How Singapore's ugly duckling went west and hit the big time

Hollywood

Gwendoline Yeo knew she'd made it when she encountered one of the inevitabilities of stardom: a stalker. She was in the Los Angeles supermarket Pavilions, carting around 'tampons, a watermelon and a six-pack', when she noticed that she was being followed by a strange woman. Finally, the woman approached Yeo, wagged a finger at her, and said: 'You're very, very bad.'

'I just looked at her,' Yeo says. 'But then she started smiling, and called me Xiao-mei.'

To 20 million Americans, and legions more around the world, Yeo is best known for her role as the Chinese slave girl-turned- minx in the hit television show Desperate Housewives. It was a role she beat 2,000 other hopefuls to get, and has so far been the crowning achievement of her five years as an actress in Hollywood.

Away from the series' setting of Wisteria Lane, Yeo has come to be known for something more substantive: as enslaved Chinese girl Sun Fu on a four-hour television miniseries Broken Trail. She plays a mother figure to four other Asian actresses - Olivia Cheng, Valerie Tian, Jadyn Wong and Caroline Chan - all playing sex slaves in a story of human trafficking in mining towns of the American West at the end of the 19th century.

Desperate Housewives might have been a pivotal point in Yeo's life as a popular, commercial actress, but her turn in Broken Trail was artistically satisfying. To prepare for the role, she set up camp in the Asian section of Borders bookshop, reading up on anything she could find on the subject. 'It's tragic that it's not written about more,' she says.