Ang Lee (Chinese: 李安; pinyin: Lǐ Ān; born October 23, 1954) is a Taiwanese filmmaker. His films are known for their emotional charge and exploration of repressed and hidden emotions. During his career, Lee has received international critical and popular acclaim and numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. He is also the only filmmaker to win the Golden Bear twice and one of only four filmmakers to win the Golden Lion twice, and received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2020.
Born in Pingtung County and raised in Hualien City, Taiwan, Lee graduated from what is now the National Taiwan University of Arts in 1975. After moving to the United States in 1979, he matriculated at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and subsequently enrolled from the New York University. He gained fame in Taiwan for the Father Knows Best trilogy: Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), which explored the relationships and conflicts between tradition, modernity, Eastern and Western.
Lee's breakthrough in Hollywood came with Sense and Sensibility (1995), which was his first English-language film. He gained further acclaim for The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Lust, Caution (2007), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Life of Pi (2012). Other notable films include Hulk (2003), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016), and Gemini Man (2019).
Lee was born on October 23, 1954, to a waishengren family in a military dependents' village of the Republic of China Armed Forces, located in Chaochou, Pingtung, a southern agricultural county in Taiwan. Both of Lee's parents moved following the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 from De'an, Jiangxi, to Taiwan. 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 took a position as the Principal of Taiwan Provincial Hualien Normal School (TPHNS). Lee attended two elementary schools in Hualien: Mingli Elementary School and Affiliated Primary School of Taiwan Provincial Hualien Normal School (now National Dong Hwa University Experimental Primary 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.
Lee studied in the Provincial Tainan First Senior High School (now National Tainan First Senior High School) where his father was the principal. He was expected to pass the annual Joint College/University Entrance Examination, the only route to a university education in Republic of China. But after failing the exam twice, to the disappointment of his father, he entered a three-year college, the National Arts School (now reorganized and expanded as National Taiwan University of Arts), and graduated in 1975. His father had wanted him to become a professor, but he had become interested in drama and the arts in college. This early frustration set his career on the path of performance art. Seeing Ingmar Bergman's film The Virgin Spring (1960) was a formative experience for him.
After finishing his mandatory military service in the Republic of China Navy (ROCN), Lee went to the US in 1979 to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he graduated with his Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater in 1980. Originally, Lee was interested in acting, but his challenges with speaking English made it difficult, and he quickly turned to directing. At UIUC, Lee met his future wife, Jane Lin (Chinese: 林惠嘉; pinyin: Lín Huìjiā), also a student from Taiwan, who was pursuing her PhD degree. Thereupon, he enrolled at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where he received 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 own thesis work, a 43-minute drama, Fine Line (1984), won NYU's Wasserman Award for Outstanding Direction and was also chosen for broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service.
After graduating from NYU 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 Government Information Office of R.O.C., and they came in first and second, respectively. The winning screenplays brought Lee to the attention of Hsu Li-kong (Chinese: 徐立功; pinyin: Xú Lìgōng), a recently promoted senior manager in a major studio who had a strong interest in Lee's unique style and freshness. Hsu, a first-time producer, invited Lee to direct Pushing Hands, a full-length feature that debuted in 1991.
1991–1994: International films
Pushing Hands (1991) was a success in Taiwan both among critics and at the box office. It received eight nominations in the Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan's premier film festival. Inspired by the success, Hsu Li-kong collaborated with Lee in their second film, The Wedding Banquet (1993), which won the Golden Bear at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated as the Best Foreign Language Film in both the Golden Globe and the Academy Awards. In all, this film collected eleven Taiwanese and international awards and made Lee a rising star. These first two movies were based on stories of Chinese Americans, and both were filmed in the US.
In 1994, Hsu invited Lee to return to Taiwan to make Eat Drink Man Woman, a film that depicts traditional values, modern relationships, and family conflicts in Taipei. The film was a box office hit and was critically acclaimed. For a second consecutive year, Lee's film received the Best Foreign Language Film nomination in both the Golden Globe and Academy Awards, as well as in the British Academy Awards (BAFTA)s. Eat Drink Man Woman won five awards in Taiwan and internationally, including the Best Director from Independent Spirit.
The three films show the Confucian family at risk and star the Taiwanese actor Sihung Lung to form what has been called Lee's Father Knows Best trilogy.
1994–2012: Breakthrough and acclaim
In 1995, Lee directed Columbia TriStar's British classic Sense and Sensibility based on the Jane Austen novel of the same name. This made Lee a second-time winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won Best Adapted Screenplay for screenwriter Emma Thompson, who also starred in the movie alongside Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet. Sense and Sensibility also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama. Thompson has described the experience of working with Lee in his first English language film, noting how taken aback Lee was when the actors asked questions or provided suggestions, something Thompson notes as uncommon in Chinese culture. Once this disjuncture was bridged, Thompson remembered having "the most wonderful time because his notes were so brutal and funny." Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised Lee's adaptation writing, "Mr. Lee is after something more broadly accessible, a sparkling, colorful and utterly contemporary comedy of manners. He achieves this so pleasantly that Sense and Sensibility matches the Austen-based Clueless for sheer fun".
After this, Lee continued directing in Hollywood. He made The Ice Storm (1997), a drama set in 1970s suburban America, starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen, and Tobey Maguire. The film competed at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for the Palme d'Or. It received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay. Angie Errigo of Empire praised the film writing, "Lee seems incapable of making a less than outstanding movie" adding, "The real beauty of this film is the way in which Lee shifts his story from sex farce to youth drama to tragic despair with the help of a perfect ensemble cast".