Aaron Kwok and Michelle Saram will appear in a number of commercials for CSL Hong Kong’s One2Free network. The film advertisement contained a plot in which Aaron’s character had to choose between two different women, and it allowed viewers to vote on which one he would end up with in his “happily ever after.” With Michelle’s character winning by a landslide, the Hong Kong public confirmed her popularity, and a plethora of offers for film and television work followed. The commercial’s sequences starring Aaron and Michelle were also included into Kwok’s MTV theme tune, “Love’s Call,” which is still inextricably linked to Michelle to this day.
On Wilson Yip’s Bullets over Summer, for which Yip, Matt Chow, and Ben Cheung received the Best Screenplay prize at the 6th Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards, Michelle next collaborated with Louis Koo, Francis Ng, and Yip. Michelle further cemented her status as a household figure in Hong Kong and among the overseas Chinese people by taking on roles in the TVB dramas At the Threshold of an Era 2 and A Step into the Past, which were both modern dramas.
Michelle was ecstatic to collaborate with Wilson Yip once more on the ensemble drama Skyline Cruisers 2, which also starred Sam Lee, Shu Qi, Leon Lai, Jordan Chan, and Jordan. She definitely enjoyed performing the thrilling stunts and playing the cool hacker with striking orange hair in this action film. The Vincent Chui-directed arthouse film Fear of Intimacy, starring Tony Leung Ka Fai, which was chosen as the closing film of the Taipei Film Festival and played at the Perspectives Competition section of the Moscow International Film Festival, came next.
Michelle collaborated with Sony-owned Epic Records to release the Mandarin solo album Upfront in 2000. With Jerry Yan, Vanness Wu, Ken Chu, Vic Chou, and Barbie Hsu as her co-stars in Meteor Garden 2, she later achieved recognition throughout Southeast Asia and helped to usher in a new age of Taiwanese “idol” dramas.
Michelle visited Singapore again to perform in Mediacorp’s Fantasy as a visually-impaired aspiring singer alongside Xiang Yun, Chen Hanwei, and Tay Ping Hui. She then starred in Baby Boom, a film starring Zoe Tay, Li Nanxing, Christopher Lee, and Qi Yuwu; To Mum with Love, a film starring Mimi Chu, Christopher Lee, and Qi Yuwu; and Love at 0° C, a film starring Rui En, Julian Hee, and Elvin Ng.
She then appeared in the Taiwanese drama City of Sky, which was shot in the stunning Yunnan region, along with Li Bingbing and Ken Zhu. After that, she played a Middle Eastern princess with dreadlocks who rides a floating carpet in the historical drama Fairy, alongside Ariel Lin and Hu Ge.
Although English is her native language, Michelle finds it somewhat ironic that, aside from a few brief guest spots on travel and cooking shows, one of her only other English-language roles to date has been a hilarious cameo in the Singapore film City Sharks, directed by Esan and starring Nicholas Lee and Sheikh Haikel. She looks forward to working on more English-language initiatives that are concerned with the environment, health, and wellbeing, as well as with preserving and enhancing our local communities.
Tiffin Club, a restaurant and food delivery business in the Keong Saik region, was established and is run by Michelle and her husband as of 2005. They were invited to open Dim Joy in Mitsukoshi Tokyo the following year after opening it in the same location less than two years later. Since running a restaurant requires a lot of work and time, Michelle and her husband decided to focus more of their time in 2010 on hospitality ventures in Europe and the US. As a result, the restaurants in Singapore were forced to close. With complete operational control, Dim Joy’s Japanese partners continue to run their business in Japan.
Michelle, a Communication Studies graduate with honours from Nanyang Technological University, began her career in journalism with an internship at Asia Business News and an extended part-time stint at SPH’s now-defunct Go Magazine. She continues to write for magazines including Her World and the Conde Nast-owned Baku as a freelancer.
Michelle has spent a lot of time in their New York apartment as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. She relishes the fantastic encounters their continual travel has exposed her to as well as the amazing, occasionally surprising contrasts and parallels these encounters show. She is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese and speaks and writes well in English.
With fans eagerly anticipating her return to the big screen, Michelle’s cameo role in Wilson Yip and Louis Koo’s newest action film Paradox generated a lot of media attention around Asia.
Michelle portrayed Ting Ting in the horror drama series Avenue 14 in 2018. The same year, she also filmed a series of Singtel commercials that were published in 2019 and sparked a lot of interest in the public’s desire in beauty!
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