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Bruce Jun Fan Lee (李振藩, 李小龍; pinyin: Lǐ Zhènfān, Lǐ Xiăolóng; Cantonese:lei5 zan3 faan4,lei5 siu2 lung4 27 November 1940 – 20 July 1973) was an American-born Chinese Hong Kong martial artist, philosopher, instructor, martial arts actor, film director, screenwriter, and the founder of the Jeet Kune Do combat form. He is widely regarded as the most influential martial artist ever and a cultural icon. He was also the father of actor Brandon Lee and of actress Shannon Lee. His baby brother Robert was a musician and member of a popular Hong Kong beat band called The Thunderbirds and was something of a heart throb in Hong Kong in the 1960s .Lee was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in Hong Kong until his late teens. His Hong Kong and Hollywood-produced films elevated the traditional Hong Kong martial arts film to a new level of popularity and acclaim, and sparked the first major surge of interest in Chinese martial arts in the West. The direction and tone of his films changed and influenced martial arts and martial arts films in Hong Kong and the rest of the world as well.

Lee became a very iconic figure particularly to the Chinese, as he portrayed Chinese national pride and Chinese nationalism in his movies. He primarily practiced Chinese martial arts (Kung fu), particularly Wing Chun.

Early life

Bruce Lee was born in the Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese zodiac calendar, November 27 1940, at the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His father, Lee Hoi-Chuen (李海泉), was Chinese, and his Catholic mother, Grace Ho (何愛瑜), was of Chinese and German ancestry. Lee and his parents returned to Hong Kong when he was three months old. There is uncertainty about his citizenship; he was definitely a US citizen, and he may have been a Chinese citizen and a British subject as well (as Hong Kong people were British subjects during his childhood).

Lee Hoi Chuen was one of the leading Cantonese opera and film actors at the time, and he was embarking on a year-long Cantonese opera performing tour, with his family, amongst the US Chinese communities on the eve of the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong during the Second World War. As touring was an extremely profitable business back then, Lee had been touring the US for many years. Although a number of his peers decided to stay in the US this time to ride out the storm, Lee decided to go back to Hong Kong after his wife gave birth to their fourth child, due partially to homesickness and partially to a miscalculation on his part. Within months, Hong Kong was invaded (at the same time of the Pearl Harbor attack) and the Lees lived the ensuing 3 years and 8 months under brutal Japanese occupation. The Lee family managed to survive the war and actually had done reasonably well. Lee Hoi Chuen would resume his acting career and become an even bigger star during the ensuing rebuilding years.

Bruce Lee's mother Grace had an even more impressive background. She belonged to one of wealthiest and most powerful clans in Hong Kong, the Ho Tungs, Hong Kong's answer to the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. She was the niece of Sir Robert Ho Tung, patriarch of the clan. As such, the young Bruce Lee grew up in an affluent and privileged environment.

Education and family

After attending Tak Sun School (德信學校) located just a couple of blocks from his home at 218 Nathan Road, Kowloon, Lee entered the primary school division of the prestigious La Salle College (喇沙書院) in 1950 or 1952 (at the age of 12). In around 1956, due to poor academic performance (and/or possibly poor conduct as well), he was transferred to St. Francis Xavier's College (聖芳濟書院) (high school) where he would be mentored by Brother Edward, a Catholic monk (originally from Germany spending his entire adult life in China and then Hong Kong), teacher, and coach of the school boxing team. In the spring of 1959, Lee got into yet another street fight and the police were called. Confirming the police's fear that Bruce Lee's fighting opponent this time had organized crime background and a possible contract was out for his life, in April 1959 his parents decided to send him to the United States to meet up with his older sister Agnes (李秋鳳) who was already living with family friends in San Francisco.

At the age of 18 and a half, Lee returned to the U.S. as a native-born citizen, with $100 in his pocket and the titles of 1957 High School Boxing Champion and 1958 Crown Colony Cha Cha Champion (or second place) of Hong Kong At birth, the English name ''Bruce'' was thought to be given by the hospital attending physician, Dr. Mary Glover (or some said it was one of the nurses). Though Mrs. Lee did not initially plan on an English name for the child, she deemed it appropriate and would concur with Dr. Glover's addition. However, his American name was never used within his family until he enrolled in the primary school division of La Salle College (a Hong Kong high school) at the age of 10 or 12, To date, ''Enter the Dragon'' has grossed over $200 million worldwide. The movie sparked a brief fad in the martial-arts, epitomized in such songs as ''Kung Fu Fighting'' and such TV shows as ''Kung Fu''.

Robert Clouse, the director of ''Enter the Dragon'', and Raymond Chow attempted to finish Lee's incomplete film ''Game of Death'' which Lee was also set to write and direct. Lee had shot over 100 minutes of footage, including outtakes, for ''Game of Death'' before shooting was stopped to allow him to work on ''Enter the Dragon''. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a student of Lee, also appeared in the film, which culminates in Lee's character, Hai Tien (clad in the now-famous yellow track suit) taking on the 7'2'' basketball player in a climactic fight scene. In a controversial move, Robert Clouse finished the film using a look-alike and archive footage of Lee from his other films with a new storyline and cast, which was released in 1979. However, the cobbled-together film contained only fifteen minutes of actual footage of Lee (he had printed many unsuccessful takes) while the rest had a Lee look-alike, Tai Chung Kim, and Yuen Biao as stunt double. The unused footage Lee had filmed was recovered 22 years later and included in the documentary ''Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey''.

Challengers on the set

Urban legend says that Lee's celebrity and martial arts prowess often put him on a collision course with a number of street thugs, stunt men and martial arts extras, all hoping to make a name for themselves. Lee typically defused such challenges without fighting, but felt forced to respond to several persistent individuals. Oddly enough, even though most of these challenges came on movie sets with plenty of cameras around, no films seem to exist of these alleged fights. The following is a story that one of Bruce's longtime friends is reputed to have told:

Bob Wall, USPK karate champion and co-star in ''Enter the Dragon'', recalled a particularly serious encounter that transpired after a film extra kept taunting Lee. The extra yelled that Lee was ''a movie star, not a martial artist,'' that he ''wasn't much of a fighter.'' Lee answered his taunts by asking him to jump down from the wall he was sitting on. Bob Wall described Lee's opponent as ''a gang-banger type of guy from Hong Kong,'' a ''damned good martial artist,'' and observed that he was fast, strong, and bigger than Bruce.

Wall supposedly recalled the confrontation in detail:

{{quotation|'This kid was good. He was strong and fast, and he was really trying to punch Bruce's brains in. But Bruce just methodically took him apart.'

'Bruce kept moving so well, this kid couldn't touch him...Then all of a sudden, Bruce got him and rammed his ass with the wall and swept him up, proceeding to drop him and plant his knee into his opponent's chest, locked his arm out straight, and nailed him in the face repeatedly.'}}

After his victory, Lee gave his opponent lessons on how to improve his fighting skills. His opponent, now impressed, would later say to Lee, ''You really are a master of the martial arts.'' and performed repetitions of two-finger pushups (using the thumb and the index finger) with feet at approximately a shoulder-width apart. In the same Long Beach event he also performed the 'One inch punch'. The description of which is as follows: Lee stood upright, his right foot forward with knees bent slightly, in front of a standing, stationary partner. Lee's right arm was partly extended and his right fist approximately an inch away from the partner's chest. Without retracting his right arm, Lee then forcibly delivered the punch to his partner while largely maintaining his posture, sending the partner backwards and falling into a chair said to be placed behind the partner to prevent injury, though the force of gravity caused his partner to soon fall onto the floor.

His volunteer was Bob Baker of Stockton, California. ''I told Bruce not to do this type of demonstration again'', he recalled. ''When he punched me that last time, I had to stay home from work because the pain in my chest was unbearable.''

Guest at 1967 Long Beach International Karate Championships

Lee also appeared at the 1967 Long Beach International Karate Championships Lee did say, with his usual bravado, he could have beaten anybody in the world in a real fight; however there is little evidence to support his claim.

Dan Inosanto said, ''there's no doubt in my mind that if Bruce Lee had gone into pro boxing, he could easily have ranked in the top three in the lightweight division or junior-welterweight division.''

Lee had boxed in the 1959 Boxing Championships held between twelve Hong Kong schools, a tournament in which he beat the three-time champion from another school (a French boy).

Physical fitness and nutrition

Physical fitness

Lee felt that many martial artists of his day did not spend enough time on physical conditioning. Bruce included all elements of total fitness—muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance, and flexibility. He tried traditional bodybuilding techniques to build bulky muscles or mass. However, Lee was careful to admonish that mental and spiritual preparation was fundamental to the success of physical training in martial arts skills. In his book ''The Tao of Jeet Kune Do'', he wrote

The weight training program that Lee used during a stay in Hong Kong in 1965 at only 24 years old placed heavy emphasis on his arms. At that time he could perform bicep curls at a weight of 70 to 80lbs for three sets of eight repetitions, along with other forms of exercises, such as squats, push-ups, reverse curls, concentration curls, French presses, and both wrist curls and reverse wrist curls. The repetitions he performed were 6 to 12 reps (at the time). While this method of training targeted his fast and slow twitch muscles, it later resulted in weight gain or muscle mass, placing Bruce a little over 160 lbs. Lee was documented as having well over 2,500 books in his own personal library, and eventually concluded that ''A stronger muscle, is a bigger muscle'', a conclusion he later disputed. Bruce forever experimented with his training routines to maximize his physical abilities, and push the human body to its limits. He employed many different routines and exercises including skipping rope, which served his training and bodybuilding purposes effectively.

Lee believed that the abdominal muscles were one of the most important muscle groups for a martial artist, since virtually ''every movement'' requires some degree of abdominal work. Perhaps more importantly, the ''abs'' are like a shell, protecting the ribs and vital organs.

He trained from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., including stomach, flexibility, and running, and from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. he would weight train and cycle. A typical exercise for Lee would be to run a distance of two to six miles in 15 to 45 minutes, in which he would vary speed in 3–5 minute intervals. Lee would ride the equivalent of 10 miles in 45 minutes on a stationary bike.

Lee would sometimes exercise with the jump rope and put in 800 jumps after cycling.

Lee would also do exercises to toughen the skin on his fists, including thrusting his hands into buckets of harsh rocks and gravel. He would do over 500 repetitions of this on a given day.

Nutrition

According to Linda Lee, soon after he moved to the United States, Lee started to take nutrition seriously and developed an interest in health foods, high-protein drinks and vitamin and mineral supplements. He later concluded that in order to achieve a high-performance body, one could not fuel it with a diet of junk food, and with ''the wrong fuel'' one's body would perform sluggishly or sloppily. Lee also avoided baked goods, describing them as providing calories which did nothing for his body. Lee's diet included protein drinks; he always tried to consume one or two daily, but discontinued drinking them later on in his life.

Linda recalls Bruce's waist fluctuated between 26 and 28 inches. 'He also drank his own juice concoctions made from vegetables and fruits, apples, celery, carrots and so on, prepared in an electric blender', she said. He consumed green vegetables, fruits, and fresh milk every day. Bruce always preferred to eat Chinese or other Asian food because he loved the variety that it had. Bruce also became a heavy advocate of dietary supplements, including:

Physique

Lee's devotion to fitness gave him a body that was admired even by many of the top names in the bodybuilding community. Joe Weider, the founder of Mr. Olympia, described Lee's physique as ''the most defined body I've ever seen!'' Many top bodybuilding competitors have acknowledged Lee as a major influence in their careers, including Flex Wheeler, Shawn Ray, Rachel McLish, Lou Ferrigno, Lenda Murray, Dorian Yates and eight time Mr. Olympia Lee Haney. Arnold Schwarzenegger was also influenced by Lee, and said of his body:

A doctor who knew Lee once claimed that he was ''Muscled as a squirrel, and spirited as a horse'' and fitter than anyone he had ever seen. Lee was known to have collected over 140 books in his lifetime on bodybuilding, weight training, physiology and kinesiology. In order to better train specific muscle groups, he also created several original designs of his own training equipment and had his friend George Lee build them to his specifications.

Physical feats

Lee's phenomenal fitness meant he was capable of performing many exceptional physical feats. The following list includes some of the physical feats that are attributed to Bruce Lee although it is difficult to separate myth and urban legend from reality as many of these feats cannot be reliably documented from unbiased sources.

The following quotations reflect his fighting philosophy.

Awards and honors

On July 20 1973, Lee was in Hong Kong, due to have dinner with former James Bond star George Lazenby, with whom he intended to make a film. According to Lee's wife Linda, Lee met producer Raymond Chow at 2 p.m. at home to discuss the making of the movie ''Game of Death''. They worked until 4 p.m. and then drove together to the home of Lee's colleague Betty Ting, a Taiwanese actress. The three went over the script at Ting's home, and then Chow left to attend a dinner meeting.

A short time later, Lee complained of a headache, and Ting gave him an analgesic (painkiller), Equagesic, which contained both aspirin and a muscle relaxant. Around 7:30 p.m., he went to lie down for a nap. After Lee did not turn up for dinner, Chow came to the apartment but could not wake Lee up. A doctor was summoned, who spent ten minutes attempting to revive him before sending him by ambulance to Queen Elizabeth Hospital. However, Lee was dead by the time he reached the hospital. There was no visible external injury; however, his brain had swollen considerably, from 1,400 to 1,575 grams (a 13% increase). Lee was 32 years old. The only two substances found during the autopsy were Equagesic and trace amounts of cannabis. On October 15 2005, Chow stated in an interview that Lee died from a hypersensitivity to the muscle relaxant in Equagesic, which he described as a common ingredient in painkillers. When the doctors announced Lee's death officially, it was ruled a ''death by misadventure.''

Dr. Langford, who treated Lee for his first collapse, stated after his death that ''There's not a question in my mind that cannabis should have been named as the presumptive cause of death.'' He also believed that ''Equagesic was not at all involved in Bruce's first collapse.'' Professor R.D. Teare, who had overseen over 100,000 autopsies, was the top expert assigned to the Lee case. Dr. Teare declared that the presence of cannabis was mere coincidence, and added that it would be ''irresponsible and irrational'' to say that it might have triggered Lee's death. His conclusion was that the death was caused by an acute cerebral edema due to a reaction to compounds present in the prescription pain killing drug Equagesic. The preliminary opinion of another doctor, Peter Wu, was that the cause of death could have been a reaction to cannabis and Equagesic. However, Dr. Wu later backed off from this position:

The exact details of Lee's death are a subject of controversy.

His wife Linda returned to her home town of Seattle, and had him buried at lot 276 of Lakeview Cemetery. Pallbearers at his funeral on July 31 1973 included Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Chuck Norris, George Lazenby, Dan Inosanto, Taky Kimura, Peter Chin, and his brother, Robert Lee.

His iconic status and untimely demise fed many theories about his death, including murder involving the Triad society and a supposed curse on him and his family.

The curse theory was extended to his son Brandon Lee, also an actor, who died, 20 years after his father, in a bizarre accident while filming ''The Crow'' at the age of 28. It was released after his death and gained cult status, as had his father's last film. (''The Crow'' was completed with the use of computer-generated imagery and a stunt double in the few but critical scenes that remained to be filmed.) Brandon Lee was buried beside his father.

Media

Biographical films

In 1976, the Hong Kong film industry released ''Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth'', a largely fictional bio-film starring a Lee ''look-a-like,'' Ho Chung Tao, billed under the name Bruce Li.

In 1993 a biopic of Lee's life titled '' The Bruce Lee Story'' was released in which Lee was portrayed by Jason Scott Lee (no relation).

In April, 2007, Chinese state media announced that its national broadcaster had started filming a 50-part TV series on Lee titled ''The Legend of Bruce Lee'' to promote Chinese culture for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics..

On August 22 2007, Fruit Chan announced that he will make a film on Bruce Lee's early years, in Chinese, entitled ''Kowloon City'', produced by John Woo's producer Terence Chang, and set in 1950s Hong Kong.

Stanley Kwan stated that he was talking with Lee's family to make a biographical film on Lee. Kwan says that his film will look at how Bruce Lee was affected by the absence of his father and how he brought up his own son, Brandon Lee.

Books authored

Books about Bruce Lee, Jeet Kune Do or both

Bruce Lee documentaries