Her career spans 30 years — and exploded after her Oscar-winning performance in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. Michelle has also appeared in movies like Crazy Rich Asians, Tomorrow Never Dies, and the upcoming film adaptation of Wicked.
She was previously married to Hong Kong business tycoon Dickson Poon, whom she met after her 1983 Miss World Malaysia win when he hired her to appear in a fashion ad with Jackie Chan. Michelle told the Sunday Times that after they wed in 1988, she retired from her budding acting career because she “really wanted to start a family,” only to learn she could not bear children.
“Maybe that is the biggest sadness in my life, that I cannot have kids,” Michelle told the Times.
“But the beauty is that I have six godchildren, many nephews and nieces,” she added. “I don’t live with regrets because I have always given it my 110 percent.”
“I did everything to make it work, and sometimes even that is not enough, you have to be able…” she continued while reportedly raising her arms with her fists balled. “In life we say, you have to not go around holding your hands like this, you have to learn to let go, and sometimes letting go helps you move forward.”
Michelle previously told Bustle that after their divorce, she resumed her acting career, and within a year, she snagged a leading role alongside Jackie Chan in 1992’s Supercop.
“I was very, very fortunate that when I stepped away from our [marriage], it was the media in Hong Kong that actually said, ‘The audience is still waiting for you. They don’t think that you have gone away. They’re just thinking that you’re working on [a movie] and haven’t presented it to them yet,'” she shared.
“So I put it out there in the universe and said maybe I should come back. And lo and behold, there was [director] Stanley Tong, who was going to do Supercop with Jackie Chan,” she recalled. “He knocked on my door and said, ‘Remember that promise you made me many years ago, when I said that one day, if I become a director, and I had a good movie, I could call on you?’ And he did.”
You can read Michelle’s full Sunday Times interview here.