About Me
Brandon Bruce Lee (February 1, 1965 - March 31, 1993) was born in Oakland, California, to the legendary martial artist actor Bruce Lee and his wife Linda Emery. Brandon is of Chinese, English, German and Swedish descent. 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 Brandon was eight, his father died suddenly from a cerebral edema. After her husband's death, Linda Lee moved the family back to the United States. They lived briefly in his mother's hometown of Seattle, Washington, and then in Los Angeles, where Brandon grew up in the affluent area of Rolling Hills. According to his mother, he was "a handful... either the teacher's pet, or the teacher's nightmare."
He attended high school at The Chadwick School, but was asked to leave for insubordination 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, Brandon 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 Brandon's martial arts instruction came from his father's top student, Dan Inosanto.
Brandon 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 Brandon's birthday.
In Kung Fu: The Movie, Brandon 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 for Carradine.
Later that same year, Brandon got his first major film role in the Hong Kong action thriller Legacy of Rage in which he starred alongside Michael Wong and Bolo Yeung, the latter of whom 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 Brandon made in Hong Kong.
In 1987 Brandon went on to star in an unsuccessful television pilot, another follow-up to the television series Kung Fu, titled Kung Fu: The Next Generation. In this film the story moved to the present day, and centered on the story of Johnny Caine (played by Brandon), who is the great-grandson of Kwai Chang Caine. The pilot was not picked up for a series but aired on the CBS Summer Playhouse.
Brandon then made a guest appearance in an episode of the short-lived American television series Ohara (1988) as a villainous character named Kenji, opposite Pat Morita who played the title role.
In 1990, Brandon starred in his first English language B-grade film, Laser Mission, which was filmed cheaply in South Africa. In 1991, he starred opposite Dolph Lundgren in the buddy cop action thriller Showdown in Little Tokyo. This marked his first studio film and American film debut. Brandon 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 1992, Brandon 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, Brandon 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 Brandon's last film. Filming began on February 1, 1993, which was his 28th birthday.
On March 31, 1993, the film crew filmed a scene in which Brandon's character walked into his apartment and discovered his girlfriend being raped by thugs. Actor Michael Massee, who played one of the film's villains, was supposed to fire a gun at Brandon as he walked into his apartment with groceries.
Because the movie's second unit team were running behind schedule, it was decided that dummy cartridges (cartridges that outwardly appear to be functional, but contain no gunpowder) would be made from real cartridges. A cartridge with only a primer and a bullet was fired in the pistol prior to the scene. It caused a squib load, in which the primer provided enough force to push the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel of the revolver, where it became stuck.
The malfunction went unnoticed by the crew, and the same gun was used again later to shoot the death scene, having been re-loaded with blanks. Nevertheless, the squib load was still lodged in the barrel, and was propelled by the blank cartridge's explosion out of the barrel and into Brandon's body. Although the bullet was traveling much slower than a normally fired bullet would be, the bullet's large size and the extremely short firing distance made it powerful enough to fatally wound Brandon.
When the blank was fired, the bullet shot out and hit Brandon in the abdomen. He fell down instantly and the director shouted "Cut!", but Brandon did not respond. The cast and crew filming rushed to him and noticed he was wounded. He was immediately rushed to the hospital where doctors operated for five hours in an attempt to save his life. It was too late however, and he was pronounced dead at 1:03pm.
Brandon's funeral was held several days later; he was buried next to his father in Lake View Cemetery, Seattle. The following day, a memorial service was held in Los Angeles.
In 1990, Brandon met Eliza "Lisa" Hutton at director Renny Harlin's office, located at the headquarters of 20th Century Fox. Eliza was working as a personal assistant to Harlin, and later became a story editor for Stillwater Productions, in 1991. Brandon and Eliza moved in together in 1991 and became engaged in October 1992.
They were to be married in Mexico on April 17, 1993, a week after Brandon was to complete filming on The Crow - just 18 days after he died. At the time of Brandon's death, Eliza was working as a casting assistant and was on set of The Crow so much that she was later credited with being Brandon's on-set assistant. After his death, Eliza petitioned to have gun safety regulations tightened on film sets.
