The former action queen Marrie Lee was my stepmom for almost a year when I was a little kid in Singapore, but I knew her as “Auntie Doris,” the bespectacled goofball who told the best ghost stories. Before her time with my turbulent father, and unbeknown to me then, Marrie had, at age 18, played the title role of the kung fu-fighting Interpol agent in “They Call Her Cleopatra Wong” (1978), an exuberant low-budget actioner by Bobby Suarez. This film and its spinoffs shot her to cult stardom in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East (lobby cards in many languages can still be found on eBay) — and it also captured the imagination of one future American auteur: Quentin Tarantino has said Uma Thurman’s character in “Kill Bill” was partly inspired by Marrie’s Cleo.

Dissatisfied with working conditions in the Philippines, Marrie left Suarez’s Manila studio and returned to Singapore in 1979 before they could make the proposed star vehicles “Super Woman” and “Queen Cobra.” This predated the Hong Kong action movie boom of the early ’80s that birthed a generation of action stars, including Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh. In a business that’s mostly about timing, Marrie had simply hit a bit too early.

When my father met Marrie, she’d already retired, at 21, from the movies and was managing a dance troupe called the Devil’s Angels that toured hotel bars in feathers and sequins. In the late ’90s, I helped organize a revival screening of “Cleopatra Wong” (largely forgotten by then), and Marrie got her second wind. Invitations to festivals in Europe and Australia followed, but more important, her sense of her own creative destiny changed. She now wanted to make her own movies. In the past decade, working with a largely volunteer crew in Singapore, Marrie has written, directed and produced two movies and is now, having just recovered from a stroke, working to make a third!