Spike Lee

Spike Lee, born in 1957, American motion-picture maker, whose works examine race relations in the United States. Lee, who is African American, has produced thoughtful and sometimes controversial movies that have made him one of the most prominent American filmmakers. His success allowed him to establish his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule.

He was born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He was educated at Morehouse College and at New York University. Lee's thesis film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1982), created in collaboration with classmate Ernest Dickerson, won a student Academy Award and was showcased in New York City at Lincoln Center and at the Museum of Modern Art.

Lee's talent attracted national attention in 1986 with the release of his low-budget film She's Gotta Have It. The film proved to be a financial and critical success, and it was followed by School Daze (1988), a musical film about Lee’s college experiences; Do the Right Thing (1989), about race relations in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood; Mo' Better Blues (1990), about a group of black musicians; Jungle Fever (1991), about interracial relationships; and Malcolm X (1992), which stars American actor Denzel Washington as the militant black leader Malcolm X.

In 1994 Lee released Crooklyn, which depicts an African American family living in Brooklyn during the early 1970s. It was followed by Clockers (1995), an urban murder mystery, and Girl 6 (1996), which follows the adventures of an aspiring African American female actor. He Got Game (1998) stars a true-life professional basketball player, Ray Allen, as a highly recruited high school basketball player named Jesus Shuttlesworth; Denzel Washington plays Shuttlesworth’s father. Summer of Sam (1999) looks back at the summer of 1977, when people in New York City were preoccupied with a series of murders committed by a man who called himself “Son of Sam.” Bamboozled (2000) is a satire about a black writer who revives the minstrel show for TV, while the crime drama 25th Hour (2002) shows the last day of freedom of a convicted drug dealer. Lee’s heist thriller Inside Man (2006), again starring Washington, topped the U.S. box office on its release, the director’s most successful opening to date.

Lee has also directed the documentaries 4 Little Girls (1997), about four girls killed in a bombing in Alabama in 1963, and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), the story of the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.