Ang Lee Earns Best Director Oscar

Ang Lee won the Academy Award for Best Director on March 6 for the cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain, becoming the first Asian to win Hollywood's top honour for filmmakers.

 

Adept at genres from westerns to historical romance and martial-arts, Lee won his Oscar for a purely American story about two men tragically swept up in a gay romance that they concealed from their families for two decades.

 

Brokeback Mountain earned Lee best director honours during several other key Hollywood awards presentations, including Directors Guild of America and Golden Globe awards.

 

Born in Taiwan, Lee first came to Hollywood's notice with the romantic charmers The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, which earned back-to-back Oscar nominations for best foreign-language films in 1993 and 1994.

 

Since then, Lee has been a chameleon. He made the Jane Austen romance Sense and Sensibility, a best picture nominee; the stark American drama The Ice Storm; the western Ride with the Devil; and the martial-arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2001 and also was a best picture and best director nominee at the Oscars.