Mumbai, March 12 : Actress Michelle Yeoh is the top contender in this year's Oscars race for Best Actress, courtesy her stunning work in 'Everything Everywhere All At Once', which will make her the first Asian actress to walk home with this honour.

The actress, who plays laundromat owner Evelyn Quan Wang in the film, has been a hot favourite of cinema lovers for the past few years, but her journey on the big screen has been far from everything, everywhere all at once. The actress has worked tirelessly for close to 40 years now.

Yeoh’s journey is a classical model graduating to becoming an actor story, except for one thing, she was not just a pretty face as a model, but also an actress with expertise in martial arts.

She won the Miss Malaysia World contest at the age of 21 in 1983 and went on to represent Malaysia at the Miss World 1983 pageant in London where she finished 18th among 72 contestants.

After this, the actress started working in television commercials after getting her break in a television ad alongside the legend, Jackie Chan. Yeoh, who has stated that she had limited proficiency in Cantonese, was informed during her initial Cantonese phone conversation with the production company that she will be working alongside ‘Sing Lung’.

It was only after she entered the studio that she realised that she will share the frame with Jackie Chan in the commercial, and that ‘Sing Lung’ was the Cantonese name of Jackie Chan.

A year after that in 1984, Yeoh landed her first job in films, that too in a film which was made far away from her home, the Hong Kong action comedy ‘The Owl vs Bombo’ directed by Sammo Hung, who is known for reinventing the genre of martial arts films and is also credited for starting the vampire-like Jiangshi genre, which is the far-eastern counterpart of the vampires and zombies of the West.