Short answers, pulled from the story.
David Lean won the Academy Award for Best Director twice, for The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957 and Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. He is the only British director to have won that award more than once. Across his career he received seven Academy Award nominations for Best Director.
The critical failure of Ryan's Daughter in 1970 led to Lean's fourteen-year break from filmmaking. At a lunch with the National Society of Film Critics at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, critics including Pauline Kael spent two hours attacking the film to Lean's face. Lean said the experience shook his confidence terribly and left him unable to make films for several years.
Lean's personal favourite of all his films was Summertime, the 1955 romance starring Katharine Hepburn, shot entirely on location in Venice. Katharine Hepburn was also his favourite actress.
Lean entered the film industry in 1927 when he visited Gaumont Studios after leaving his father's accountancy firm. He started as a teaboy, advanced to clapperboy, and by 1930 was editing newsreels for Gaumont Pictures and Movietone. He had edited more than two dozen feature films before making his directorial debut with In Which We Serve in 1942.
Lean was in pre-production on a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo with a total budget of $46 million and an all-star cast including Marlon Brando, Peter O'Toole, and Dennis Quaid. The project was six weeks from the start of filming when Lean died of throat cancer on the 16th of April 1991. The production collapsed after his death.
Seven of Lean's films appear on the British Film Institute's 1999 list of the Top 100 British Films, three of which sit in the top five. Brief Encounter placed second, Lawrence of Arabia third, and Great Expectations fifth on that list.