Burma regime deports actress playing Suu Kyi

Although the Burmese junta finally agreed to release the political dissident Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest last November, they clearly aren't happy that a movie is being made about her. Michelle Yeoh, the Malaysian-born actress playing Suu Kyi in an upcoming film, was deported just hours after arriving in Rangoon.
 
Yeoh, known for her role as a Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies and as a warrior in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, flew to Burma to meet Suu Kyi on June 22, but was put on the next flight home after being told that she was blacklisted.

Although no reason was not given for the blacklisting, such a mechanism is routinely used against journalists and critics of the repressive generals who run Burma.
 
Luckily for Yeoh and French director Luc Besson, The Lady is already in the can. It is due to be released later this year.

The title comes from the nickname given to Suu Kyi by the Burmese people, who were forbidden from uttering her real name while she was under house arrest for the best part of two decades.
 
The Lady looks at 11 years of Suu Kyi's life, beginning in 1988 when she left her husband and children in Oxford to visit her sick mother in Burma, and ending in 1999, the year her husband, academic Michael Aris (to be played by David Thewlis), was diagnosed with prostate cancer but denied entry to Burma to visit her.
 
The period in between saw Suu Kyi found the main opposition party - the National League for Democracy - win a general election, be placed under house arrest for six years, and be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
 
She is "more of a heroine than Joan of Arc", Besson has said. "How often in history do you have a person, a woman, who never curses, never steals anything, never does anything illegal and you put her under house arrest?
 
"It is the fight of a woman without any weapons, just her kindness and her mentality. She is very Gandhi-like." ·