Miky Lee, The South Korean Mogul Conquering Hollywood

She co-produced Parasite, brought K-pop to the West and helped launch Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks. Now, she’s throwing her weight behind a new museum of cinema in Los Angeles. Meet Miky Lee, the South Korean mogul conquering Hollywood

- Oliver Giles

Miky Lee was 11 when she fell in love with film. “I vividly remember watching The Sound of Music for the first time,” says the 63-year-old tycoon, speaking by video call from her home in California, a bright smile on her face, her Japanese Akita, Sasha, standing protectively by her chair. “There is a scene when Maria turns her curtains into children’s clothes—I had always looked at the curtains in my house and my grandmother’s house and imagined that they would make beautiful clothes. When this happened in the film, I was surprised to know that I was not the only one who had thought about it.”

The cheery Lee pauses, becoming momentarily serious. “That is the power of a movie,” she says. “You sit in a room and laugh and cry with the rest of the audience, and you know that you are connected to a larger community.”

Lee began going to the cinema near her family’s house in Seoul every weekend, encouraged by her parents and grandparents, including her grandfather Lee Byung-chul, the founder of Samsung. Her interest became an all-consuming passion and, eventually, her career. She is now the vice-chair of CJ Group, a South Korean conglomerate founded in 1953 by her grandfather as a sugar and flour manufacturing business. Under Lee’s leadership, it branched into the film industry in the 1990s and has since become one of the world’s largest entertainment companies.