Bruce Lee, the actor and martial-arts icon, passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 32 on this day in 1973, succumbing to a brain edema that might have been triggered by a prescription painkiller. In his tragically short career, Lee rose to fame as a movie star in Asia and achieved posthumous acclaim in America.
Born on November 27, 1940, in San Francisco, California, Jun Fan (Bruce) Lee’s father, a Chinese opera performer, was touring in the United States at the time. The family relocated to Hong Kong in 1941. As a child, Lee acted in roughly 20 Chinese films, pursued dance, and trained in the Wing Chun style of gung fu (commonly referred to as “kung fu”). In 1959, he made his way back to America, where he eventually became a student at the University of Washington and established a martial-arts school in Seattle. Lee wed Linda Emery in 1964, and their first child, Brandon Lee, was born the following year. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1966, where Bruce took on the role of the agile sidekick Kato in the television show The Green Hornet (1966-1967). Additionally, he participated in karate tournaments across the United States and taught martial arts privately, including to actor Steve McQueen.
Seeking more substantial acting roles than those Hollywood had to offer, Lee returned to Hong Kong in the early 1970s, where he successfully carved out a niche as a star with action films such as The Big Boss (1971) and The Way of the Dragon (1972), which he not only starred in but also wrote and directed. Lee’s subsequent film, Enter the Dragon, was released by Warner Bros. in August 1973. Unfortunately, tragedy struck one month earlier when Lee died on July 20 in Hong Kong due to a brain edema suspected to be caused by an adverse reaction to pain medication. The film became a massive success at the box office, earning over $200 million, and solidified Lee’s status as a cinematic icon in America after his passing.
Following his death, Lee’s remains were transported back to Seattle for burial. The circumstances surrounding his untimely death at just 32 years old led to numerous rumors and speculations regarding the factors behind it. One theory suggested he had been killed by Chinese gangsters, while another posited that Lee was the target of a curse. This family-curse notion became more prominent when Brandon Lee, his 28-year-old son who pursued an acting career like his father, tragically died in an accidental shooting on the set of the film The Crow on March 31, 1991. Brandon was subsequently laid to rest next to Bruce at Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery.
