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 expelled three months before 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.
Brandon's 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 in 1986. He then went back to Hong Kong where he got his first leading role in Legacy of Rage (1986} in which he starred with Michael Wong and Bolo Yeung who also appeared in his father Bruce's last film Enter the Dragon. The film was made in Cantonese and was directed by Ronny Yu.
Lee continued to study acting privately and appeared in local theatre productions and low budget films. In 1990 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 opposite Dolph Lundgren, 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. The premise of the film was that Brandon would play a rockstar who is brutally murdered along with his fiance by a gang of street thugs. Then a crow brings him back to life to avenge his fiance's death by killing the thugs one by one.
Brandon's Tragic Death:
On March 31, 1993, the 52nd day of a 60 day shooting schedule for The Crow, the scene being filmed was when Lee's character Eric Draven was to walk into his apartment and see his girlfriend being raped by thugs. This would subsequently lead to Eric being shot and killed along with his fiance. Actor Michael Masse who played Funboy, one of the villains in the movie was supposed to shoot at Lee as he walked into his apartment.
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 the 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 as cameras rolled at the EUE Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. Seconds later the director Alex Proyas shouted 'CUT' but Brandon remained on the floor. Stuntman and Lee's friend Jeff Imada ran over to Brandon with a paramedic to see if he'd hit his head on the door when he fell and knocked himself out. They discovered a thin slit an inch below to the right of his navel, but this didn't hold any clues as to what happened. They removed Brandon's jacket and spotted a hole in his T-shirt. By this time Brandon had slipped into unconciousness. An ambulance was called and Brandon was rushed to a hospital. He underwent 5 hours of surgery upon which they discovered a bullet had been the cause of the damage.
At 1:04pm Brandon died. His funeral was held days later -- over 400 people attended, including David Carradine, David Hasselhoff and Kiefer Sutherland. Both Brandon's closest friends and Fight choreographers Jeff Imada and Jeff Cadiente were so shocked they couldn't speak, Linda reminded everyone "Brandon would want this to be a happy occasion, we are here to celebrate his life". 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, and fiancee Eliza Hutton 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 majority of the film had already been completed and only a few scenes had to be done.
After Brandon's death a stunt double, Chad Stahelski, 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 scene where 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 in Mexico. Lee is survived by his mother and sister.
Brandon Lee ( 1 February 1965 - 31 March 1993)