1940-1973
Who Was Bruce Lee?
Bruce Lee was a groundbreaking actor, director, and martial arts expert known for his roles in movies such as The Chinese Connection and Enter the Dragon. Born in the United States before becoming a child actor in Hong Kong, Lee later returned to America and taught martial arts. In 1966, he began starring in the TV series The Green Hornet and later became a major box-office draw. Shortly before the release of Enter the Dragon in 1973, Lee died at age 32 from a cerebral edema.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Lee Jun Fan
BORN: November 27, 1940
DIED: July 20, 1973
BIRTHPLACE: San Francisco, California
SPOUSE: Linda Lee Cadwell (1964-1973)
CHILDREN: Brandon Lee and Shannon Lee
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius
HEIGHT: 5 ft. 7 in.
Early Life
Bruce Lee was born Lee Jun Fan on November 27, 1940, in San Francisco in both the hour and year of the Dragon. His father, a Hong Kong opera singer named Lee Hoi Chuen, moved with his mother, Grace Ho, and three children to the United States in 1939. Lee Jun Fan was born while his father was on tour in San Francisco.
Lee received the name “Bruce” from a nurse at his birthing hospital, but his family never used it during his preschool years. The future star appeared in his first movie at the age of 3 months. He served as the stand-in for an American baby in Golden Gate Girl (1941).
In the early 1940s, the Lees moved back to Hong Kong, which was then occupied by the Japanese. Apparently a natural in front of the camera, Bruce appeared in roughly 20 movies as a child actor beginning in 1946. He also studied dance, winning Hong Kong’s cha-cha competition, and also became known for his poetry.
As a teenager, Lee was taunted by British students for his Chinese background and later joined a street gang. In 1953, he began to hone his passions into a discipline, studying kung fu (referred to as “gung fu” in Cantonese) under the tutelage of Master Yip Man. By the end of the decade, Lee moved back to the United States to live with family friends outside Seattle, initially taking up work as a dance instructor.
Martial Arts Teacher
Lee finished high school in Edison, Washington, and subsequently enrolled as a philosophy major at the University of Washington. He also got a job teaching the Wing Chun martial arts style he had learned in Hong Kong to his fellow students and others. By 1964, Lee had married and opened his own school in Seattle.
He and his wife, Linda, soon moved to California, where Lee opened two more schools in Oakland and Los Angeles. He mainly taught a style he called Jeet Kune Do, or the Way of the Intercepting Fist. Lee was said to have deeply loved being an instructor and treated his students like a clan. He ultimately chose the world of cinema as a career to not unduly commercialize teaching.
Movies and TV Roles
Lee first gained a measure of celebrity with his role in the TV series The Green Hornet, which aired over 26 episodes from 1966 to 1967. In the show, based on a 1930s radio program, the wiry Lee displayed his acrobatic and theatrical fighting style as the Hornet’s sidekick, Kato. He went on to make guest appearances in other TV shows such as Ironside, Longstreet, and the popular Batman series starring Adam West.
One of Lee’s early movie roles as an adult came in 1969’s Marlowe, starring James Garner as the notable detective created by author Raymond Chandler. The screenwriter for the film, Stirling Silliphant, was one of Lee’s martial arts students. Other Lee students included James Coburn, Steve McQueen, and Garner.
The former martial arts teacher remained devoted to a variety of workouts and physical training activities. Lee stood just over 5 feet, 7 inches tall and is said to have weighed around 145 pounds during the height of his acting career. After suffering a significant back injury, Lee spent part of his gradual recovery writing. He came up with the idea that became the basis for the Buddhist monk TV series Kung Fu; however, David Carradine got the starring role initially slated for Lee due to the belief that an Asian actor wouldn’t pull in audiences as the lead.
Watch two of Bruce Lee’s biggest movies: Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon
Confronted with a shortage of meaty roles and the prevalence of stereotypes regarding Asian performers, Lee left Los Angeles for Hong Kong in the summer of 1971. His family eventually joined him. In Hong Kong, the actor promptly signed a two-movie contract.
The first film was The Big Boss, known as Fists of Fury in the United States. The 1971 release featured Lee as a heroic factory worker who has sworn off fighting yet enters combat to confront a murderous drug smuggling operation. Combining his smooth Jeet Kune Do athleticism with the high-energy theatrics of his performance in The Green Hornet, Lee was the charismatic center of the movie, which set new box-office records in Hong Kong.
Those records were broken by Lee’s next film, Fist of Fury, also known as The Chinese Connection (1972). But like The Big Boss, the movie received poor reviews from some critics upon its stateside release.
Enter the Dragon
By the end of 1972, Lee was a major movie star in Asia. He cofounded his own company, Concord Productions, with Raymond Chow and released his first directorial feature, Return of the Dragon. Although he hadn’t yet gained stardom in America, he was on the brink with his first major Hollywood project, Enter the Dragon. During filming, Lee is estimated to have weighed around 125 pounds.
The 1973 movie was ultimately Lee’s final movie. With its posthumous release that August, Enter the Dragon cemented Lee’s status as a film icon. According to the American Film Institute, the movie had a budget of only $850,000 but has gone on to gross more than $2 billion worldwide since its release, with totals adjusted for inflation. Enter the Dragon influenced future action movies and fighting video games and was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2004.
Lee appeared onscreen one final time in 1978 with the completion of Game of Death, a project he began producing and directing years prior in 1972. The movie notably features a fight scene with Lee and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
How Did Bruce Lee Die?
On July 20, 1973, just one month before the premiere of Enter the Dragon, Lee died in Hong Kong at age 32. The official cause of his utterly unexpected death was a cerebral edema. According to an autopsy, the fatal brain swelling was caused by a strange reaction to a prescription painkiller Lee was reportedly taking for a back injury.
Controversy surrounded Lee’s death from the beginning, as some claimed he had been murdered. There was also the belief that he might have been cursed, a conclusion driven by Lee’s obsession that he would have an early death.
In any case, Lee has left a lasting legacy. His Hollywood breakthrough helped pave the way for broader depictions of Asian Americans in cinema and created a whole new breed of action hero—a mold filled with varying degrees of success by actors like Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Jackie Chan. He continues to be a revered martial artist, too. His daughter, Shannon, was largely involved in the 2011 update of her father’s instructional guide, Tao of Jeet Kune Do.
Lee’s life has been depicted in the 1993 movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, based on his wife Linda’s 1975 memoir, and the 2009 documentary How Bruce Lee Changed the World. In the summer of 2013, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum opened the “Bruce Lee: Kung Fu. Art. Life.” exhibition.
Grave
Lee’s funeral was held in Hong Kong. He is buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle beside his son, Brandon. According to the Seattle Times, Lee’s first martial arts school in the city, the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute, pays tribute to the action star yearly with a ceremony at his gravesite.
Wife and Children
While working as a martial arts teacher in Washington, Lee met Linda Emery. They married in 1964 and quickly added to their family with two children. Their son, Brandon Lee, was born in 1965, and their daughter, Shannon, arrived in 1969.
A young Brandon received training from his father at a young age, becoming a skilled martial artist and aspiring actor himself. He appeared in a handful of movies and TV shows throughout the late 1980s and starred opposite Dolph Lundgren in the 1991 buddy cop movie Showdown in Little Tokyo.
Like his father, Brandon died under tragic circumstances in March 1993 on the set of the 1994 film The Crow. Based on the comic book character of the same name, the movie featured Brandon in a starring role as Eric Draven, a musician resurrected by a supernatural crow who seeks to avenge the deaths of himself and his fiancée. While filming on March 31, 1993, he was accidentally killed after being shot in the abdomen with a prop gun that contained a bullet.
Shannon also trained in martial arts and became an actor and producer. She is the chairperson of the Bruce Lee Foundation, which works to “inspire people to embrace their uniqueness, discover their limitless potential, and help one another thrive” through camps and educational programs. She is also the CEO of the Bruce Lee Family Company, which manages control of Bruce’s name and image.
Now retired, Linda worked as a teacher and writer. She published two books about her late husband: the 1975 memoir Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew and 1989’s The Bruce Lee Story. She remarried twice after Lee’s death, eventually taking the name Linda Lee Cadwell, and is a founder of and advisor for the Bruce Lee Foundation.
Quotes
- The martial arts are ultimately self-knowledge. A punch or a kick is not to knock the hell out of the guy in front but to knock the hell out of your ego, your fear, or your hang-ups.
- The core of understanding lies in the individual mind and until that is touched, everything is uncertain and superficial. Truth can not be perceived until we come to fully understand our potential selves. After all, knowledge in the martial arts ultimately means self-knowledge.
- A fight is not won by one punch or kick. Either learn to endure or hire a bodyguard.
- There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there—you must go beyond them.
- I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
- The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.
- As you think, so shall you become.
- Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.
- If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
- There is no such thing as defeat until you admit so yourself, but not until then!
- Be a practical dreamer backed by action.
- Never waste energy on worries or negative thoughts, all problems are brought into existence—drop them.
- Real living is living for others.
- Learning is never cumulative; it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.
- The measure of the moral worth of a man is his happiness. The better the man, the more the happiness. Happiness is the synonym of well-being.
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