The First Chinese Woman to Win an Oscar
Michelle Yeoh made Oscar history this year with her win in the category of Best Actress for her nuanced portrayal of Evelyn Wang, a Chinese first-generation immigrant who owns a laundromat in Everything Everywhere All at Once. She beat out nominees Andrea Riseborough, Michelle Williams, Ana de Armas, and Cate Blanchett, who all starred in leading roles this award season.
Michelle Yeoh
The Malaysian-born Yeoh, 60, first gained international renown in Hong Kong action films, performing her own stunts. She was a leading lady in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies and in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After making her mark in Hollywood, with roles in the sci-fi cult movie Sunshine and the survival epic Far North, she returned to fighting form with Reign of Assassins and portrayed Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in the 2011 drama The Lady.
This year, Yeoh won a well-deserved Best Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, a genre-defying science fiction film in which she portrays multiple versions of herself across a multiverse. The role required a wide range of skills, from familial angst to spectacular martial-arts prowess. It was a performance that exemplified the kind of acting Yeoh is known for, and it earned her a record four Oscar nominations, tying her with fellow Asian actors Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu for most this awards season.
Yeoh, who has long been a vocal advocate for diversity in Hollywood, credited decades of fervent activism within the Asian community for allowing her and other Asian actors to reach this milestone. During an interview with NPR’s Ailsa Chang last April, she explained that when she landed her first top-lining Hollywood role in the 2015 film The Fate of the Furious, she could see the beginning of a cultural moment where Asians would be recognized as “full-fledged participants” in both society and Hollywood.
Her second win in the category was for the 2017 biopic Crazy Rich Asians, in which she starred as Singaporean socialite Rachel Kuo, who became one of the first Asian women to make over a billion dollars. The award was a career highlight for Yeoh, who won over nominees including Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie), Michelle Williams (Blonde), and Ana de Armas (The Fabelmans). It’s the first time an Asian actress has won an Oscar in a leading role since Cate Blanchett won for Blue Jasmine in 1998. Yeoh and her co-stars will attend the ceremony on Sunday, Feb. 24, where they’re likely to be among the most popular presenters of the night.
Luise Rainer
Luise Rainer, a renowned German-American stage actress and film star, became the first woman to win an Oscar for both a dramatic and comedic role. Her double victory was a shock to Hollywood, which immediately reacted against her by giving her only a few more films. She gave what is probably her best performance in Frank Borzage’s Big City, in which she is a glamorous taxi driver’s wife who tries to maintain her dignity while coping with her husband’s gambling addiction. She was also superb as a New Orleans flirt in The Toy Wife and a show-biz goddess in Dramatic School.
Her next film was The Good Earth, based on Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and Rainer was excellent as O-Lan, the peasant wife of a Chinese farmer played by Paul Muni. But she was unimpressed by the studio’s attempts to subdue her accent and mannerisms, and she resented being portrayed as a stereotype. The resulting public spat with MGM’s Louis B. Mayer caused her to publicly break with the studio.
After the comedy Missing (1936), which won her an Oscar nomination, and The Great Ziegfeld, she starred in only two more films. Her last screen appearance was in the wartime thriller Hostages in 1943. It is unfortunate that she did not make more films because she was a wonderful actress, but it was understandable that she would want to return to her native Germany.
She was a very intelligent woman and she had many friends in literary circles including composer George Gershwin, novelist Thomas Mann and wit Dorothy Parker. She was also a talented painter, and exhibited her work in a few exhibitions. She lived for many years in an apartment on London’s genteel Eaton Square and was survived by her daughter with publisher Robert Knittel, whom she married in 1945; he died in 1989. She is buried at St. John’s Wood Cemetery in London. She kept her two Oscars on a bookshelf in her study. In later life, she devoted herself to her art and her gardening. She was an active member of the National Society of Arts and Letters.
Cate Blanchett
Born Catherine Elise Blanchett AC, she is an Australian actress, film producer and theatre director. She is considered to be one of the world’s finest actors, acclaimed for her work in independent films, blockbusters and the stage. She has won two Academy Awards, four BAFTAs, and four Golden Globe Awards, among other accolades.
Blanchett’s breakthrough came with the role of Queen Elizabeth I in 1998’s drama Elizabeth. Her portrayal earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination, but lost to Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance in Shakespeare in Love. However, her success in this role paved the way for a string of critically and commercially successful films.
She continued to star in several independent films throughout the 2000s, including Pushing Tin, a comedy about air-traffic controllers; Bandits, a western featuring Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton; and Charlotte Gray, a WWII drama. In 2002, she appeared as a grieving woman who committed a desperate act of terrorism in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven, which won her critical praise and an Oscar nomination.
In 2008, she starred in the blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as Irina Spalko, a Soviet agent. The following year, she won a Golden Globe Award for her role as the manipulative psychoanalyst Blanche du Lac in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which used various characters to represent different aspects of musician Bob Dylan’s life and career. Her character of Jude directly corresponded to the Dylan who toured England in 1966, meeting suspicion and open hostility with audiences.
Blanchett returned to the theater in 2014, starring as Dan Rather’s wife Mary Mapes in James Vanderbilt’s drama Truth. She later starred as a witch in Disney’s 2015 non-animated adaptation of Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh. She reunited with Haynes in 2015 for Carol, in which she portrayed a suburban housewife and department store saleswoman who fall in love with each other.
Outside of her acting career, Blanchett is a vocal critic of the Australian government’s treatment of refugees. She has stated that asylum seekers have been subject to “gross mistreatment and human rights abuses”. She is also a patron of the charity organisation No To Violence.
Merle Oberon
Born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson in 1911, Oberon grew up in Bombay, India, with her mother who was part-Sinhalese and part-Maori. She got her start in acting through the Calcutta Amateur Theatrical Society before moving to London at age 17 to pursue a career in film. Fearing that her career would be derailed if people knew about her heritage, she faked a white background. She changed her name to Merle Oberon, a more regal sounding name, and created a backstory about being from Tasmania, a British colony at the time.
Despite her white-washing, Oberon was still seen as a “coloured” actress at the time. In the US, anti-miscegenation laws were still in effect and the Hays Code required that actors portray only white characters. To combat this, Oberon used makeup to lighten her skin tone. In addition, she used a lighting technique known as the Obie light, named after her, which highlighted the brightest parts of her face while blurring the rest. This made her appear more white in photographs.
After making a name for herself in British films, Oberon was given the opportunity to move to Hollywood and she took it. Her American debut was in 1935 with the film Folies Bergere de Paris. The film was a huge success and gave her the boost she needed to become a star.
In the 1940s, she starred in several films but was unable to match the success of her role in Wuthering Heights. She was also plagued with constant health problems and a series of scandalous affairs. After a short-lived marriage to film producer Alexander Korda, she divorced him and married Lucien Ballard, a cinematographer.
While he was no actor, he helped her to overcome her problems with her complexion and develop her signature style of lighting. They worked together to create the Obie lighting system which highlighted the center of the face, making it look lighter than the rest of the body. The technique is still used today and can help to make an actor appear more luminous in photographs. Oberon died in 1979.
