 Brandon
Bruce Lee was an American actor of
Chinese, Swedish, and German descent.
Early Life
Brandon Lee was born in Oakland, California, to the legendary martial artist
actor Bruce Lee and his wife Linda Emery. The family moved to Los Angeles,
California when Brandon was three months old, but when offers for film roles
became limited for his father the family moved back to his father's childhood
home of Hong Kong in 1971; Bruce Lee made three films there between 1971 and
1973.
When Brandon was eight, his father died suddenly from a cerebral edema. After
her husband's death, Linda Lee moved the family (including daughter Shannon, who
was born in 1969) back to the United States. They lived briefly in his mother's
hometown of Seattle (where Bruce Lee is buried), and then in Los Angeles, where
Brandon grew up in the affluent area of Rolling Hills. According to his mother,
he was "a handful" - "either the teacher's pet, or the teacher's nightmare."
He attended high school at Chadwick School, but was expelled for insubordination
three months before graduating. He received his GED in 1983, and then went to
Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts where he majored in theatre. After one
year, Lee moved to New York City where he took acting lessons at the famed Lee
Strasberg Academy and was part of the American New Theatre group founded by his
friend John Lee Hancock.
Career
Early Work
In 1986, Lee got his first movie role in the Hong Kong action thriller Legacy of
Rage in which he starred with Michael Wong and Bolo Yeung, who also appeared in
his father's last film, Enter the Dragon. The film was made in Cantonese, and
directed by Ronny Yu. It was also the only film Lee made in Hong Kong. Regarding
the pressures of being the son of a legendary father, Brandon said, "You only
have the burdens on you that you choose to put there."
Kung Fu Sequels
Lee then returned to Los Angeles, where he worked for Ruddy Morgan Productions
as a script reader. He was asked to audition for a role by casting director Lyn
Stalmaster. The project was Kung Fu: The Movie, which was to be a feature-length
television movie that was a follow-up to the television series Kung Fu.
Later Work
 Lee then had a guest appearance in the short-lived American television series
Ohara (1988) as Kenji, son of title character Lt. Ohara (played by Pat Morita).
1990 saw the release of his first English language B-grade film, Laser Mission,
which was filmed cheaply in South Africa in 1988. In 1991, he starred opposite
Dolph Lundgren in Showdown in Little Tokyo, his first studio film and American
debut.
Lee signed a multi-picture deal with 20th Century Fox in 1991. He then had his
first starring role in Rapid Fire, and was scheduled to do two more films for
them. Screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh wrote a script entitled Simon Says that
was originally developed for Lee, but was later used as the blueprint for the
movie Die Hard With a Vengeance.
In 1992, Lee landed the lead role of Eric Draven, an undead vigilante avenging
his murder, and that of his fiancée, in the movie adaptation of The Crow, a
popular underground comic book. About his character Lee said, "He has something
he has to do and he is forced to put aside his own pain long enough to go do
it".
It would be Brandon Lee's last film. Filming began on February 1, 1993, which
was his 28th birthday.
Death
On March 31, 1993, the 52nd day of a 60-day shooting schedule for The Crow, the
scene being filmed involved Lee's character walking into his apartment and
discovering his girlfriend being raped by thugs. This would subsequently lead to
Eric being brutally killed, along with his girlfriend, by the thugs. Actor
Michael Massee, who played one of the villains named Funboy in the movie, was
supposed to fire a gun at Lee as he walked into his apartment with groceries.
Because the movie's second unit team were running behind schedule, it was
decided that dummy cartridges - bullets that outwardly appear to be functional,
but contain no gunpowder - would be made from real cartridges, which had been
brought to the set earlier in production. Bruce Merlin, an effects technician,
dismantled the live cartridges by removing the bullets, emptying out the
gunpowder, detonating the primer and reinserting the bullets. This rendered the
cartridges inoperative but realistic in appearance. Merlin and his prop master,
Daniel Kuttner, took initiative to create some blanks by removing live
cartridges and replacing the gunpowder with firework powder; the bullets were
not reinserted.
Later, a cartridge with only a primer and a bullet was fired in a pistol; this
caused the bullet to lodge in the forcing cone of the revolver. When the first
unit used this gun to shoot the death scene, the chamber was loaded with blanks
which had no bullets. However, there was still the bullet in the barrel, which
was propelled out by the blank cartridge's explosion. Consequently, Lee was shot
and severely wounded as cameras were rolling at the Carolco Studios in
Wilmington, North Carolina. Seconds later, director Alex Proyas stopped the
scene, but Lee remained on the floor. Stuntman (and Lee's friend) Jeff Imada ran
over to him with a paramedic, and discovered a thin slit an inch below to the
right of his navel. By this time, Lee had slipped into unconsciousness and was
rushed to the hospital where doctors discovered that a bullet was the cause of
the damage. They fought for five hours in an attempt to save him, but at 1:04 PM
he was pronounced dead at the age of 28.
His funeral was held several days later; he was buried next to his father in
Lake View Cemetery, Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington. The following day, a
memorial service was held in Los Angeles, California, at the home of actress
Polly Bergen; over 200 people attended, including David Carradine, David
Hasselhoff and Kiefer Sutherland. Jeff Imada, Lee's closest friend, and Eliza
('Lisa') Hutton, Lee's intended bride, were so shocked they couldn't speak,
while his mother, Linda Emery, reminded everyone, "Brandon would want this to be
a happy occasion; we are here to celebrate his life."
The footage of the incident was soon destroyed without ever being developed.
The shooting was ruled as an accident, although many fans suspected foul play.
(Bruce Lee's own death in 1973, at the age of 32, apparently from a reaction to
an analgesic he had taken, was also considered suspicious.)
Bruce Lee's
character in the 1978 version of Game of Death is shot in a similar fashion. His
character, like that of his son in The Crow, returns ('from the dead', although
the character did not actually die) to get revenge on his adversaries.
Some fans also suspected that Lee's death was all part of a curse on the Lee
family because Lee had died nearly 20 years after his father; both deaths were
very mysterious, and Brandon would also die before the release of a film that
would catapult him to stardom. After his death, his mother and fiancée Eliza
Hutton supported director Alex Proyas' decision to complete the movie. At the
time of Lee's death, only eight days were left before completion of the movie. A
majority of the film had already been completed with Lee and only a few scenes
had to be done.
To complete the film, a stunt double (Chad Stahelski), who was a friend of Lee's
at the famed Inosanto Academy, and special effects were used to add Lee's face
onto the stunt double. These scenes were filmed after Lee's death:
Eric Draven's death in flashbacks (this was the scene Brandon was filming at the
time he had died); a scene with Eric walking into his apartment after returning
from the dead was digitally composited from a scene of Lee walking into an
alleyway with raindrops added (the rest of the scenes in the apartment were all
done with the double); Lee's face was digitally composited onto the stunt double
when Eric puts on make-up in front of a mirror and walks towards the broken down
window of his apartment; When Sarah (Rochelle Davis) visits Eric, his face is
not seen as it is actually the stunt double. The Crow was finally released in
May 1994 and became a box office smash. The film is dedicated to Lee and his
fiancée Eliza Hutton. They were to have been married on April 17, 1993, in
Mexico. Lee is survived by his mother and sister.
In an interview just prior to his death, Brandon quoted a passage from Paul
Bowles' book The Sheltering Sky that he had chosen for his wedding invitations;
it is now inscribed on his tombstone:
"Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an
inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times,
and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain
afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being
that you cannot conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times
more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon
rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..."
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