After Lee's paternal grandparents were executed for being landowners during the Communist revolution in mainland China, his father, a scholar and school principal, fled to Taiwan. In 1973, Lee surprised his family by heading to Taipei to study acting. Five years later, he moved to the USA to pursue further studies. Following his graduation from the University of Illinois, he headed east to NYU's film school, where he began his moviemaking career. Lee worked in production capacities on student like Spike Lee's "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barber Shop: We Cut Heads" (1982, as assistant to cinematographer Ernest Dickerson). His own shorts, "Dim Lake" (1983) and "Fine Line" (1984) earned prizes and led to representation by the esteemed William Morris Agency. Yet Lee was caught in what can only be termed as "development hell". For five years, he struggled to get various projects off the ground, all the while playing househusband to his two sons while his wife, microbiologist Janice Lin, was the breadwinner. While he became an accomplished cook of rich Chinese cuisine, his mate researched how such foods contributed to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).

In 1990, Lee saw a turning point in his career. He entered two scripts into a national competition in Taiwan and amazingly placed first and second with "Pushing Hands" and "The Wedding Banquet". Both films, along with "Eat Drink Man Woman" (1994), find their central metaphor in food. Taken together, these movies which feature actor Sihung Lung as a patriarch, form what Lee has called his "Father Knows Best" trilogy. 1991's "Pushing Hands" examined the clash of cultures when the father comes to live with his son in America and takes a shine to a Chinese cooking instructor. "The Wedding Banquet" was about a marriage of convenience between a gay man and a Chinese immigrant that was arranged in part to please the man's elderly parents. "Eat Drink Man Woman" (1994), which also picked up an Oscar nomination as Best Foreign-Language Film, told the story of a father—a renowned Taiwanese cook—and his three daughters as they strive to concoct a recipe for harmonious living. Boasting a more complex screenplay and polished performances, "Eat Drink Man Woman" opened to laudatory reviews and robust box office.

A seemingly unlikely choice to film a classic British novel, Lee was hired to direct "Sense and Sensibility" (1995), his first English-language movie. Adapted from Jane Austen's classic novel and starring Emma Thompson, it earned rave reviews, many of which singled out Lee's nuanced approach to this comedy of manners. In many ways. the film was similar to his earlier work, in that the motion pictures all studies of mores unique to a time and place, the effect of a patriarch on his family and miscommunication. Although the film received seven Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, Lee surprisingly did not make the final cut in the Best Director category.

"The Ice Storm" (1997) revolved around a father who watches the collapse of a patriarchal society. Adapted from Rick Moody's novel, the film focused on the societal upheavals in the 1970s (from Nixonian politics to wife-swapping to the burgeoning women's movement), with particular attention to how the interpersonal codes were becoming inverted. With meticulous detail to period, "The Ice Storm" looked at events from the perspectives of both the adults and the teenagers. Featuring a superb ensemble, this mood piece played as a modern Greek tragedy. Lee next undertook perhaps his most ambitious film yet, "Ride With the Devil" (1999), an action-packed post-Civil War-era epic about renegade Confederate soldiers set on the Missouri-Kansas borders. Although based on a Daniel Woodrell's novel "Woe to Love On", the story had its roots in history. To realize the project, the director assembled a cast drawn from a who's who of rising stars, including Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jewel, Skeet Ulrich and James Caviezel, but its execution provoked a mostly dispassionate response from audiences.

In 2000, Ang Lee saw the realization of a dream project. He had long harbored the desire to make a film similar to those on which he had been raised while growing up in Taiwan. Returning to his roots, he made his first Chinese-language project in years, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which married two genres—historical romance and martial arts -- into an exciting blend. Teaming Hong Kong stars Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh as mature lovers, utilizing action star Cheng Pei-Pei as a villain, and teaming newcomers Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen as a younger couple, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" had elements to appeal to a mass audience—action for the guys, romance for the gals. Already a hit in Asia when it was released in the USA in late 2000, the movie earned mostly raves and earned a spot on many a critic's Ten Best list, as well as ten Academy Award nominations and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Lee's next major film was directing the highly anticipated comic adaptation "The Hulk" (2003) which starred Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly. The high-profile film was met with mixed but generally appreciative responses, with many quarters praising the dark psychological underpinnings of the story while others decried the CGI-created Hulk as too unrealistic and cartoony-looking.

If "The Hulk" was largely viewed as a disappointment, Lee certainly redeemed himself thoroughly with his next film, the haunting, sensitive drama "Brokeback Mountain" (2005), an adaptation and expansion of E. Annie Proulx's revered story (screenplay by Western master Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) which cast Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, respectively, a pair of rugged ranch hands who, while driving sheep through a mountain range in the 1960s, engage in a homosexual affair and struggle through a painful, heart-wrenching love affair that spans several decades—a relationship complicated by Ennis' need to be closeted and their mutual heterosexual relationships with women. Lee won several awards, including a Golden Globe for Best Director – Motion Picture and the top honors at the Directors Guild Awards. As predicted, Lee won an Academy Award for a Best Director, but his film’s anticipated Best Picture Oscar surprisingly went to “Crash” instead.