Producers of the new Bond film wanted a different type of leading lady. They got one.

So long, James Bond, the “sexist, misogynist dinosaur,” as his boss M so blithely pegged him in “GoldenEye.” Hello, Wai Lin, the latest Bond babe who shakes up his macho assumptions with a kick as lethal as her kiss in “Tomorrow Never Dies.”

Wai Lin is played by Chinese actress Michelle Yeoh, 35, a newcomer to the States but who has reigned as queen of Asian action movies for the last decade. “It’s time for Bond to be different, to move into the 21st century,” muses Yeoh during a brief layover in this, her adopted hometown. “Today your leading lady has to be something more, more than ‘Oh-James-come-rescue-me!’ That’s something of the past.” By instinct and by will, Yeoh is going to be that something of the future.

Winning the coveted role over a slate of other Asian actresses, she is keenly aware of making history in more ways than one. She is not your typical Bond babe. Doesn’t look it, doesn’t act it. She is neither voluptuously buxom nor Valkyrian. In fact she’s downright petite--5-foot-4 and about 100 pounds--and her hands are small, delicate, not what you expect to form the fists of a kung fu master.

The makers of “Tomorrow” were also looking for something different. “We thought that it would be more interesting to have a more contemporary leading lady to get away from the ‘babes’ of the past,” says director Roger Spottiswoode (“Air America,” “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot”). “Someone who could be his match, be another 007. Our story was veering toward Asia so it made sense to have a Chinese actress.”

In his newest adventure, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan once more) of Her Majesty’s Secret Service gets thrown in with Wai Lin, his mainland Chinese counterpart, as they join forces to battle an evil media mogul (Jonathan Pryce). In one sequence the accidental allies get handcuffed together, then share a wild motorcycle ride through the crowded streets and rooftops of an Asian city.

Today we’re far from that adrenaline-pumping clamor as we sit in a quiet outdoor cafe on the Peak, the mountaintop of breathtaking views, tourist malls and some multimillion-dollar homes overlooking the megalopolis. Somewhere among the surrounding apartments is Yeoh’s own, where she is enjoying a short breather between the fast action.

In the last year, she’s been away nearly nine months, stopping over in Hong Kong for only a few days at a time. She has just returned from a home visit to Malaysia, where her parents and her brother and his family still live, where old friends remind her of who she is.

But she’s not complaining. Hardly. She’s enjoying it all. “I’ve been very lucky,” she says.

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Yeoh grew up in Ipoh, Malaysia, in the tropics of wide open spaces and endless summer. Every moment she could she was on the kinetic go--swimming, bicycling, boating, playing table tennis or squash. “I was a tomboy--and still am!” she says good-humoredly.

Young Michelle took up ballet and eventually went to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dance. In 1983 she returned to Malaysia thinking she would run a ballet school. Somewhere along the way she entered a beauty contest and got crowned Miss Malaysia.

Then a friend called her up from Hong Kong to say that businessman Dickson Poon was looking for a new face for a watch commercial. It would feature action superstar Jackie Chan. Was she interested?

“So I thought ‘Well, why not? It could be fun,’ ” Yeoh recalls. “So I flew out, met Dickson, and the next day we did the commercial.” Next she knew Poon was offering her a film contract at his newly founded film production company, D&B; Films.

In Malaysia, Yeoh had grown up speaking English and Malay, with some Chinese lessons thrown in on the weekends. She didn’t really learn Chinese until she moved to Hong Kong, enough for conversation and for speaking lines of dialogue, but she never mastered the written language. So on the set, people would read her the lines and she memorized them.

Her first role was that of a much-bullied social worker in “Owl vs. Dumbo.”

“It was a very stereotyped female role,” she says. But her second film, “Yes, Madam!” was a breakthrough. The D&B; folk realized that this woman with her natural athleticism and spunk could be cast differently, that she could be leaping, high-kicking and fist-slugging like one of the boys. She was cast as a tough police officer.

To train for the part, Yeoh put in eight-hour days at the gym--jogging, working out, practicing all those belligerent moves.

But a big surprise lay in store. Before she worked on an action film, she thought it was all faked. Then one day on the set she watched them shoot a fight sequence. When it was over, one actor was on the floor, doubled over in pain.

For authenticity’s sake, she began doing her own stunts, which boosted her box-office popularity. Then she made two more pictures before she married the boss and bowed out of show-biz in 1988. But the marriage quickly unraveled. Three years later she and Poon parted company. Ironically, in these parts Poon is as famous as she is. He’s one of Hong Kong’s high-profile millionaires--he runs a classy chain of watch-and-jewelry stores, owns London’s swank Harvey Nichols department store and recently made the successful bid to take over beleaguered clothier-to-the-chic Barney’s.

Yeoh quickly went back to films. Jackie Chan offered her a part in his film “Police Story III: Supercop,” and she grabbed it. In it she plays a mainland China security chief who teams up with a Hong Kong detective (Chan) to break an international drug ring.

The film was helmed by action wunderkind Stanley Tong (who directed “Mr. Magoo” for Disney) and a brilliant two-hour roller-coaster of shootings, explosions and nonstop action. The stunts Yeoh herself dared--you can see them in the outtakes included at the end of the film--are nothing short of astonishing.

By 1993 she was at her peak. She did five films including a sci-fi fantasy thriller called “The Executioners,” the sequel to “The Heroic Trio,” and several period swordplay flicks including “Butterfly & Sword” and “Tai Chi Master.” She had become the highest paid female actress in the industry, with fans all over Asia and as far flung as the U.S., where Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino numbered among her ardent admirers.

Sprains, bruises and other injuries were common, but ironically enough, it was an Alpine skiing accident that put her out of commission. In 1994 she underwent knee surgery and three months of physical therapy at a sports clinic in New York. She rested a year, rethinking her career.

While recuperating she was approached by Terence Chang, a former Hong Kong producer relocated to North America, about the possibilities of working in the West. Today Chang is her manager and represents only two actors--Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat. “This business is so crazy,” says Chang, who has successfully shepherded the career of John Woo in Hollywood, “that I only want to work with nice people, and Michelle’s one of the nicest.”

On the introductory rounds that Chang helped arrange in 1995, she met Jeff Kleeman, an executive at United Artists, who immediately thought she would be perfect for a Bond film. Two years later, she was called in for an audition, reading opposite Pierce Brosnan. It was a nerve-racking experience, but producer Barbara Broccoli kindly arranged a dinner for Yeoh to meet the actor the night before. They quickly hit it off, and it showed on the screen test.

“I met every Chinese actress around,” Spottiswoode says, “and I thought Michelle had a special quality and I thought she and Pierce would be great on screen--and they were.”

Brosnan adds to the platter of the compliments for Yeoh, “The woman is just spectacular in capital letters,” he says.

Yeoh returns the compliment--she adored working with him. Furthermore, “Yes, he’s cute, so cute. Thank God he’s so married!”

During the shooting in Asia and in Europe, Yeoh ended up doing many of her own stunts. “At first we tried to have doubles for her,” Spottiswoode said. “But she’s so incredibly difficult to double--so slight, so small that we couldn’t find anyone, any Western stunt man or stunt woman, to double for her. Also, no one moves the way she does--she’s so fast--so she ended up doing virtually everything that wasn’t strictly prohibited by our insurance policy.” Then he adds, with due respect, “She’s very gutsy.”

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“Tomorrow Never Dies” represents a lot of firsts for Yeoh, not the least of which she gets to do a whole movie in her first language, English. “It’s great--this is the first time I’ve been able to read the script!” she says. And she’s obviously looking forward to more of the same. She is cagey about talking about future projects, only hinting that several offers are pending.

“We want to be very careful about choosing her next project,” Chang says. “We don’t want to focus only on action, we want to develop different sides of her talent, so maybe a good comedy would be a way to go.”

Clearly, new challenges propel Yeoh, and both drama and comedy would be new paths for her to test. On a broader note, she is keenly aware of the brave new image she may be forging for Asian women, so often pegged as sluttish Suzi Wongs, nefarious Dragon Ladies or pathetic victims in Western cinema.

“What a better way than to be able to have a showcase in a Bond movie and to be presented on the same level as Bond,” she says. “And hopefully people are going to stop thinking of Asian women as Suzi Wong and so on. For that generation, for that era it [“The World of Suzi Wong”] was a fun movie, it was the kind of thing that attracted people to the East, but now we’ve moved on, a whole generation has evolved, we’re more sophisticated. It should no longer stay the same.”