Sook-Yin Lee

Sook-Yin Lee
250x200px Lee at the Odessa International Film Festival in 2010.
Background information
Born	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Occupation(s)	Musician, actress, filmmaker, broadcaster
Years active	1990–present
Labels	Zulu

Sook-Yin Lee is a Canadian broadcaster, musician, filmmaker, and actress. She is a former MuchMusic VJ, and, since 2002, has been the host of CBC Radio's Definitely Not the Opera (DNTO).

Background

Lee was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and the second oldest daughter of a Chinese father and a Hong Kong mother. She was raised as a devout Roman Catholic. Her father was a post-World War II orphan from Hong Kong, and her mother an escapee from Communist China who remained in and out of psychiatric institutions when Lee was young. She grew up within a strict, secretive and unstable family. When Lee was 15, her parents split up and Lee ran away from home, for a time living on the street before eventually living with a "community of lesbians and artists".

In the late 1980s, she became the lead singer for Bob's Your Uncle, a Vancouver alternative rock band. Lee often incorporated performance art techniques into the band's melodic rock. When that band broke up, Lee pursued a solo music career, releasing several solo albums and performing as an actor in theatre, film and television projects. She was the lead singer for the band Slan. Neko Case covered Lee's song "Knock Loud" on her 2001 EP Canadian Amp.

She has been in a relationship with writer and musician Adam Litovitz, who is also her frequent artistic collaborator, since 2007. They occasionally perform improvised musical sets under the name LLVK, short for Lee/Litovitz/Valdivia/Kamino, and have formed the band Jooj, which is slated to release its debut album in 2015.

MuchMusic and CBC

In 1995, Lee became a VJ for MuchMusic, bringing her theatrical and musical background and her unique creative perspective to the channel. She was best known as the host of MuchMusic's alternative music show, The Wedge.

Lee is openly bisexual. In 1995, on the day that sexual orientation was added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Egan v Canada case, Lee celebrated the decision by kissing a woman on the air. She later appeared on the cover of Xtra! in 1997.

She left MuchMusic in 2001. During her last appearance as a MuchMusic VJ, Lee and her co-host turned their backs to the camera, and mooned the audience on live television. The following year, she was named as the new host of CBC Radio One's Saturday afternoon pop culture magazine Definitely Not the Opera.

In the fall of 2004, she produced and hosted a documentary celebrating Terry Fox as part of the CBC Television series The Greatest Canadian. Fox finished second in the voting to Tommy Douglas, whose advocate was another ex-MuchMusic VJ, George Stroumboulopoulos.

Film work

Lee played the lead character, Alessa Woo, alongside fellow Canadian actor Adam Beach in Helen Lee's 2001 film The Art of Woo.

In 2003, she became the centre of controversy when John Cameron Mitchell first announced that he was casting Lee in his film Shortbus (released 2006). Due to Mitchell's announcement that the film was to be sexually explicit in nature – Lee and other cast members perform non-simulated intercourse and masturbation on screen – the CBC initially threatened to fire her. Celebrities such as director Francis Ford Coppola, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, actress Julianne Moore and artist and musician Yoko Ono, as well as the CBC's listening audience, rallied behind her, and the CBC ultimately relented. The movie premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Her performance in Shortbus earned Lee the 2007 International Cinephile Society Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Lee also has a smaller part in Mitchell's film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, playing Kwahng-Yi, a guitarist in Hedwig's rock band made up of Korean-born army wives.

In 2012 she was chosen to play Olivia Chow in the CBC biopic Jack, alongside Rick Roberts as Jack Layton. The film aired in 2013. She subsequently won the 2014 Canadian Screen Award for Best Performance by a Lead Dramatic Actress in a Program/Mini-Series.

Lee stars in, wrote and directed The Brazilian segment of the 2008 film Toronto Stories.

Her feature film directorial debut Year of the Carnivore premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009. Lee, Litovitz and Buck 65 also collaborated on the film's soundtrack, which garnered a Genie Award nomination for Best Original Score at the 31st Genie Awards.

Theatrical work

In 2013, Lee wrote and starred in a theatrical performance show, How Can I Forget? at Toronto's Rhubarb and Summerworks theatre festivals. She and Litovitz also staged Morrice Fled: Two Paintings Talk to Each Other, a pop-up performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario based on the art of James Wilson Morrice, in January.

Discography

• 1994 – Lavinia's Tongue (Zulu Records)
• 1996 – Wigs 'n' Guns (Zulu Records)
• 2003 – Electric Blues (with Slan, Last Gang Records)
• 2010 – Original Music from and Inspired by the Movie Year of the Carnivore (with Buck 65 and Adam Litovitz, Last Gang Records)

Filmography

• Green Dolphin Beat (1994)
• Bad Company (1995)
• Sliders (1995, TV series)
• Boy Meets Girl (1998)
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
• The Art of Woo (2001)
• 3 Needles (2005)
• Shortbus (2006)
• Toronto Stories (2008)
• Year of the Carnivore (2009)
• Jack (2013)

External links

• Sook-Yin Lee's profile as host of DNTO at CBC
• Sook-Yin Lee at the Internet Movie Database