Bruce Lee

Child actor in Hong Kong

Bruce Lee was born Lee Jun-fan on 27 November 1940 in San Francisco and grew up in Hong Kong. The son of a Cantonese opera actor, he appeared on screen as a baby in Golden Gate Girl (1941), then made around twenty films as a child and teenager under the stage name Lee Siu-lung, "Little Dragon". His first lead came in 1950 with The Kid, based on a comic strip. The Orphan (1960) closed that first career just before he left for the United States.

Martial arts training

In the mid-1950s he joined Ip Man's Wing Chun school, where he also trained with William Cheung and Wong Shun-leung. He boxed as well: in 1958 he won the Hong Kong schools boxing tournament, beating defending champion Gary Elms in the final. The following year he moved to Seattle. There he taught his first kung fu students, among them judoka Jesse Glover and Taky Kimura, opened the Lee Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute and enrolled at the University of Washington in 1961. A second school followed in Oakland with James Yimm Lee, then a third in Los Angeles.

In 1964 Ed Parker invited him to the Long Beach International Karate Championships, where his demonstration made his name: two-finger push-ups and the one-inch punch. He also attacked classical styles he saw as rigid. In 1967 he gave his method a name, Jeet Kune Do, "the way of the intercepting fist". The idea was to keep whatever works in a real fight, whatever its origin (Wing Chun, boxing, fencing, wrestling), and discard the rest. His Los Angeles students included Dan Inosanto, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Steve McQueen and James Coburn. His notes, published in 1975 as Tao of Jeet Kune Do, are still a standard reference.

Film career

Long Beach led to an audition with producer William Dozier. Lee played Kato in The Green Hornet (26 episodes, 1966-1967) and took supporting parts, including Winslow Wong in Marlowe (1969), where he kicks the detective's office to pieces. Hollywood offered no lead role, so in 1971 he signed with Raymond Chow's Golden Harvest in Hong Kong.

The Big Boss (1971), directed by Lo Wei, set a Hong Kong box office record. Fist of Fury (1972), with Lee as Chen Zhen, a pupil of Huo Yuanjia who takes on a Japanese school in Shanghai, broke it. For Way of the Dragon (1972) he wrote, directed and produced through his company Concord, and shot his duel with Chuck Norris in Rome's Colosseum. Enter the Dragon (1973), the first co-production between Warner Bros., Concord and Golden Harvest, opened in August 1973, a month after his death in Hong Kong on 20 July, aged 32. The fights he filmed in 1972 for Game of Death, climbing a pagoda in the yellow jumpsuit against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dan Inosanto and Ji Han-jae, were used in the version Robert Clouse completed for release in 1978.

Screen style and legacy

His fights broke with studio-bound swordplay films: short, fast strikes, high kicks, footwork borrowed from boxing, sharp cries, and shots wide enough to prove he performed every technique himself. He designed most of his own choreography and made the nunchaku famous in Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon.

His films set off the Western kung fu boom of the mid-1970s and packed martial arts schools. Jeet Kune Do is still taught, notably through Dan Inosanto's lineage. In 2004 UFC president Dana White called him the father of mixed martial arts for his rejection of closed styles. Time named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, and a statue stands in his honour on Hong Kong's Avenue of Stars. Jackie Chan, a stuntman on Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon, started out in his shadow.