Bruce Lee Biography

Bruce Lee was born "Lee Jun Fan" november twenty-seventh 1940 in San Francisco, the son of Lee Hoi Chuen, a singer with the Cantonese Opera. Lee was born while his father was on tour in America.

Approximately one year later the family returned to Kowloon in Hong Kong. Growing up, Lee was a child actor who appeared in some 20 Chinese films including The Birth of Mankind (1946) and Fu gui fu yun (1948). He also studied dancing and trained in the Wing Chun style of kung fu.

At the age of 12 Bruce commenced attending La Salle College. Bruce was later beaten up by a street gang, which inspired him to take up martial arts training under the tutelage of "Sifu Yip Man" who schooled Bruce in Wing Chun kung fu for a period of approximately five years. This was the only formalized martial arts training ever undertaken by Lee. The talented & athletic Bruce also took up cha-cha dancing and at the age of 18 won a major dance championship in Hong Kong.

Lee moved to the United States at the age of 18 to receive his higher education, at the University of Washington, at Seattle and it was during this time that he began teaching martial arts. His Hong Kong and Hollywood-produced films elevated the traditional Hong Kong martial arts film to a new level of popularity and acclaim, sparking a surge of interest in Chinese martial arts in the West in the 1970s. The direction and tone of his films changed and influenced martial arts and martial arts films in the United States, Hong Kong and the rest of the world.

He is noted for his roles in five feature-length films: Lo Wei's The Big Boss (1971) and Fist of Fury (1972); Golden Harvest's Way of the Dragon (1972), directed and written by Lee; Golden Harvest and Warner Brothers' Enter the Dragon (1973) and The Game of Death (1978), both directed by Robert Clouse. Enter the Dragon was a box-office hit, eventually grossing more than $200 million. By the 1990s Enter the Dragon alone had earned more than $100 million, and Lee's influence could be found in the work of many Hollywood action heroes such as Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Jackie Chan. In 1993 Jason Scott Lee (no relation) appeared in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.

Lee became an iconic figure known throughout the world, particularly among the Chinese, as he portrayed Chinese nationalism in his films. He trained in the art of Wing Chun and later combined his other influences from various sources, in the spirit of his personal martial arts philosophy, which he dubbed Jeet Kune Do (The Way of the Intercepting Fist). Lee held dual nationality of Hong Kong and the United States.

In 1964, he married Linda Emery. Lee had two children with Linda, Brandon Lee (1965–93) and Shannon Lee (born 1969).

On July 20, 1973, Bruce had a minor headache. He was offered a prescription painkiller called Equagesic. After taking the pill, he went to lie down and lapsed into a coma. He was unable to be revived. Extensive forensic pathology was done to determine the cause of his death, which was not immediately apparent. A nine-day coroner’s inquest was held with testimony given by renowned pathologists flown in from around the world. The determination was that Bruce had a hypersensitive reaction to an ingredient in the pain medication that caused a swelling of the fluid on the brain, resulting in a coma and death.

The world lost a brilliant star and an evolved human being that day. His spirit remains an inspiration to untold numbers of people around the world.

In the final months of his short life, Bruce Lee wrote a personal essay, “In My Own Process” where he said, “Basically, I have always been a martial artist by choice and actor by profession. But, above all, I am hoping to actualize myself to be an artist of life along the way".

Lee wasn’t just a philosopher. He was also a poet and a translator of poetry. In the book, Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, John Little has published 21 original poems found within Lee’s personal archive. The poems, Little writes, are by American standards, rather dark — reflecting the deeper, less exposed recesses of the human psyche.