Who

Lee is the Oscar-winning director behind such movies as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain.

Backstory

The son of Chinese nationals who fled to Taiwan during the Revolution of 1949, Lee made his way to the States in his mid-20s, earning a theater degree at the University of Illinois before attending film school at NYU. He earned a handful of awards with his thesis film, but had trouble finding work for years afterward—it was his wife, a microbiologist, who supported the family while he stayed home and took care of the kids.

Lee eventually broke through with 1992's Pushing Hands, a comedy about the cultural gaps in a Taiwanese family living in New York, and he followed up soon after with two more acclaimed Chinese-language films, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. It also helped open the doors to Hollywood and in 1995, he debuted his first English-language film, Sense and Sensibility starring Emma Thompson. The Ice Storm, an adaptation of Rick Moody's novel starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, and Christina Ricci, followed in 1997.

Lee's next project took his career in a surprising direction. Returning to Chinese-language film, he had a monster hit with 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which remains the highest grossing foreign language film in history. Less successful was his 2003 foray into comic book territory with Hulk, which was panned by critics and audiences alike. ("Incredible, but only in a negative sense: incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid," wrote the Times.) The biggest film of his career opened two years later: Brokeback Mountain starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, which earned Lee an Oscar for Best Director.

Of note

Lee's filmmaking career has been anything but conventional. One of the few filmmakers who has managed to go from directing foreign-language films to Hollywood fare, he now straddles the line between East and West, directing classically American films one minute (like Brokeback) and Chinese films the next (2007's Lust, Caution). Contradictions exist on both sides of the Pacific: While he's routinely lauded as the pride of China, he's actually from Taiwan; and while his Brokeback success made him the poster boy for the accomplishments of Chinese living abroad, Beijing leaders refused to show the movie due to its gay theme and censored his Oscar acceptance speech.

Lee's most recent film, the Chinese-language Lust, Caution, starring Joan Chen and Tony Leung, was a big hit in China and Taiwan, opening at number one at the box office. The NC-17-rated film was less successful in the U.S., where it only mustered lukewarm reviews: "Overpadded and underdeveloped," concluded one critic.

Personal

Lee and his wife, Jane Lin, have been married since 1983. They have two sons, Haan and Mason, and live in a four-bedroom home in Larchmont.

True story

Ang's relationship with Spike Lee goes back to their days as NYU film students: Ang helped out on the set of Spike's 1983 thesis film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads.