Michelle Yeoh won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical.
Yeoh won an award Tuesday for her lead role in the psychedelic comedy-drama Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“Wow! Okay. I’m just going to stand here and take this all in,” she said. “Thanks to the Foreign Press. It’s been an amazing journey and an incredible fight to be here today, but I think it’s worth it.”
The honor makes Yeoh the second Asian actor to win in this category. The first winner is his Awkwafina for 2020’s “The Farewell.”
Yeoh on “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris”, Margot Robbie on “Babylon”, Anya Taylor-Joy on “Menu” and Emma Thompson on “Good Luck To You, Leo Grande”.
In her speech, she reflected on her career.
“As time goes by, I turned 60 last year. I think you ladies understand that days, years, numbers get bigger and opportunities get smaller,” she said. “Then came the greatest gift: ‘Everything, everywhere at once.'”
In her first Golden Globe nomination and win, she played Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant owner of a crumbling laundromat tasked with saving the multiverse from destruction. I’m here. and the Hollywood Critics Association. And Yeo’s name comes up frequently in discussions about worthy Oscar nominations.
The actor’s popularity rose after playing the icy matriarch Eleanor Young in the blockbuster “Crazy Rich Asians” and Ying Nan, the guardian of the mystical village Taro in “Shang-Chi.” It has surged among mainstream Western audiences in recent years. And the legend of ten wheels. However, ‘Everything Everywhere’ marked her first film in which many fans and critics felt Yeo was properly recognized for her acting prowess.
In his acceptance speech, Yeoh said he was always unacceptable in the industry.
“When I first came to Hollywood, it was a dream come true until I got here. Look at this face,” she said. “Someone said to me, ‘Do you speak English?’ So forget that they don’t know Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Asia, India. The flight here was about 13 hours long,’ he said.
In a previous interview with NBC News, Yeo, who has a career spanning decades and the international film industry, said he was “lucky” to be offered the role as an elderly actor at this point in his career. And in a way, the variety of characters she’s played over the years has prepared her for roles that move in and out of different multiverse-spanning identities.
For Yeoh, the film is also important because it portrays the immigrant experience in a familiar, albeit a little unconventional, way, she said.
“For me, this film is a tribute to the many women we have around us, sometimes invisible and taken for granted,” she said. It’s all because they were chasing the American Dream.… We all know it’s so hard, and any immigrant who comes here knows how hard it is, sometimes failing, trying to do it. I think it will tell you what you can’t find.”
Before her triumph, Yeo had long established herself as an Asian icon, rising to fame during the golden age of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 90s. Her role did her own stunts in many of them and greatly challenged her longstanding sexist tropes.
