Bruce Lee

Born in San Francisco

Bruce Lee was born in the Year of the Dragon and the Hour of the Dragon. He was born on November 27, 1940 at the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco while his father was touring with the Cantonese opera company. Little Lee Jun-fan was already familiar with film sets before turning one, since he appeared in his father's arms in movies of the era.

At eighteen, he returned to the United States with just one hundred dollars and a Hong Kong cha-cha champion title. He worked washing dishes in restaurants and sleeping in attics while studying philosophy at the University of Washington. But his real obsession was perfecting the Wing Chun he had learned from master Ip Man.

He began teaching martial arts in public parks and garages in Seattle. This broke the unwritten rules of Chinese American communities in California. Traditional masters didn't accept Bruce teaching ancient techniques to Westerners or African Americans.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1964, he performed an exhibition in Long Beach that left television producers speechless. His physical speed was so extreme that the 35mm cameras of the time couldn't capture his movements clearly. That's how he landed the role of Kato in the series The Green Hornet, which paid him 400 dollars a week.

Hollywood's Rejection and a Triumphant Return

The series lasted only one season. Hollywood saw him as an exotic supporting actor rather than a lead capable of carrying a big-budget production. Bruce Lee tried to sell the idea of a series about a Shaolin monk in the Old West, but the studios preferred to give the role to David Carradine.

Frustrated by the industry's systemic racism, he decided to return to Hong Kong in 1971. Upon landing, he discovered he was a superstar thanks to TV reruns of his American work. Raymond Chow signed him to Golden Harvest with a contract worth 15,000 dollars for two films.

The first was The Big Boss.

The Hong Kong premiere was a social sensation. Bruce Lee didn't just fight in front of the camera. He choreographed every impact and demanded a realism that the action cinema of the era knew nothing about. In Fist of Fury from 1972, he introduced the use of nunchakus and a physical intensity that bordered on the animalistic.

In 1972, he founded his own production company, Concord Production, to have full control over his projects. That's how The Way of the Dragon came to be. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film himself. The final duel against Chuck Norris at the Colosseum in Rome was filmed without official permits and became the absolute technical benchmark for the genre.

The Warner Contract and the End in 1973

Warner Bros finally relented and offered him the first major joint project between East and West. Filming Enter the Dragon in 1973 was a logistical mess, with real fights breaking out among the extras and constant translation problems between the crew.

Bruce Lee lost nearly ten kilos during filming from the stress and physical demands. He had an obsessive fixation on the technical perfection of every shot and on the liquid diet he followed to keep his body fat percentage at a minimum. His view of the human body was that of an absolutely precise machine.

He didn't live to see the release.

He died on July 20, 1973 in Hong Kong from cerebral edema caused by an allergic reaction to a painkiller called Equagesic. He was thirty-two years old. The worldwide box office of his last film topped $(200) million on an initial budget of just 850,000. His body rests in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle under a red granite headstone.