Michelle Yeoh reveals that she went through a slump in her life — and a certain filmmaker helped her out of it.
The Wicked actress, 62, shared on the latest episode of The Graham Norton Show that there was a time she considered stepping “back” from starring in action movies, but decided against it thanks to some guidance from Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino.
“I was in Hong Kong and depressed as I had had a bad accident while filming a stunt,” Yeoh recalled on the show.
“I felt hopeless and was re-thinking the whole action thing and thought maybe I should take a step back,” she explained. “When I met [Tarantino], he was so enthusiastic and said that if you love something you have to find a better way to do it.”
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Her action film career continued through the 1990s in memorable films like Wing Chun, Supercop and Tomorrow Never Dies, and in the 2000s with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Memoirs of a Geisha, Sunshine and Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy.
While the actress has worked with several notable directors through the years, she has still not worked with Tarantino — though she said she wouldn’t be opposed to doing so in the future.
“I have never worked with him, and when I asked him about Kill Bill and why he hadn’t thought of me, he said, ‘No one would believe Uma Thurman could kick your ass!”
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Yeoh has not only been candid about the challenges she’s faced in the film industry over the last several decades, but also the struggles that she has overcome offscreen.
In November 2024, during an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, she opened up about how infertility impacted her personal life and relationships, and how she eventually came to terms with not being able to have children.
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“And I think the worst moment to go through is every month you feel like such a failure,” she said. “And then you go, why? And I think at some point you stop blaming yourself. I go, there are certain things in your body that doesn’t function in a certain way. That’s how it is.”
She added, “You just have to let go and move on. And I think you come to a point where you have to stop blaming you.”
Yeoh eventually married French motor racing executive Jean Todt, and added that although she still thinks about not being able to have children of her own, she is grateful to be a grandmother thanks to her stepson.
“I’m 62. Of course I’m not going to have a baby right now, but the thing is we just had a grandchild,” she said. “Then you feel you’re still very, very blessed because you do have a baby in your life.”
