The interview over, Yeo Yann Yann is walking to the Novena Square taxi stand to catch a cab home when she pretty much screams out loud: 'Damn it! He never touched my breast!'

She appears oblivious that people nearby may hear her, or disastrously for this reporter, hear her incorrectly and think that she said: 'He touched my breast!'

One could say that the salt-of-the- earth actress is 'in the moment', which is acting parlance for being totally immersed in her thoughts and feelings.

Life! has just casually praised her indelible performance as a gold-digging Ah Lian in the 2007 TV drama Do Not Disturb. The expression of pride on her face quickly changes to one of rumination, then slight wistfulness, before she vents her full-blooded regret that she and her co-star were not faithful to the 'truth of the scene'.

'I don't want to have any regrets when it comes to work. When I do something, I give it my all. But that's one of my regrets. We were self-censoring. It's so unreal that we kissed and kissed and he never touched my breast,' she says of the drama where she and a Caucasian make out in a seedy budget hotel room.

Her no-holds-barred attitude is why director Kelvin Tong cast her in the role.

'That she is a great actress is a given,' he says. 'More importantly, she is a fearless actress who will think about the truth of the moment in a scene instead of whether she looks good from a camera angle or whether the role looks good on her resume.'

That last point is especially pertinent to her most recent movie, Love Matters, a Jack Neo comedy where the 32-year-old plays a dowdy 40something housewife.

Starring in a Jack Neo movie is hardly a feather in the cap for a serious actress. But she is proud of it.

'Go watch it,' she urges. 'It's quite funny. It's hard for anyone to hear me praising my own work, but I think I have improved as an actress in this film.

'I don't see a difference between commercial work and artistic work. Acting is the same. There are only good performances and bad ones. And my passion for acting can conquer a lot of things.'

Spoken like a person who recalls embarking on her journey to being an actress without a Plan B, in case things do not work out in the volatile profession.

At 19, the Malaysia-born young woman, whose family owns Kukup Seafood, the biggest seafood supplier in Johor Baru, came to Singapore on the back of an undistinguished academic record.

The middle child, who has an older and a younger brother, repeated the final year of her education at Foon Yew High School, Malaysia's largest independent Chinese high school, whose alumni include singer-songwriter Penny Tai and actor Chen Hanwei. The only subject Yeo, a commerce student, excelled in was Chinese.

'I was terrible at book-keeping. For years, I couldn't balance the books. Even when my younger brother went through the homework with me, step by step, I could still get it wrong,' she recalls.

Arriving in Singapore, she had a go at a mass communications course offered by a private school in Tiong Bahru.

'Of course, I flunked that course because my English was so bad. At that time, I didn't even understand a word like 'strategy'. I was totally Chinese-educated. So I flunked and flunked. There seemed to be nothing I could do.

'But I was happy as long as I wasn't dirt-poor. I was still taking pocket money from my parents. If I had more than $10, I was fine. I did the course for about one year while I acted in plays. My heart was totally in acting.'

This probably makes her sound like one of those struggling actresses whose love for acting overcomes all practical considerations. The truth, however, is a little more bimbotic. Towards the end of high school, she had quit the windsurfing club to join the drama club for 'hormonal' reasons, she says.

'I was thinking, 'Why am I so tanned, so muscular?' I couldn't find jeans to fit me because my thighs were so muscular. I wanted to be pretty.' (She is still 'very strong', she says. In the publicity photos for Love Matters, the 1.56m-tall, 47kg actress actually carried her co-star Henry Thia, who is heavier than her by 20kg.)

So in her nascent career, she was just like another star-struck fan of Singapore TV stars such as Zoe Tay who wanted to follow in their footsteps.

'Zoe enchanted me, especially in Faces Of Eve - I was crazy about her. She was so good in that show,' she says. She was crazy enough about Tay to join Star Search in 1997, the same talent contest which launched the Singaporean to fame.

How far did she go in the competition? 'Nowhere, nothing. I queued and signed up only. Thanks for participating.'

Writer-director Han Yew Kwang corroborates this account of her lack of seriousness as an actress during this period. In 1998, he was the writer for the Channel 8 TV sitcom The Right Frequency, in which Yeo had landed a small supporting role - her first TV role.

Whenever Han visited the set, she seemed to be laughing all the time. To him, the 21-year-old Yeo was just 'enjoying life, enjoying herself'. 'She appeared to be just trying out acting. It didn't seem like her career,' he says.

Almost a decade later, he directed her in his second feature film, 18 Grams Of Love, and met a transformed Yeo.

He recalls: 'When she came to the audition, she offered to do the scene in three different ways. I was impressed.'

She is now regularly described by critics as the best thing in whatever show she appears in, including Love Matters and 2006's Singapore Dreaming. Currently, she can be seen every Monday in the Channel 8 sitcom The A-Go-Go Princess, where she plays the title character, a ditsy dancing queen in the 1960s.

She has a supporting role in Muallaf, Malaysian director Yasmin Ahmad's new film which will be re-released this Thursday. In both shows, her screen presence is magnetic.

As film-maker Tong puts it: 'As far as I can recollect, she's always elevated the stuff she's been in.'

Yeo's transformation from giggly teen to mature thespian is the legacy of the late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun. Meeting him and acting for him in the 1999 Theatre Practice play Red Hawk changed her life.

She says: 'When we were working on the play, he was trying to teach me a lot of things. But I didn't understand them. For three months, I couldn't sleep well because I was thinking about the play. He opened my mind so much.'

After that, she got serious about the craft of acting, starting with a mission to improve her English.

'When I first came to Singapore, I came with only Mandarin and Hokkien. A bit of English, which sucked; a bit of Malay, which also sucked. So I put in a lot of effort to improve my English. I had a friend who tutored me. I am still not good but at least better than I was before.'

The greater lessons, arguably, were those she learnt from 2000 to 2003 in the Theatre Training & Research Programme, founded by Kuo and the programme's current director T. Sasitharan.

She has said of the programme: 'Before going into TTRP, I would get nervous before going onstage thinking about things like whether I would forget my lines. During those three years, I was the most inexperienced one in the cohort and I just soaked up everything like a sponge.

'Now, I'm really immersed in my characters and the moment. It's a different level.'

Not having the money - $12,000 a year - to study was not the biggest hurdle she faced, since Kuo wrote her recommendation letters which got her sponsorships from the Lee Foundation and Georgette Chen Arts Scholarships. She still had to convince her mother that she was not wasting three years on a course of study that did not confer paper qualifications.

'My mum was really angry when I told her I wanted to study again - and no cert! She said she would not give me money anymore,' says Yeo.

'Even when I was bumming around, she was okay with it. She could still see my work on TV. She didn't see theatre as a real job. Luckily, my elder brother pulled me aside and told me he would support me during that time.'

Have her parents accepted that acting is now her job? The income is not regular and she has been paid as little as $70 for a student production.

'Yes. They have stopped asking me whether I could earn a living to feed myself. That was probably after Singapore Dreaming when I had regular jobs. I think they were finally forced to have confidence in me because I have been doing this for so many years. Even if they have no confidence in me, at least they could see my persistence.'

Later this year, her parents will see more than persistence; they will see her in the lead role in a blockbuster TV drama serial entitled Nu Tou Jia, or Female Towkay, a Malaysian production that has given her the biggest pay cheque of her decade-long career.

'Don't want to say how much, lah. Let's just say it's a lot.'

She says she is in a relationship but declines to talk about her private life. Two years ago, Yeo became a Singapore permanent resident but she will always have an emotional attachment to Malaysia.

'Singapore is the place where I became an adult,' she says. 'But Malaysia will always be the place of my childhood. Before I was born, my parents worked and lived in Singapore for one year, but they went back to kampung life in Kukup. I am glad they did because I loved kampung life. It shaped my character.

'There's a Chinese saying: chu sheng zi du bu pa hu. It means when you don't know what's dangerous, you just go out and do it. Growing up in a kampung, we ran around wild. The Hokkien word for it is 'hmm chai see', meaning fearless. This 'hmm chai see' quality has got me where I am today.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.