MUMBAI (Reuters) – Michelle Yeoh, the first Asian actress to win an Oscar, joined the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Tuesday after being voted in as a member at a ceremony in Mumbai.
She was one of eight new proposed members to join the Olympic body at its session in the Indian financial capital.
A former Malaysian junior squash champion, Yeoh won the Oscar for best lead actress earlier this year for her role in the film, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”.
She got her Hollywood breakthrough when she was cast as the first ethnic Chinese Bond girl in 1997’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” opposite Pierce Brosnan.
Yeoh, also a producer and a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, starred in martial arts movie “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon”, the 2005 period drama “Memoirs of a Geisha” and the 2018 romantic comedy, “Crazy Rich Asians”.
The 61-year-old is married to Jean Todt, the former head of FIA, the governing body for motor sport, which was recognised by the IOC in 2013.
She joins judoka Yael Arad, who won Israel’s first Olympic medal, Hungarian businessman and sports administrator Balasz Furjes, Cecilia Roxana Tait Villacorta, a former Olympic volleyball medallist and politician from Peru, and German sports entrepreneur Michael Mronz as the five new individual members.
Furjes and Mronz have also led efforts, unsuccessful so far, to get the Olympics to Hungary and back to Germany respectively.
Sweden’s Petra Soerling, head of the International Table Tennis Federation, and South Korean Kim Jae-youl, president of the International Skating Union, joined through their function as heads of an international federation.
Mehrez Boussayene, President of the Tunisian Olympic Committee, also joined.
(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
