The transcript below is from the video “Bruce Lee Transformation ⭐ Journey From Street Tough to Cinema Legend” by Top Famous Tube.

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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. Lee received the name “Bruce” from a nurse at his birthing hospital and his family never used the name during his preschool years. The future star appeared in his first film at the age of three months when he served as the stand-in for an American baby in Golden Gate Girl (1941).

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In the early 1940s, the Lees moved back to Hong Kong, then occupied by the Japanese. Apparently, a natural in front of the camera, 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 Gongfu 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.

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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 a 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.

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Lee gained a measure of celebrity with his role in the television series The Green Hornet, which aired in 26 episodes from 1966 to 1967. In the show, which was based on a 1930s radio program, the wiry Lee displayed his acrobatic and theatrical fighting style as the hornets sidekick Kato. He went on to make guest appearances in such TV shows as Ironside and Long Street while a notable film role came in 1969’s Marlow. Lee signed a two film contract, eventually bringing his family over to hong kong as well. The Big Boss, aka Fist of Fury in the U.S, was released in 1971 and featured Lee as the factory worker hero 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 film, which set new box office records in Hong Kong. Those records were broken by Lee’s next film Fist of Fury aka The Chinese Connection (1972), which like The Big Boss received poor reviews from some critics upon the U.S release.

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By the end of 1972, Lee was a major movie star in Asia. He had co-founded with Raymond Chow his own company, conquered 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 on July 20, 1973, just one month before the premiere of Enter the Dragon, Lee died in Hong Kong, China at the age of 32.

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The official cause of a sudden and utterly unexpected death was a brain enema 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.