Michelle Yeoh and the ageing discourse of Asian women celebrities

On the stage of the 2023 Golden Globes, Malaysian-born Michelle Yeoh gave her winner’s speech for her first Best Actress award, mentioning that she turned 60 last year and acknowledging the importance of the honour in view of the presumably fewer opportunities in Hollywood for actresses who grow old. Yeoh’s speech draws our attention to the plausibility of reading her persona and the ideological connotations through the lens of research on ageing celebrities. The notion of ageing has attracted increasing attention in recent scholarship of celebrity studies but there is an inadequacy of solid scrutiny when it comes to the category of Asian women. As a critical response, this chapter engages in the onscreen and offscreen discourses of Yeoh, probing how the celebrity power of ageing Asian women is negotiated in a crossover context. Using the ‘decline’ narratives as the analytical frame in conjunction with Asia’s conception of ageing, the chapter interrogates what the meaning of growing old is for transnational female talents. By so doing, the chapter recalibrates Yeoh’s image as an alternative representation of ageing celebrity femininity, illuminating the possible crisscrosses of gender, ethnicity, and longevity in the twenty-first-century global arena.