One glance at her CV shows Michelle Yeoh is not one for repetition. “In the past few years I've been a geisha, an astronaut, a nun, a reindeer herder,” she says. “Now I'm a wizard.” A duplicitous, dead-raising wizard, no less, who is one of the highlights of this month's The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. For this former ballerina and beauty pageant winner, diversity has been the key to success.

The Malaysia-born Yeoh is one of the few actresses to flourish after playing a Bond girl - alongside Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) - rather than fall foul of the so-called “curse” that has caused many female stars to sink into post 007 obscurity. “I never heard about this until I was deep into the movie,” she recalls. “And I just said, ‘What curse? Is something going to fall on my head?'” So how did she avoid it? “I just kicked my way out of it.”

True enough: after beginning her acting career as a judo instructor opposite Jackie Chan in Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars (1985), Yeoh has wowed Asian fans for years with her martial arts prowess - before showing international audiences just how agile she was in Ang Lee's celebrated Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yet, as her recent roles in Memoirs of a Geisha and Danny Boyle's sci-fi scorcher Sunshine proved, she's not just an all-action actress. “I've been very lucky,” she says. “I've been presented with roles that demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well.”

Gracefully flitting between Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema, the 45-year-old Yeoh has the aura of one in total control. Dressed in skin-tight black leggings and top, and bedecked with silver jewellery, she seems much taller than her 5ft 4in, perhaps because her super-lean body looks like it could somersault over you at any given moment. Curiously, Yeoh has never had any formal training in martial arts. Her abilities stem from her time studying ballet in her youth, including a period at London's Royal Academy of Dance.

A spinal injury forced Yeoh to give up dancing, but the eye-watering injuries continued during her acting career, as she tore knee ligaments on Crouching Tiger... and in 1995 fell 18ft from a bridge in Ah Kam (“I thought I had broken my back and neck”). She smiles: “It gets to a point where you think: ‘Where doesn't it hurt?'.” Not that this stopped her getting her kicks on The Mummy. In this third instalment in the franchise, Yeoh plays Zi Juan, a double-crossing sorceress who curses an Emperor and his army to remain in suspended animation for eternity. Brendan Fraser returns as the 1940s archaeologist Rick O'Connell, who inadvertently awakens the Emperor Han, played by the Asian superstar Jet Li.

While Yeoh has worked with Li before, notably on Twin Warriors (1993), this time she gets the chance to cross swords with him. “We've always been on the same side in movies, and always fought against the rest of the world,” she says. “So I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to have a great fight with Jet Li.”

She showcases a more placid side in her other new film, Mathieu Kassovitz's Babylon AD, playing a nun given the task of caring for a girl who may be carrying a deadly virus. Yeoh describes it as a cross between Mad Max and The Matrix: “It's not really science fiction. It's not really in space. It's very much on the ground, about the turmoil on Earth.” She could easily be referring to the problems the Prague-based shoot ran into, after it ran wildly over budget and schedule.

Word has it that the film had to be bailed out by the production's insurance company. “There are always money problems, on any film,” Yeoh says, cautiously. “Here, the effects and the scale of the production were a lot bigger than anybody could imagine. The studio should've given us at least another $20 million on top of what they agreed to. At the end of the day, it was a compromise.”

Despite these two Hollywood-sized productions, Yeoh has yet to relocate to Los Angeles, and has no desire to. Based in Hong Kong, she's well known for her loyalty to her roots - whether it be talking up her Malay-Chinese upbringing in Ipoh or supporting homegrown designers (her Oscar gown was by the local couturier Barney Cheng). “I come from a very traditional Chinese background,” she explains. “I come from a family that is Buddhist, so I am very respectful of all of those things around us.”

While she describes her lawyer father as “quiet and conservative”, her background was not so strict. It was her mother who suggested she try out modelling after she graduated from college and moved back home when she was 21. Modelling paved the way for Yeoh to become Miss Malaysia in 1983, which in turn brought her to the attention of Hong Kong businessman and film tycoon Dickson Poon, who cast her in a TV commercial with Jackie Chan before recruiting her for his fledgeling company D&B Films.

In 1989, Yeoh announced her retirement from cinema, at the request of Poon (by then her husband). But when their marriage headed for divorce, she returned to the screen in the 1992 international hit Supercop - and hasn't looked back.

For the past four years, her partner has been the former Ferrari CEO Jean Todt. The only thing Yeoh doesn't have in her life right now is a child. “It feels like I do have my own kids, because I have five godchildren,” she says. “So in my mind I do have kids. I have people who love me and a man that I love. I feel that I'm pretty well rounded.”

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor opens nationwide on Aug 8; Babylon AD is released on Aug 29

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