Brandon Bruce Lee (February 1, 1965 – March 31, 1993) was an American actor. He was the son of the late legendary martial arts film star Bruce Lee and Linda Lee Cadwell and the brother of actress Shannon Lee.
Early life
Brandon Lee was born in Oakland, California, son of the legendary martial artist actor Bruce Lee. Only a week after his birth, his grandfather Lee Hoi-Chuen died. The family moved to Los Angeles, California when he was three months old. When offers for film roles became limited for his father the family moved back to Hong Kong in 1971; Bruce Lee made three films there between 1971 and 1973.
When Lee was eight, his father died suddenly from cerebral edema. After her husband’s death, Linda Lee moved the family (including daughter Shannon Lee (b.1969)) back to the United States. They lived briefly in his mother’s hometown of Seattle, Washington, and then in Los Angeles, where Lee grew up in the affluent area of Rolling Hills.
He attended high school at Chadwick School, but was asked to leave for insubordination, more specifically driving down the school’s hill backwards, three months before graduating. He received his GED in 1983, and then went to Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts where he majored in theater. 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. The bulk of Lee’s martial arts instruction came from his father’s top student, Dan Inosanto.
Career
Lee returned to Los Angeles in 1985, where he worked for Ruddy Morgan Productions as a script reader. He was asked to audition for a role by casting director Lyn Stalmaster and then made his acting debut in Kung Fu: The Movie, a feature-length television movie and a follow-up to the 1970s television series Kung Fu. The film aired on ABC on February 1, 1986 which was also Lee’s 21 birthday.
In Kung Fu: The Movie, Lee played Chung Wang, the suspected son of Kwai Chang Caine (played by David Carradine). This seemed ironic at the time as Brandon’s father Bruce Lee was originally intended to have played the leading role in the Kung Fu TV series as he had also come up with the original concept for the TV series, but in the end he was turned down for playing the lead in favor of Carradine.
Lee got his first major film role in the Hong Kong action thriller Legacy of Rage in which he starred alongside Michael Wong. This film also had a cameo by 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 the only film Lee made in Hong Kong.
In 1987, Lee starred in the unsuccessful television pilot Kung Fu: The Next Generation which was another follow-up to the “Kung Fu” television series which aired on the CBS Summer Playhouse.In this film the story moved to the present day, and centered on the story of Johnny Caine (played by Lee), who is the great-grandson of Kwai Chang Caine.
Lee then made a guest appearance in an episode of the short-lived American television series Ohara in 1988 playing a villainous character named Kenji, opposite Pat Morita who played the title role. In the summer of 1988, Lee also started filming his first English-language B-grade action film, Laser Mission, which was filmed cheaply in South Africa, and was eventually released on the European market in 1990.
In 1991, he starred opposite Dolph Lundgren in the buddy cop action film Showdown in Little Tokyo. This was marked as his first studio film and American film debut. Lee signed a multi-picture deal with 20th Century Fox in 1991. He had his first starring role in the action thriller Rapid Fire in 1992, and was scheduled to do two more films for them. In August of that year, Bruce Lee biographer John Little once asked Brandon Lee what his philosophy in life was, and he replied, “Eat—or die!” Brandon later spoke of the martial arts and self-knowledge:
“Well, I would say this: when you move down the road towards mastery of the martial arts—and you know, you are constantly moving down that road—you end up coming up against these barriers inside yourself that will attempt to stop you from continuing to pursue the mastery of the martial arts. And these barriers are such things as when you come up against your own limitations, when you come up against the limitations of your will, your ability, your natural ability, your courage, how you deal with success—and failure as well, for that matter. And as you overcome each one of these barriers, you end up learning something about yourself. And sometimes, the things you learn about yourself can, to the individual, seem to convey a certain spiritual sense along with them.
…It’s funny, every time you come up against a true barrier to your progress, you are a child again. And it’s a very interesting experience to be reduced, once again, to the level of knowing nothing about what you’re doing. I think there’s a lot of room for learning and growth when that happens—if you face it head on and don’t choose to say, “Ah, screw that! I’m going to do something else!”
We reduce ourselves at a certain point in our lives to kind of solely pursuing things that we already know how to do. You know, because you don’t want to have that experience of not knowing what you’re doing and being an amateur again. And I think that’s rather unfortunate. It’s so much interesting and usually illuminating to put yourself in a situation where you don’t know what’s going to happen, than to do something again that you already know essentially what the outcome will be within three or four points either way.”
In 1992, Lee landed the lead role of Eric Draven, in the movie adaptation of The Crow, a popular underground comic book. About his character, an undead rock musician avenging his and his fiancée’s murder, 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 Lee’s last film. Filming began on February 1, 1993, which was his 28th birthday.
While it’s wildly rumored the Wachowski Brothers initially planned for Brandon Lee to be the star of The Matrix Movies, there is no evidence to support this, and the script for The Matrix hadn’t even been completed by the time of Lee’s death.
Personal life
In 1990, Lee met Eliza “Lisa” Hutton at director Renny Harlin’s office, located at the headquarters of 20th Century Fox. Hutton was working as a personal assistant to Harlin, and later became a story editor for Stillwater Productions, in 1991. Lee and Hutton moved in together in early 1991 and became engaged in October 1992.
They were due to be married in Mexico on April 17, 1993, a week after Lee was to complete filming on The Crow - just 17 days after he died. At the time of Lee’s death, Hutton was working as a casting assistant and was on set of The Crow so much that she was later credited with being Lee’s on-set assistant. After his death, Hutton petitioned to have gun safety regulations tightened on film sets.
