costume designers scurried around.

“She the girl from those Jackie-chickie-Chan films, then?” the double snorted at Spottiswoode – the latest in a series of racially tinged chauvinistic jibes he’d made during the shoot. “Nothing but high heels, this one, right?”

“Just high heels,” Yeoh cut in, before calmly stepping to one side and demonstrating a high kick: one that brought the point of her stiletto up 120 degrees so that it was hovering directly in front of his eyeball.

“I have never seen someone turn whiter faster,” Spottiswoode recalls. “He had been talking over her head in the most dismissive, sneering way, and then he suddenly thought he was about to lose his sight.”

Spottiswoode shooed him from the room and apologised to his leading lady. “Well, now we know the outfit will work,” she coolly replied.

Later that year, Tomorrow Never Dies opened in British and American cinemas, and the western world at large was introduced to Michelle Yeoh. Her performance in that film made her a global action star, as well as convincing Ang Lee to cast her in his 2000 masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: after catching an early Bond screening, the Taiwanese director sweet-talked his way into the premiere purely to ask her to read the screenplay for a martial arts epic he was mulling, which he pitched to her as “Sense and Sensibility, but with lots of kicking ass.”

“All the Bond films I’d seen before presented the girl as an accessory,” Lee, now 68, remembers on the phone from his New York office. “But with Michelle, it was like watching” – he pauses, searching for a comparison – “I don’t know, Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in Easter Parade. She and Pierce were two equally matched movie stars.”

More than two decades on, her long overdue moment of recognition has finally arrived. For her acclaimed performance in the science-fiction comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, Yeoh, now 60, has received the highest honour in Hollywood – making her the first Asian woman in the Oscars’ 95-year history to be so recognised.

Extraordinarily, it was the first time she’d even been shortlisted: her work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon got her a nomination at the Baftas, but their American counterparts were apparently less enthused.

Yeoh was embraced by Britain relatively early on. As well as working twice with the Canadian-British Spottiswoode, first in Bond and then his 2008 war epic The Children of Huang Shi, she has starred in films by Danny Boyle, Asif Kapadia, Luke (son of Ridley) Scott and soon also Kenneth Branagh: she’s in the ensemble of his third Hercule Poirot film, A Haunting in Venice, coming later this year.

But she embraced Britain first. Born in northwestern Malaysia in 1962 to a politician father and lawyer mother, she moved to London at 15 to pursue a childhood dream of becoming a professional ballerina at the Royal Academy of Dance.

Unfortunately a back injury put paid to that. But after re-centring her degree on choreography and drama, she was soon acting in student productions of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde – and to her surprise, enjoying it. Her mother, keen to keep young Michelle’s show-business streak going after graduation, entered her into the 1983 Miss World Malaysia pageant: she begrudgingly took part, and won. Casting directors noticed. She was flown to Australia to make an advert for watches alongside – yes – Jackie Chan, and that caught the eye of a Hong Kong production company in turn.

She had the looks and poise for cinema, but what about formal martial arts training? No – but her background in dance allowed her to learn fast. From her 1984 debut on, she mastered a new discipline on every film: Wing Chun, Tai Chi, kickboxing, Muay Thai. In 1987 she retired after marrying the head of the studio – then in 1992 divorced him and got back to work. Her comeback film – Police Story 3: Supercop, with Chan again – is now widely considered to be one of the greatest action movies ever made.

Its climactic scene has Chan dangling from a helicopter’s rope ladder as it scuds across the Kuala Lumpur rooftops. Yeoh had pleaded with the director, Stanley Tong, to allow her to do this stunt: “But Michelle,” Tong sighed, “if I let you do that, what on earth can I give Jackie to top it?”

Instead, Tong had her cling onto the side of a van as it barrels down a busy motorway and jump a motorcycle onto the roof of a moving train – and yes, she did her own stunts.

When Spottiswoode grilled his teenage nephews for ideas after landing the Bond job, he didn’t realise he was speaking to avowed Supercop fans.

“I asked them what I should do differently,” he says. “And they told me I should lose the blonde sidekick and get Michelle Yeoh.” Within 24 hours, producer Barbara Broccoli had put him on a flight to Hong Kong. Two days after that, he had persuaded her to come aboard.

She brought her own Hong Kong stunt team to the shoot, who Spottiswoode remembers were shocked by their British counterparts’ conservative approach. “Our boys were jumping off buildings onto 10ft of cardboard boxes,” he chucklingly recalls, “whereas Michelle could land safely on an inch-thick rubber mat.”

Directing her was a pleasure. “She’s one of these performers where when you turn on the camera, nothing changes,” Spottiswoode says. “There’s no move into performing mode. She’s already there, completely natural, in close-up or 25 stories up on a ledge.”

Shooting Crouching Tiger, Lee felt the same. “Even though she’s an action heroine, she has this very soulful look – she makes your heart race for her. It’s something very special.”

On Lee’s film, she was the only core cast member with martial arts experience. But in week one of an eight-month production, she tore a knee ligament in the moonlit courtyard fight with Zhang Ziyi: after completing her last close-up sitting on a swivelling bar stool (“Because that still allowed her to turn,” Lee explains), she went off to recuperate for two and a half months, and the filming schedule was hastily reworked.

Lee wincingly describes the resultant upheaval as his “mid-life crisis”. But of course it was worth it: Yeoh’s fight scenes with Zhang are among the most extraordinary ever filmed, and cemented her status as the world’s most thrilling female lead. Even so, the West couldn’t quite work out what to do with her. Back in Hong Kong, the martial arts scene kept her busy, while in Hollywood she was typically cast in overtly exotic ‘Eastern’ roles: a pleasure-quarter queen bee in Memoirs of a Geisha; a warrior nun in Babylon AD; a Chinese sorceress in the second Mummy sequel.

On the rare occasion she was cast more imaginatively, confusion reigned: at the London Critics’ Circle Awards last month, where Yeoh won the Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film, the director Danny Boyle recalled being buttonholed by a studio executive after a test screening of 2007’s Sunshine, in which he'd cast her as a space-faring biologist.

“You mean to say we’ve got the greatest action heroine of all time as voted by Rotten Tomatoes,” the suit fumed, “and you’ve killed her off at the end of the second act without even one fight? We’re f___ed.”

The last role of her 40s was the Myanmar revolutionary leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s 2011 biopic The Lady. Beyond that age, roles for any woman in Hollywood become scarce. Afterwards came two Marvel cameos, a substantial comic role in Crazy Rich Asians, and a smaller one as a shopkeeper in the festive rom-com Last Christmas. But it took Everything Everywhere All at Once to utilise the full scope of her talents arguably for the first time since Crouching Tiger: her extraordinarily centred, quiet expressivity, her split-second comic timing, her daunting physicality and poise.

To Lee, the film contains “a lot of clashing elements, and Michelle is the reason it holds together. She’s the reason you follow it. She’s its soul.”

What does Lee think last night's win will mean for her, and film at large?

“It will make her a symbol of something, whether she likes it or not,” Lee chuckles. “And I’m not sure she will like it. There will be pressure, but also so much excitement. For our industry and for the Asian community, it's very big.”

“She's done European films, and British films, and American films, but she should have done so many more of them,” Spottiswoode says. “Just talking about her makes me want to find her another role. Michelle is an incredible talent. But more than that, she’s the definition of what an international talent should be.”

Do you think Michelle Yeoh deserved to win 'Best Actress' for her role in 'Everything, Everywhere All At Once'? Share your thoughts in the comments section below