On-screen, the Oscar winner has confronted outdated gender and racial stereotypes. Off-screen, she’s honoring the resilience and ingenuity that women show in the face of disaster.

Ten years ago, Michelle Yeoh was visiting Kathmandu with her now husband, Jean Todt, when the city was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. The couple had been attending an event at a low-rise hotel and narrowly escaped the devastation. The experience was harrowing. “When the earth shook, I was immediately on the floor,” Yeoh recalls. “We literally had to crawl out because there was no way to stand.”

In the aftermath of the earthquake, Yeoh was stunned by the destruction. Close to 9,000 people were dead and millions more displaced. What impacted her most was how helpless she felt. “If you are not a first responder, don’t try to help—you just get in the way,” she recalls. But after she and Todt left the country, she found herself thinking about the Nepali survivors, many of whom had nowhere to go. And so weeks later, amid aftershocks and landslides, Yeoh returned to Nepal, working with Live to Love International, a New York–based NGO that partners with a local nunnery to aid villages.

She came back again the following year to join the United Nations Development Programme’s continuing relief efforts. Renaud Meyer, then head of UNDP in Nepal, immediately grasped the value of Yeoh’s fame for mobilizing partners. But he hadn’t anticipated the depth of her ability to connect with local women. He recalls arriving at a cluster of dilapidated houses where some women were so happy to see aid workers that they started singing and dancing. “Michelle didn’t even wait to be asked,” Meyer recalls. “She immediately started dancing with them. It was such a nice, warm moment, where suddenly life comes back to this community.”

Read the full article/interview in our press library.