Lilian Lee, whose original name is Li Bai, was born in Hong Kong in 1959 to a family from Taishan, Guangdong, and was educated at the well-known girls' school True Light Middle School. She began submitting articles to newspapers as a secondary student, and from 1976 worked successively as a primary school teacher, a profile interviewer and a columnist before becoming a screenwriter. In the late 1970s she wrote for television, contributing to series such as Seven Women, Big Dipper and Below the Lion Rock, and then moved into film, co-writing Father and Son with Cheung Kin-ting and Chan Siu in 1981; the film won Best Picture at the first Hong Kong Film Awards. From the 1980s she turned to fiction, her stories usually first serialised in newspapers before appearing as books, spanning history, the supernatural and urban desire and centring on women and fate. Her novels include Rouge, Farewell My Concubine, Green Snake, A Terra-Cotta Warrior, My Name Ain't Suzie, Temptress Moon and Dumplings, many of which became films; Rouge tells of the courtesan Ru Hua and Twelfth Master across the boundary of death, Farewell My Concubine of the Peking-opera artists Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou over decades, and Green Snake retells the legend of the White Snake. Her screenplay for Rouge, co-written with Yau Kong-kin and directed by Stanley Kwan in 1988, won her Best Screenplay at the 8th Hong Kong Film Awards; the film adaptation of Farewell My Concubine, co-written with Wei Lu and directed by Chen Kaige in 1993, won the Palme d'Or at the 46th Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, bringing her work to a far wider international audience. She also worked on the film versions of Green Snake and My Name Ain't Suzie and collaborated with director Fruit Chan on Dumplings; in 2013 her Tales from the Dark series was directed by Simon Yam, Lee Chi-ngai and Fruit Chan, with Lee herself writing and planning. She has also been a planner for dance productions and a long-time newspaper columnist. Keeping an extremely low profile, she rarely appears in public, yet her books have been reprinted and read across the Chinese-speaking world for decades, making her one of the few Hong Kong writers equally noted for her fiction and its screen adaptations.
The film adaptations of Rouge and Farewell My Concubine carried her supernatural romances to a far wider audience and tightened the bond between Hong Kong popular fiction and cinema; her tales of reincarnation entangled with history became a hallmark of Chinese-language popular literature.
Achievements
- 1976 · Began working as a journalist and television and film screenwriter, contributing to series such as Seven Women, Big Dipper and Below the Lion Rock
- 1981 · Co-wrote the film Father and Son with Cheung Kin-ting and Chan Siu, which won Best Picture at the first Hong Kong Film Awards
- 1989 · Won Best Screenplay at the 8th Hong Kong Film Awards for Rouge, co-written with Yau Kong-kin
- 1993 · The film adaptation of Farewell My Concubine, which she helped write, won the Palme d'Or at the 46th Cannes Film Festival