Ang Lee failed university entrance twice and spent years unemployed before fame
Ang Lee flunked Taiwan's national university exam twice, disappointing a father who wanted a professor. After film school in New York he spent several years out of work, writing scripts while his wife supported them. He is now the only director to win Berlin's Golden Bear twice.
Lee was born in 1954 in a military dependents' village in Pingtung, in southern Taiwan, to parents who had moved from Jiangxi after the civil war of 1949. His father became principal of a teacher-training school in Hualien, where Lee spent eight years he later called the happiest of his life, and then of the Tainan high school Lee attended. Education was everything at home. Instead of university he went to a three-year arts college, graduating in 1975, where drama took hold of him; watching Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring was a turning point.
After navy service he left for the University of Illinois in 1979 and took a theatre degree the next year. He first wanted to act, but struggles with spoken English steered him to directing. There he met his future wife, Jane Lin, a doctoral student from Taiwan. At New York University's film school he was a classmate of Spike Lee and crewed on his thesis film; his own 43-minute thesis, Fine Line, won NYU's Wasserman award for direction and aired on PBS.
The drought ended in 1990 when his scripts for Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet took first and second place in a Taiwanese government competition. Hsu Li-kong, a newly promoted studio manager producing for the first time, backed Pushing Hands in 1991, and The Wedding Banquet won the Golden Bear in 1993. With Eat Drink Man Woman, set in Taipei, the three became known as the Father Knows Best trilogy, probing clashes between tradition and modern life, East and West.
Hollywood followed. Sense and Sensibility in 1995 was his first English-language film, and acclaim continued with The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi. His work is known for emotional force and buried feelings. He has two Academy Awards, four BAFTAs and three Golden Globes, is one of four directors with two Golden Lions from Venice, and received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2020.
Source: Ang Lee
