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Oliver Stone crossed the Pacific to find her. "I've always had a crush on Michelle," Stone says. "I've seen and loved all her movies, and once I decided I'd go and meet her. It was in a very remote location, hours outside Beijing, but I got in a cab with a vague road map and a driver who didn't speak English, and we drove out to find her. I was smitten. She's sophisticated, cool, beautiful, and nobody moves as smoothly as she does."

Those smooth moves are no accident. Raised in Malaysia by English-speaking Chinese parents, Yeoh went off to London to study dance before returning home to become 1983's Miss Malaysia. A year later, she was taking chairs to the head in Hong Kong action movies, where she used her smattering of martial-arts skills and earned a reputation for doing her own stunts.

"Action is really just choreography," says Yeoh, who is divorced from Hong Kong boutique tycoon Dickson Poon, to whom she was married for three years (she's now single). "You and your partners know exactly where you need to move so that it looks beautiful and so nobody gets hurt. I mean, if we need to fly a car from one parking garage to another, I leave it to the stunt people."

That's not always so easy. "Michelle's almost impossible to double," says Spottiswoode. "Nobody as small and delicate and thin as she is can move and kick and punch like that."

Nobody can match Yeoh's scar power, either. She's dislocated her shoulder, cracked ribs, twisted vertebrae, ruptured arteries in her leg, and has a screw in her knee, among other things. "Sometimes I look at myself," she says, "and it seems like I've been thrown down five flights of steps."

That kind of grit is what Yeoh needs, though, if she expects to make it in Hollywood. With so few roles written for Asian actresses, she'll need to lobby creatively for good parts. "Of course," she says, "I might have trouble in, say, a Civil War movie. I think it would be difficult to find a Chinese lady roaming around."

What might help is the growing influence of the Hong Kong film community in Hollywood: directors John Woo and Stanley Tong, and actor Chow Yun-Fat have all taken up at least part-time residency here and often meet for dinner at Woo's house in L.A. "We're not talking a simple meal," says Yeoh. "John cooks up a banquet with lobster, shrimp, fish, everything imaginable."

Yeoh's biggest challenge is reaching the level of respect in Hollywood she's already secured in Asia. So far, that hasn't been so simple. "As I make my rounds at the studios," she says, "people say, 'So...have...you...done...any... films...before?'--like I don't speak English or something. I can't just blurt out, 'Well, yes, I'm the highest-paid actress in Hong Kong.' I guess I just have to sit back, be my jolly old self, and see what comes my way." --David Hochman

OLIVIA WILLIAMS

Kevin Costner's costar in The Postman is doing her best to nail the whole L.A.-I've-Arrived attitude. She's not doing half badly, given that in just 10 months, 29-year-old Olivia Williams has hurtled from unemployed London-stage actress to Hollywood's toughest ingenue. Sitting poolside at the Four Seasons hotel, she's ordered a combo of carrot and orange juice with confidence, and she's daintily dipping berries in her yogurt. But then, with a rumbling late-night-barroom laugh and the flourish of a broad who couldn't give a damn about modesty, Williams hauls up her long skirt to display her legs.


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