Michelle Yeoh Is The First Chinese Woman To Win An Oscar
When Michelle Yeoh won the best actress Oscar for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, it cemented a long-awaited milestone. It was only the third time a person of Asian descent won that award in its 93-year history—and the first since biracial actress Merle Oberon in 1935.
Like Oberon, Yeoh refused Hollywood film roles that perpetuated negative stereotypes of Asian women. Here are some of the women who helped pave the way for her.
Merle Oberon
As 2023 marks a historic year for actresses of color, it’s important to remember the women who came before them. One of those pioneers is Merle Oberon, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1936 for her performance in The Dark Angel. She was the first Asian woman to be nominated for a leading role at a time when the film industry was rife with racism.
Like other stars of her era, Oberon passed as white and struggled to find roles that aligned with her heritage. She often found herself playing supporting roles in films that perpetuated stereotypes of the “Lotus Flower” and the “Dragon Lady.”
Oberon was born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson to a Welsh father and an Indian mother. Her childhood was filled with racism, and she dropped out of school at age 14 to become a professional dancer. In 1928 she moved to London and started appearing in bit parts as a way to support herself. It wasn’t until producer (and eventual first husband) Alexander Korda took interest in her that her career took off. He changed her last name to Oberon and helped her develop a backstory that made her seem Tasmania-born, thus obscuring her background.
She was nominated for an Oscar in 1936, but lost to Bette Davis’s turn in Dangerous. Despite her lack of success at the awards, she kept working into the early 70s, including roles in Wuthering Heights and Marlon Brando’s Desiree. She died of a stroke in Malibu at the age of 68.
Though it wasn’t uncommon for movie stars to undergo physical transformations at the behest of the studio, Oberon took it further than most. She even lied about her place of birth and used chemicals to lighten her complexion. Her obsession with passing as white led her to suffer from dermatitis in 1940, which was later attributed to the chemical she had been using. Her death was ruled accidental. Oberon is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is dedicated to her work in the entertainment industry.
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut on May 12, 1907. Her mother, a suffragist, and her father, a doctor, encouraged her to speak her mind and use her body to its fullest potential. Hepburn began acting in school plays and went on to study at Bryn Mawr College, where she made her Broadway debut in 1928. After a series of successful performances, Hepburn was offered her first Hollywood role in the 1932 film A Bill of Divorcement. Her subsequent films earned her favorable reviews, but commercial flops such as Bringing Up Baby and Morning Glory made Hepburn “box office poison” for several years. Hepburn finally returned to Broadway and bought the film rights to her stage play The Philadelphia Story in 1938, which became a smash hit.
Hepburn’s role as Jo in the 1951 film version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women received widespread critical acclaim. Her performance cemented her reputation as one of the great screen actresses of all time.
Following Adam’s Rib, Hepburn sought new projects outside of movies and began exploring Shakespeare’s plays with the help of her teacher and coach Constance Collier. This helped Hepburn discover new depths to her talent and reinvigorated her faltering image.
When Spencer Tracy became ill in 1964, Hepburn moved into his Benedict Canyon home and took charge of his daily routine. According to his biographer Jean Negulesco, Hepburn tended to his health needs, even at the expense of her own. Guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel would often see Hepburn curled up asleep outside Tracy’s bedroom door; hotel employees knew that meant the actor was on a bender and wouldn’t let anyone enter.
Hepburn received numerous Oscar nominations over the course of her career, and won four times. Her 1967 performance in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and 1968’s The Lion in Winter both won her Best Actress Oscars, and she won another for 1981’s On Golden Pond. She also won an Emmy for 1976’s Love Among the Ruins, and was nominated 12 more times. Hepburn only attended the Oscar ceremony once, in 1974 to present the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to friend Lawrence Weingarten, but she never missed a chance to receive her statuette.
Luise Rainer
After garnering acclaim on the European stage, Rainer was spotted by MGM, and by 1935 was firmly established as its leading lady. She starred opposite William Powell in The Great Ziegfeld and Paul Muni in The Good Earth, both of which earned her Oscars.
Born in Germany, she grew up in Austria and was given dual citizenship as a child. This gave her the opportunity to experience firsthand the rise of Nazism in Germany. She was among a number of celebrities who were recruited to speak at the March on Washington against Nazism. She was also a prominent member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy, founded by Frank Capra and featuring Anna May Wong.
Although MGM tried to mold her into a Garbo-like icon, she had a lot more depth and nuance than the studio would have you believe. Even the two films that earned her the most acclaim, The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth, suffer from condescending ethnic stereotyping. In The Great Ziegfeld, she is the long-suffering wife of impresario Florenz Ziegfeld and in The Good Earth she plays a peasant.
While the films she made may have dated, her acting prowess was undeniable and she was a great role model for young women of her time. She continued to perform in a variety of roles, including some in German, until her retirement at age 70 in London.
In recent times, we’ve seen a significant increase in Asian actors making waves on the big screen. Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. She won a standing ovation as she accepted her award for the movie, playing Evelyn Wang, a Chinese first-generation immigrant who owns the laundromat around which the film’s absurdist multiverse revolves.
Behind the camera, there has been a similar push for more diversity. Ang Lee won an Oscar for Best Director for Brokeback Mountain in 2006, and Kathryn Bigelow did the same for The Hurt Locker in 2010. More recently Bong Joon-Ho won an Oscar for his movie Parasite in 2020 and Chloe Zhao won one for Nomadland in 2021. Despite these strides, there is still work to be done.
Michelle Yeoh
In a ceremony that has seen just four women of color win the award, Yeoh took home the Oscar for Best Actress. She won the award for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once, which follows Evelyn Wang, a laundromat owner who traverses multiple universes. The film was nominated for five of the Oscar’s “big six” categories, and Yeoh won in all of them.
She beat out fellow nominees Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie), Ana de Armas (Blonde) and Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans). Her history-making win marks the first time an Asian woman has ever won the award, and came in the midst of a year of activism around representation in Hollywood. Many Asian actors and directors have praised the move, and called it a milestone.
Yeoh, who is of Malaysian Chinese descent, rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s for her roles in Hong Kong action films, where she often performed her own stunts. In 1997, she made her international debut in James Bond’s Tomorrow Never Dies, and became a global star with hits like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Memoirs of a Geisha. In addition to her acting, she’s also an accomplished singer.
In her acceptance speech, Yeoh thanked her husband and daughter and gave a message of hope for the future. “For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, don’t let anyone tell you that your dreams aren’t possible,” she said.
She added, “If you believe in yourself and work hard enough, anything is possible.” It’s a message that has resonated with many audiences, who saw Yeoh’s win as a sign of progress for the industry. The fight for Asian representation in Hollywood has been a long one, with many milestones and setbacks along the way. In the 1930s, Anna May Wong was denied a role in a film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth, which was given to a white actress in yellowface. However, in recent years, the movement for diversity in Hollywood has gained momentum, with movies like Crazy Rich Asians and Ghost in the Shell proving that Hollywood is finally ready to change its ways.
