The transcript below is from the video “The Sad Life And Last Goodbye Of Bruce Lee” by Celebrity Reporter.
Celebrity Reporter:
Bruce Lee was a revered martial artist actor and filmmaker known for movies like Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon and the technique Jeet Kune Do.
Who was Bruce Lee?
Iconic actor director and martial arts expert Bruce Lee 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 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 20th, 1973.
Celebrity Reporter:
Early Life
Bruce Lee was born Lee Joon Fan on November 27th, 1940 in San Francisco, California in both the hour and year of the dragon. His father Lee Hoi Chuwan a Hong Kong opera singer moved with his wife Grace Ho and three children to the United States in 1939. Hoi Chuwan’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 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. In the early 1940s the Lee’s 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 Gung Fu in Cantonese under the tutelage of Master Ip 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.
Celebrity Reporter:
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. 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 Long Street. 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 Sterling Siliphant 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 by 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. However David Carradine would get the starring role initially slated for Lee due to the belief that an Asian actor wouldn’t pull in audiences as the lead. Confronted with an earth of meaty roles and the prevalence of stereotypes regarding Asian performers Lee left Los Angeles for Hong Kong in the summer of 1971.
Celebrity Reporter:
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. 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 Long Street. 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 Sterling Siliphant 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 by 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. However David Carradine would get the starring role initially slated for Lee due to the belief that an Asian actor wouldn’t pull in audiences as the lead. Confronted with an earth of meaty roles and the prevalence of stereotypes regarding Asian performers Lee left Los Angeles for Hong Kong in the summer of 1971.
Celebrity Reporter:
Breaking box office records, Lee signed a two-film contract eventually bringing his family over to Hong Kong as well. The Big Boss aka. Fists 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. 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.
Celebrity Reporter:
Mysterious Death
On July 20th 1973, just one month before the premiere of Enter the Dragon 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 lodge deep within its barrel.
Celebrity Reporter:
Legacy
With the posthumous release of Enter the Dragon, Lee status as a film icon was confirmed. The film said to have a budget of one million dollars went on to gross more than 200 million dollars. 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.
