Fast Facts:
• Born June 19, 1945 in Rangoon. Her father, Aung San, was commander of the Burmese Independent Army and considered the father of modern Burma. He was assassinated when Suu Kyi was 2.
• Her name — pronounced "awng san sue chee" — is a blend of her mother's, father's and grandmother's names. She's known in Burma simply as "the Lady."
• Attended Oxford University after spending four years in India, where her mother served as Burma's ambassador. Later attended graduate school in New York and worked briefly at the United Nations.
• Married a British professor and lived abroad until 1988, when she returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother and became a leading advocate for democracy and human rights amid a brutal crackdown by the nation's junta.
• In 1989 she was placed under arrest without trial in her family's white-shuttered home for the first time. The party she led, the National League for Democracy, won more than 80% of parliamentary seats in the following year's election, but the junta ignored the results.
• Won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 — news she learned by listening to a BBC radio broadcast. The prize was accepted by her two teenage sons.
• Fearing she would not be allowed to return to Burma, Suu Kyi chose not to leave the country to visit her husband, Michael Aris, as he died of cancer in England in 1999.
• Released and subsequently re-arrested several more times through 2003.
• For much of the 1990s, spoke to large crowds at her front gate every Saturday and Sunday.
• A Buddhist, she told an interviewer she rises each day at 4:30 am for meditation and reads voraciously. Neighbors said she once played Mozart on the family piano, but the music stopped early in her detention.
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