Bruce
Lee was a revered martial artist, actor and filmmaker known for movies
like Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon as well as the technique Jeet
Kune Do.
Early Life
Bruce
Lee was born on November 27, 1940, in San Francisco, California. He was
a child actor in Hong Kong who later returned to the U.S. and taught
martial arts. He starred in the TV series The Green Hornet (1966-67) and became a major box office draw in The Chinese Connection and Fists of Fury. Shortly before the release of his film Enter the Dragon, he died at the age of 32 on July 20, 1973.
Background and Early Career
Iconic
actor, director and martial-arts expert Bruce Lee was born Lee Jun Fan
on November 27, 1940, in San Francisco, California, in both the hour and
year of the Dragon. His father Lee Hoi Chuen, a Hong Kong opera singer,
moved with his wife, Grace Ho, and three children to the United States
in 1939; Hoi Chuen's fourth child, a son, was born while he was on tour
in San Francisco.
Lee received the name "Bruce" from a nurse at
his birthing hospital, and his family never used the name during his
pre-school years. The future star appeared in his first film at the age
of 3 months, when 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, then occupied by the
Japanese. Apparently a natural in front of the camera, Bruce Lee
appeared in roughly 20 films as a child actor, beginning in 1946. He
also studied dance, winning Hong Kong's cha-cha competition, and would
become known for his poetry as well.
As a teenager, he 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 U.S. to live with family friends outside Seattle, Washington,
initially taking up work as a dance instructor.
Devoted 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 style of martial arts that he had learned in
Hong Kong to his fellow students and others. Through his teaching, Lee
met Linda Emery, whom he married in 1964. By that time, Lee had opened
his own martial-arts school in Seattle.
He and Linda soon moved
to California, where Lee opened two more schools in Oakland and Los
Angeles. He taught mostly 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 clan, ultimately choosing the
world of cinema as a career so as not to unduly commercialize teaching.
Lee and Linda also expanded their immediate family, having two children--Brandon, born in 1965, and Shannon, born in 1969.
Action Hero
Lee gained a measure of celebrity with his role in the television series The Green Hornet,
which aired in 26 episodes from 1966 to '67. In the show, which was
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 such TV shows as Ironside and Longstreet, while a notable film role came in 1969's Marlowe,
starring James Garner as the notable detective created by 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 himself.)
Lee, who was devoted
to a variety of workouts and physical training activities, suffered a
major back injury that he gradually recovered from, taking time for
self-care and writing. He also came up with the idea that became the
basis for the Buddhist monk TV series Kung Fu; yet David
Carradine would get the starring role initially slated for Lee due to
execs believing that an Asian actor wouldn't pull in audiences as the
lead. Confronted with a dearth of meaty roles and the prevalence of
stereotypes regarding Asian performers, Lee left Los Angeles for Hong
Kong in the summer of 1971.
Breaking Box Office Records
Lee signed a two-film contract, eventually bringing his family over to Hong Kong as well. Fists of Fury
was released in late 1971, featuring Lee as a vengeful fighter chasing
the villains who had killed his kung-fu master. 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 film, which set new box office records in Hong Kong.
Those records were broken by Lee's next film, The Chinese Connection (1972), which, like Fists of Fury, received poor reviews from critics when they were released in the U.S.
By
the end of 1972, Lee was a major movie star in Asia. He had co-founded
with Raymond Chow his own company, Concord Productions, and had released
his first directorial feature, Return of the Dragon. Though he had not yet gained stardom in America, he was poised on the brink with his first major Hollywood project, Enter the Dragon.
Mysterious Death
On July 20, 1973, just one month before the premiere of Enter the Dragon,
Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong, China, at the age of 32. The official
cause of his sudden and utterly unexpected death was a brain edema,
found in an autopsy to have been caused by a strange reaction to a
prescription painkiller he 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 with his own early death.
(More
rumors of the so-called curse circulated in 1993, when Brandon Lee was
killed under mysterious circumstances during the filming of The Crow.
The 28-year-old actor was fatally shot with a gun that supposedly
contained blanks but somehow had a live round lodged deep within its
barrel.)
Legacy
With the posthumous release of Enter the Dragon,
Lee's status as a film icon was confirmed. The film, said to have a
budget of $1 million, went on to gross more than $200 million. Lee's
legacy 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.
Lee's life has been depicted in the 1993 film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, based on the 1975 Linda Lee memoir Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, and the 2009 documentary How Bruce Lee Changed the World. And in the summer of 2013, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum opened the exhibition "Bruce Lee: Kung Fu. Art. Life."
Lee's
legacy as a premier martial artist continues to be revered as well.
Daughter Shannon Lee was largely involved in the 2011 update of her
father's instructional guide Tao of Jeet Kune Do.
Stephen
William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of
Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London,
but during the second world war, Oxford was considered a safer place to
have babies. When he was eight, his family moved to St. Albans, a town
about 20 miles north of London. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to
St. Albans School and then on to University College, Oxford; his
father's old college. Stephen wanted to study Mathematics, although his
father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at
University College, so he pursued Physics instead. After three years and
not very much work, he was awarded a first class honours degree in
Natural Science.
