Classic Corner: Yes, Madam!

Thirty-eight years before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, Michelle Yeoh began her career as a leading lady by slamming a heavy book of Michelangelo paintings shut on a trench-coated flasher’s junk in the nutty 1985 Hong Kong thriller Yes, Madam! Back then still credited as Michelle Khan, the former Miss Malaysia found her way into martial arts films rather by accident, after her ballet career was cut short by a spinal injury. Yeoh’s first turn on camera was in a commercial for Guy Laroche watches opposite Jackie Chan, and the two would be most memorably reunited nearly a decade later in 1992’s Police Story 3: Supercop, a milestone of movie stuntwork so bananas I still have no idea how either of them survived the film’s final helicopter-motorcycle-speeding-train chase sequence.