Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee Bio

Bruce Lee completed highschool in Edison, Washington, and afterward enrolled as a philosophy major at the University of Washington. He also acquired a job instructing the Wing Chun style of martial arts that he had learned in Hong Kong to his fellow students and others. Through his teaching, Bruce Lee met Linda Emery, whom he married in 1964. By that time, Lee had opened up his own martial arts acadamyl in Seattle. He and Linda soon moved to CA, where Bruce Lee opened two more schools in L.A and Oakland. At his schools, Bruce Lee instructed mostly a style he called Jeet Kune Do (The Way of THe Open Fist.

Lee earned a measure of fame with his character in the television series The Green Hornet, which was broadcast from 1966 to 1967. In the show, which was based on a 1930s radio programme, the small, lean Bruce Lee displayed his gymnastic and theatrical fighting style as the Hornet’s truehearted sidekick, Kato. He went on to make guest appearances in such television show* as Ironside and Longstreet, while his most celebrated role came in the 1969 picture Marlowe, starring James Garner. Faced with the shortage of meaty roles and the prevalence of stereotypes affecting actors of Asian heritage, Bruce Lee left Los Angeles for Hong Kong in 1971, with his wife and 2 children (Brandon, born in 1965, and Shannon, born in 1967).

Back in the city where he grew up, Lee signed a two-film contract. Fists of Fury (its United States. title) was released in late 1971, featuring Bruce Lee as a vengeful fighter tracking the villains who had killed his kung-fu master. Melding his smooth Jeet Kune Do athleticism with the dynamic theatrics of his performance in The Green Hornet, Bruce Lee was the magnetic center of the movie, which set new box office records in Hong Kong. Those records were broken by Bruce Lee* next movie, The Chinese Connection (1972), which, like Fists of Fury, underwent poor reviews from critics when they were released in the United States

By the end of 1972, Bruce Lee was a major film star in Asia. He had founded his own production company, Concord Pictures, and had released his 1st directorial feature film, Way of the Dragon. Although he had not yet gained stardom in the U.S.A., he was poised on the threshold with his 2nd directorial feature and 1st major Hollywood project, Enter the Dragon.

On July 20, 1973, just one month before the premiere of Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong at the age of thirty-two. The official cause of his abrupt and absolutely unexpected death was a brain edema, found in an autopsy to have been induced by a strange chemical reaction to a prescription painkiller he was reportedly taking for a back injury. Controversy encircled Lee’s death from the offset, as some claimed he had been murdered. He was also widely thought to have been cursed, a conclusion driven by Bruce Lee* compulsion with his own early death. (The calamity of the so-called curse was deepened in 1993, when Brandon Lee was killed under likewise mysterious circumstances during the shooting of The Crow. The 28-year-old actor was fatally shot with a gun that purportedly contained blank shell* but for some reason had a live round wedged deep within its gun barrel.)

With the late release of Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee* status as a cinema icon was confirmed. The motion picture went on to gross a total of over $two hundred million, and Bruce Lee's legacy produced a whole new breed of action hero—a cast filled with varying degrees of success by such actors as Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Jackie Chan