Athletes - Brandon Lee

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	Athletes - Brandon Lee

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.

Early life

Brandon Lee was born in Oakland, California to martial artist and actor Bruce Lee and his 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 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. The project was Kung Fu: The Movie. His acting debut in Kung Fu: The Movie aired on American TV on his 21st birthday. His first movie role was in Legacy of Rage (1987) 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 (1985) 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 on 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 1988 he filmed and starred in his first English language film Laser Mission , which was filmed in South Africa. In 1991 he starred in Showdown in Little Tokyo, his first studio film, and American debut. He 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 were 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 deathscene, 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 at the EUE Screen Gems Studios 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.

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