Ang Lee

Lore & Background

Ang Lee was born on October 23, 1954, to a waishengren family in a military dependents' village in Chaochou, Pingtung, Taiwan. Both of his parents moved from De'an, Jiangxi, to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949. He grew up in a household that put a heavy emphasis on education. In 1956, when Lee was 2 years old, his family moved to Hualien because his father became Principal of Taiwan Provincial Hualien Normal School.

Lee has mentioned that the eight years he lived in Hualien were the happiest time of his life before he went north to study at National Arts School. He studied at Provincial Tainan First Senior High School where his father was principal, but after failing the Joint College/University Entrance Examination twice, he entered the National Arts School (now National Taiwan University of Arts), graduating in 1975. Seeing Ingmar Bergman's film The Virgin Spring (1960) was a formative experience for him. After mandatory military service in the Republic of China Navy, Lee went to the US in 1979 to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater in 1980.

There he met his future wife, Jane Lin, also a student from Taiwan pursuing her PhD. He then enrolled at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, receiving his M.F.A. in film production. He was a classmate of Spike Lee and worked on the crew of his thesis film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. During graduate school, Lee finished a 16mm short film, Shades of the Lake (1982), which won the Best Drama Award in Short Film in Taiwan.

His thesis work, Fine Line (1984), won NYU's Wasserman Award for Outstanding Direction and was chosen for broadcast by PBS. After graduating in 1985, Lee struggled to find work despite interest from the William Morris Agency, spending several years unemployed while continuing to write screenplays with his wife's support. In 1990, Lee submitted two screenplays, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, to a competition sponsored by the Government Information Office of R.O.C., and they came in first and second, respectively. This brought him to the attention of Hsu Li-kong, who invited Lee to direct Pushing Hands (1991).

The film was a success in Taiwan, receiving eight nominations in the Golden Horse Film Festival. Inspired by that success, Hsu collaborated with Lee on The Wedding Banquet (1993), which won the Golden Bear at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated as Best Foreign Language Film in both the Golden Globe and the Academy Awards. In 1994, Hsu invited Lee to return to Taiwan to make Eat Drink Man Woman, a box office hit that was critically acclaimed and received Best Foreign Language Film nominations in the Golden Globe, Academy Awards, and BAFTAs. These three films, starring Taiwanese actor Sihung Lung, form what has been called Lee's Father Knows Best trilogy.

1994–2012: Breakthrough and acclaim

Lee's Hollywood breakthrough came with Sense and Sensibility (1995), his first English-language film, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won Best Adapted Screenplay for Emma Thompson. He later directed The Ice Storm (1997), which competed at Cannes for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Screenplay award. After the revisionist Western Ride with the Devil (1999) received mixed reviews and was a box office bomb, Lee returned to Chinese-language film with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which became the highest grossing foreign film in many countries including the US and UK. Other notable films include Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lust, Caution (2007), Life of Pi (2012), Hulk (2003), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016), and Gemini Man (2019).