Michelle Yeoh, the actor playing the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a forthcoming film, has been refused entry to Burma.

Yeoh, who has been filming the biopic in neighbouring Thailand, was detained on arriving at Rangoon's airport on 22 June but was sent out on the next flight, Burmese officials said. "She was deported on the same day because she is on a blacklist," an unnamed official told Reuters.

The 48-year-old Malaysian actor, a veteran of Hong Kong action movies who achieved wider fame with her roles in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, had previously been allowed into Burma, which has been ruled for almost five decades by a repressive military regime.

In December Yeoh visited Aung San Suu Kyi at her lakeside home in Rangoon, just weeks after the opposition politician was released from a seven-year period of house arrest. The actor spent a day with the pro-democracy leader and her son, British-based Kim Aris.

Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in a general election in 1990, which the ruling junta allowed to take place but then largely ignored. She won the Nobel peace prize the following year.

Yeoh's film, titled The Lady after Aung San Suu Kyi's nickname in Burma, focuses heavily on the personal sacrifices the politician has been obliged to make. Directed by Luc Besson, it charts her marriage to the British academic and Tibet scholar Michael Aris, played in the film by David Thewlis.

The family was based in the UK but Aung San Suu Kyi returned home in 1988 to care for her mother. She was detained the following year and Aris and the couple's two children, Kim and Alexander, were not permitted to enter Burma, even when Aris was diagnosed with cancer in 1997. Burmese authorities told Aung San Suu Kyi she could travel to the UK but she decided not to as she feared never being allowed to return. Aris died in 1999.

After her first visit to Burma, Yeoh told reporters in Hong Kong that the film charted "an incredible love story that has political turmoil within". She added: "More important for me is that people should know her story because unfortunately I think a lot of people have forgotten or don't really understand what was going on because it's been 20 years."

The film, due for release in October, has also been shot in the UK and France.