Brandon Lee

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This page is about the actor and son of Bruce Lee. For the adult film actor see Brandon Lee (porn star).

Brandon Lee as Jake Lo in Rapid Fire

Brandon Bruce Lee (李國豪, pinyin: Lǐ Guóháo February 1, 1965–March 31, 1993) was an American actor, the son of actor Bruce Lee and his wife Linda Emery.

1 Early life
2 Theatric career
3 Fatal accident
4 Filmography
5 External links

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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 homeland 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 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 was buried) and then to Los Angeles, where Brandon grew up in the affluent area of Rolling Hills.

He attended high school at The 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.

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Theatric career

Lee returned to Los Angeles in 1985, where he worked for Ruddy Morgan Productions as a script reader. He was asked to read for the part of Chung Wang, Kwai Chang Caine's son in Kung Fu: The Movie (1986 (the sequel to the 1970s television show, Kung Fu) and got the part. He also portrayed Johnny Caine in Kung Fu: The Next Generation (1987), who is the great-grandson of Kwai Chang Caine.

Lee continued to study acting privately and appeared in local theatre productions and low budget films. 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, the popular underground comic book of the same name. It would be his last film.

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Fatal accident

Because The Crow's second unit team were running behind schedule, it was decided that rather than invest in the dummy cartridges that were needed, they would be made from real cartridges that had been brought to the set earlier. Bruce Merlin, an effects technician, dismantled the live cartridges by removing the bullets, removing out the gunpowder, detonating the primer and reinserting the bullets. This rendered the cartridges inoperative but real 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 was fired in a gun. 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 a bullet in the forcing cone of the barrel. Consequently, Lee was shot and killed as cameras rolled in Wilmington, North Carolina. 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.

The Crow was released in May 1994, and became a box office smash. The film is dedicated to Brandon and his fiancee Eliza Hutton (they were to be married on April 17, 1993)

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