Ang Lee

Ang Lee (born October 23, 1954, P’ing-tung county, Taiwan) is a Taiwan-born film director who transitioned from directing Chinese films to major English-language productions. In 2006 Lee became the first person of color to win an Academy Award for best director, for Brokeback Mountain (2005). He won a second Oscar for best director for the film Life of Pi (2012).

After high school Lee enrolled in the Taiwan Academy of Art, where he became interested in acting. In 1978 he moved to the United States to study theater at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cinema at New York University, where his master’s project, Fine Line, received best film and best director awards. After graduating in 1984, Lee spent the next six years unsuccessfully pitching ideas to Hollywood studio executives. Frustrated and depressed by the stagnancy of his film career in the United States, he entered two scripts in a screenplay contest in Taiwan and placed first and second. This honor inspired two independent film production companies to fund and produce his movies.

Lee’s first three features, which he cowrote and directed, were comedies that poignantly examined intergenerational conflicts in Chinese families: Tui Shou (1992; Pushing Hands), Hsi Yen (1993; The Wedding Banquet), and Yinshi nan nu (1994; Eat Drink Man Woman). After earning international acclaim for the latter two movies, Lee was chosen to direct a screen adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility (1995). The film—which starred Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, and Hugh Grant—marked a turning point in his career, with Lee proving that he could handle a British period piece. Despite his admittedly clumsy English, Lee worked with the actors—sometimes even employing tai chi chuan exercises—to evoke poignant performances, a hallmark of his directorial style. The movie was a success, garnering seven Oscar nominations.

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Lee returned to Hollywood to make his next film, The Ice Storm (1997), a tragic drama set in the 1970s about two spiritually empty upper-middle-class American families. The film was based on Rick Moody’s best-selling 1994 novel and starred Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, and Sigourney Weaver. In 2000 Lee directed Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination. The lavish film, which featured spectacular scenes of martial arts, and launched Michelle Yeoh into global stardom, became the highest-grossing foreign-language film released in the United States. Expanding his repertoire, Lee made the live-action thriller The Hulk (2003), transforming the comic-book story into an intelligent investigation of character and identity. In 2005 he directed Brokeback Mountain, a Western based on a short story by Annie Proulx that centers on two cowboys (played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who fall in love. The film was critically acclaimed, and Lee made history as the first person of color to win a directing Oscar for a feature film.

Lee subsequently directed Se, jie (2007; Lust, Caution), an erotic tale set during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in World War II, and Taking Woodstock (2009), a comedy about a young man’s pivotal role in staging the famed Woodstock Music and Art Fair. He returned in 2012 with Life of Pi, an adaptation of Yann Martel’s fablelike novel (2001) in which an Indian boy, having survived a shipwreck in the Pacific Ocean, becomes trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The visually sumptuous film earned Lee a second Academy Award for best director. His next film was another adaptation, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), based on Ben Fountain’s acclaimed novel about Iraq War veterans. In 2019 Lee directed Will Smith in the action drama Gemini Man, in which a hit man is hunted by his clone.