Brandon Lee
From MartialTalk Online Martial Arts Encyclopedia Project
Brandon Bruce Lee (李國豪, pinyin: Lǐ Guóháo February 1, 1965–March 31, 1993) was an American actor, the son of martial artist and actor Bruce Lee and his wife Linda Emery.
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Early life
Brandon Lee was born in Oakland, California to martial artist and actor Bruce Lee and his American wife Linda Emery. The family moved to Los Angeles, California when Brandon was three months old. When offers for film roles became limited for his father, the family moved to his father's childhood home of Hong Kong in 1971, where Bruce Lee made several films from 1971 - 1973.
When he was 8 years old, Brandon's father Bruce died from a cerebral edema. After his father's death, his mother moved Brandon and his younger sister Shannon (born in 1969) back to the United States. They lived shortly in his mother's hometown of Seattle (where Bruce Lee is buried) and then to Los Angeles, where Brandon grew up in the affluent area of Rolling Hills.
He attended high school at Chadwick School, but was kicked out three months shy of graduating for insubordination. He received his GED in 1983 and then went to Emerson College in Boston, MA 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.
Movie career
Early work
Lee returned to Hong Kong in 1985, where he worked for Ruddy Morgan Productions as a script reader. His first movie role was in Legacy of Rage (1985) in which he starred with Michael Wong and Bolo Yeung who also appeared in his father Bruce's last film Enter the Dragon.
Kung Fu sequels
According to Herbie Pilato on pp. 32 and 157 of his text, The Kung Fu Book of Caine, David Carradine (who at the time the show was being cast in 1971/1972, was the better known actor) was chosen for the lead role over Brandon's father, Bruce Lee, for the television series Kung Fu due to Carradine's abilities as a dancer (it was only after the series began that Lee found fame with Enter the Dragon).
Years later, Brandon would become a pivotal figure in two sequels to the series. In the first, Kung Fu:The Movie (1986) Caine (Carradine) is forced to fight his hitherto unknown son, Chung Wang (Lee). In the second, Kung Fu:The Next Generation (1987), the story moves to the present and centers around the story of Johnny Caine (Lee) who is the great-grandson of Kwai Chang Caine.
Later work
He then had a guest appearance in the short-lived TV series Ohara] in 1988 as Kenji, son of title character Lt. Ohara played by Pat Morita
Lee continued to study acting privately and appeared in local theatre productions and low budget films. In 1990 he starred in his first English language film Laser Mission In 1991 he starred in Showdown in Little Tokyo, his first studio film, and then did his first starring role in Rapid Fire. He signed a multi-picture deal with 20th Century Fox in 1991 and was slated to do two more films for them. In 1992 he landed the lead role of Eric Draven in the movie adaptation of The Crow, a movie based on the popular underground comic book of the same name. It would be his last film.
Fatal accident and death
Because The Crow's second unit team was running behind schedule, it was decided that dummy cartridges — bullets that outwardly appear to be functional, but contain no gunpowder and hence pose no threat to those on the set of a movie — would be made from real cartridges that 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 real looking in appearance. Merlin and his propmaster Daniel Kuttner took initiative to create some blanks. To create these, Merlin and Kuttner removed the bullets from live cartridges and replaced the gunpowder with firework powder. The bullets were not reinserted.
Later, a cartridge with only a primer and a bullet (but no gunpowder) 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 Lee’s 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 killed as cameras rolled in Wilmington, North Carolina. The footage of his death was soon destroyed without ever being developed. After his tragic death, he was buried next to his father in Lake View Cemetery, Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington.
The shooting was ruled an accident, though many fans suspected foul play. (Bruce Lee's own death in 1973 at age 32, apparently from a reaction to painkillers, was also considered suspicious.) Oddly, Bruce Lee's character] in Game of Death is shot in a similar fashion. Bruce's character, like Brandon's in The Crow, returns ("from the dead," although the character did not actually die) to get revenge on his adversaries. After his death, his mother Linda supported Alex Proyas's (the director) decision to complete the movie. At the time of Brandon's death only eight days were left before completion of the movie.
A stunt double was used for scenes showing Lee's character's death in flashbacks,a scene with him walking into a room was digitally composited from a scene of Lee walking into an alleyway and the make-up scene when his character puts on make-up. Lee's face was digitally composited into the mirror during that scene.
The Crow was released in May 1994, and became a box office smash. The film is dedicated to Brandon and his fiancée Eliza Hutton. They were to have been married on April 17, 1993. Lee is survived by his mother and sister.
Filmography
- The Crow, 1994 - Eric Draven
- Rapid Fire, 1992 - Jake Lo
- Showdown in Little Tokyo, 1991 - Johnny Murata
- Laser Mission / Soldier of Fortune, 1990 - Michael Gold
- Ohara / Tv Episode, 1988 - Kenji
- Kung Fu:The Next Generation, 1987 - Johnny Caine
- Kung Fu:The Movie (1986) - Chung Wang
- Legacy of Rage (Long zai jiang hu), 1986 - Brandon Ma
References
- Pilato, Herbie J. The Kung Fu Book of Caine: The Complete Guide to TV's First Mystical Eastern Western. Boston: Charles A. Tuttle, 1993. ISBN 0804818266
External links
- Some may claim that Brandon Lee's death occurred during a removed scene in which he and the officer are attacked at the officer's apartment. This is however, not true, as can be read here: Snopes Urban Legend on Brandon Lee
- Description of the accidental death
- Find A Death - Brandon Lee
- Brandon Lee at the Internet Movie Database
- Brandon Lee Fansite
- The Brandon Lee Movement
- Brandon Lee Shot on the Set of The Crow Was it an accident or was it the "Curse of the Chinese Merchant?"
