Malaysia celebrates ‘pride of Asia’ Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar win
- ‘I was speechless, I cried’ said Yeoh’s niece Vicki, while the 60-year-old actress’ mother said she was proud of her ‘very hardworking’ daughter
- Relatives and friends of Yeoh’s were gathered at a live screening of the Oscars awards ceremony at a Kuala Lumpur cinema
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“I’m very happy … I’m proud of my daughter. She is very hardworking,” Janet Yeoh told reporters after her daughter became the first Asian woman to win the Academy Award for best actress.
“I’ll call her to come back [to Malaysia] and celebrate very soon. Next month is my birthday.”
She and other relatives and friends of Yeoh’s were gathered at a live screening of the awards ceremony at a Kuala Lumpur cinema, where there were loud cheers, embraces and tears of joy the second the announcement was made.
“It was such a jaw-dropping moment,” Yeoh’s niece Vicki said. “I was speechless, I cried. Everything was, it happened so quickly. We are so happy that she won, that our auntie won …
“We kept telling her: ‘You will win … You’re going to stand on stage with the golden man,” she said, referring to the Oscar statuette.
Oscars 2023 as it happened: Michelle Yeoh makes history with best actress win
Writing on Twitter, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim congratulated Yeoh for her victory, describing her as a “cultural icon”.
“Coupled with this latest accomplishment, Michelle’s illustrious and exemplary career in this field will certainly continue to be a source of great inspiration and motivation to our home-grown actors and actresses and provide even greater impetus to the growth of our local industry,” Anwar said.
The 60-year-old Malaysian actress won the award for her role in the sci-film Everything Everywhere All at Once, beating Cate Blanchett who had long been favourite to win a third Oscar for Tar.
Everything Everywhere follows a Chinese immigrant laundromat owner locked in battle with an inter-dimensional supervillain – who happens to be her own daughter.
Another fan, Tan Ooi Hong said: “She is the pride not just for Malaysia, but she is the pride of Asia as well.”
The former Bond girl was born to Malaysian-Chinese parents in 1962 in the city of Ipoh, 200km (125 miles) north of Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur.
In an interview with the Financial Times this month, Yeoh described her early life as “laid-back [and] life was happy we were very multiracial”.
“I would speak to my dad mainly in English, to my mom in Malaysian Cantonese, because my grandmother was living with us and she basically only spoke Cantonese,” she said. “My best friend in school was Malay. You’re different cultures, but who cares? We celebrated each other’s New Years and things like that.”
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Malaysia celebrates Oscar win by ‘pride of Asia’ Michelle Yeoh
She embraced dance as a child and specialised in ballet, which she studied in England.
On a holiday while visiting family, her mother entered her in the Miss Malaysia contest without consulting her.
“I agreed to go to shut her up,” a giggling Yeoh, who unwittingly went on to win the beauty pageant, told a talk show.
When Everything Everywhere’s Michelle Yeoh was Hong Kong’s action queen
Yeoh was awarded the title of “Tan Sri” by the Malaysian king in 2013, one of the country’s highest honorifics awarded to civilians.
“This is a testimony to the strong potential of Hong Kong’s talents and film industry,” he said.
Additional reporting by SCMP’s Asia desk
