In the 1990s, he started to work with major Hollywood studios starring in Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire. In 1992, he landed his breakthrough role as Eric Draven in The Crow, based on the comic book of the same name which would be his final film. On March 31, 1993, only days away from completing the film, Lee died on the set of The Crow after the misfiring of a faulty prop gun which fired the tip of a dummy round accidentally lodged in the barrel. The film was completed by re-writing the script, CGI and stunt doubles and released one year after Lee's death to critical and commercial success and is now considered a cult classic.
Publication Information
- Bruce Lee : Brandon Lee
- Version : Bruce Lee
- Birth Name : Brandon Bruce Lee
- Age : 28
- Chinese :
- Traditional : 李國豪
- Simplified :
- Ancestry : Shunde, Guangdong, China
- Born : February 1, 1965
- Born Place : Oakland, California, United States
- Died : March 31, 1993 (Aged 28)
- Place : Wilmington, North Carolina, United States
- Resting place : Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington, United States
- Gender : Male
- Occupation :
- Actor
- Martial Artist
- Nationality : American
- Relative :
- Lee Hoi-chuen : Grandfather (1901-1965)
- Grace Ho : Grandmother (1907–1965)
- Bruce Lee : Father (1940–1973)
- Linda Lee Cadwell : Mother
- Shannon Lee : Sister
- Eliza Hutton : Partner
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. Brandon and Eliza planned to start a family immediately after they were married, but they had yet to conceive when he died. They were due to be married in Ensenada, Mexico, on April 17, 1993, a week after Lee was to complete filming on The Crow. 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. The Crow is dedicated to the couple. Brandon Lee was trained in Jeet Kune Do, Wing Chun, Muay Thai, and Shaolin Kung-Fu.
Early Life
Brandon was born on February 1, 1965, in Oakland, California, the son of martial artist and actor Bruce Lee and Linda Emery. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was three months old. The family lived in Hong Kong from 1971 to 1973, after which his mother moved back to the United States following the death of his father. He attended high school at Chadwick School, but was asked to leave for insubordination—more specifically, driving down the school's hill backwards.
He briefly attended Bishop Montgomery High School, located in Torrance from 1979 to 1980. He received his GED in 1983 at the age of 18, 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 Theatre and Film Institute 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 students, and best friends Dan Inosanto and Richard Bustillo.
1985 to 1989
Lee returned to Los Angeles in 1985, where he worked for Ruddy Morgan Productions as a script reader, doing an uncredited cameo in the action film Crime Killer starring George Pan Andreas. He was asked to audition for a role by casting director Lyn Stalmaster and got his first credited acting role in Kung Fu: The Movie, a feature-length television movie which was a follow-up to the 1970s television series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine. The film aired on ABC on February 1, 1986, which was also Lee's 21st birthday. In Kung Fu: The Movie, Lee played Chung Wang, the suspected son of Kwai Chang Caine. Lee's real-life father was originally considered to play the leading role in the Kung Fu TV series. Lee got his first leading film role later that year in the Hong Kong action crime thriller Legacy of Rage in which he starred alongside Michael Wong, Regina Kent and Mang Hoi. It also featured a cameo appearance by Bolo Yeung who appeared in his father's film, Enter the Dragon. Made in Cantonese and directed by Ronny Yu, it was the only film Lee made in Hong Kong. He was also nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award for Best New Performer in this role.
1991 to 1993
In 1991, he starred opposite Dolph Lundgren in the buddy cop action film Showdown in Little Tokyo. This marked his first studio film and American film debut. Lee signed a multi-picture deal with 20th Century Fox in 1991. In the film Lee plays Johnny Murata, a Japanese American cop who is partnered with sergeant named Kenner working in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. The two are sent to infiltrate the operations of new Japanese drug gang named the Iron Claw manufacturing a lethal methamphetamine while using a local brewery and nightclub as a front for the operation. Along the way, Kenner discovers that Yoshida, the head of the drug gang, is a member of the Yakuza who killed his parents in front of him as a young boy in Japan and the case becomes violent and personal.
In 1992, he had his first starring role in the action thriller Rapid Fire, directed by Dwight H. Little, co-starring Powers Boothe and Nick Mancuso. Lee plays a student who witnesses a murder and is put under a witness protection programme. Lee was reportedly in talks with 20th Century Fox about making two more sequels. Many of the fight scenes were orchestrated by Lee, which contain elements of his father Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do fighting style. Also that year, Lee landed the lead role in the film adaptation of The Crow, a popular underground comic book. The film tells the story of Eric Draven, a rock musician who is revived from the dead by a supernatural crow to avenge his own death as well as the rape and murder of his fiancée by a dangerous gang in his city.
Death
On March 31, 1993, Lee was filming a scene in The Crow where his character is shot and killed by thugs. In the scene, Lee's character walks into his apartment and discovers his fiancée being beaten and raped by thugs. Actor Michael Massee's character fires a .44 Magnum revolver at Lee as he walks into the room. A previous scene using the same gun had called for inert dummy cartridges fitted with bullets to be loaded in the revolver for a close-up scene; for film scenes that utilize a revolver and do not require the gun to actually be fired, dummy cartridges provide the realistic appearance of actual rounds.
Instead of purchasing commercial dummy cartridges, the film's prop crew created their own by pulling the bullets from live rounds, dumping the powder charge then reinserting the bullets. However, they unknowingly or unintentionally left the live primer in place at the rear of the cartridge. At some point during filming, the revolver was apparently discharged with one of these improperly-deactivated cartridges in the chamber, setting off the primer with enough force to drive the bullet partway into the barrel, where it became stuck . The prop crew either failed to notice this or failed to recognize the significance of this issue.
Legacy
After Lee's death, his fiancée Eliza Hutton and his mother supported director Alex Proyas' decision to complete The Crow. 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 remained to be done. To complete the film, stunt double Chad Stahelski, who was a friend of Lee's at Inosanto Academy, served as a stand-in; special effects were used to give him Lee's face. Another stunt double, Jeff Cadiente, was also used to complete Lee's unfinished scenes for the movie.
The Crow was released in May 1994 and became a box office hit, grossing over $50 million in the U.S., and retaining a loyal cult following many years after its release. Lee's portrayal of Eric Draven posthumously earned him an MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Male Performance and a Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Actor. The film is dedicated to Brandon and Eliza. In an interview just prior to his death, Lee 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 don't 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 can't even 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...
- 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 more 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.
Film
- 1985 - Crime Killer Gangster - Uncredited
- 1986 - Legacy of Rage - Brandon Ma
- 1989 - Laser Mission - Michael Gold
- 1991 - Showdown in Little Tokyo - Johnny Murata
- 1992 - Rapid Fire - Jake Lo
- 1994 - The Crow - Eric Draven/The Crow
- 1986 - Kung Fu : The Movie - Chung Wang
- 1987 - Kung Fu : The Next Generation - Johnny Caine
- 1988 - Ohara - Kenji
- 1986 - Hong Kong Film Awards - Best New Performer - Legacy of Rage - Nominated
- 1994 - Fangoria Chainsaw Awards - Best Actor - The Crow - Won MTV Movie & TV Awards
- With son Brandon in 1966
- The grave site of Brandon Lee and his father, Bruce Lee
- Bruce Lee
- Linda Lee Cadwell Jun Fan Gung Fu
- Jeet Kune Do
- Bruce Lee Official Website
- Bruce Lee Foundation
- Lee Hoi Chuen
- Brandon Lee
- Shannon Lee
