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"Because we do not know when we will die,we get to think
of life as an inexhaustible well,and yet everything happens only a certain number of times....How many more times will you
remember a certain afternoon of your childhood..that is so deeply a part of your being,you can't even conceive of your life
without it?
Perhaps four or five times more ?Perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full
moon rise?Perhaps twenty.And yet it all seems limitless".
-Brandon Lee
(1986)***Legacy of Rage....Character: Brandon Mei
(1986)***Kung Fu:The Movie.....Character: Chung Wang
(1987)***Kung Fu:The Next Generation....Character:
Johnny Caine
(1990)***Laser Mission....Character: Michael Gold
(1991)***Showdown in Little
Tokyo....Character: Johnny Murata
(1992)***Rapid Fire....Character:
Jake Lo
(1994)***The Crow. . . Character: Eric Draven
Brandon was born in Oakland,California,on February
1,1965 to legendary film icon Bruce Lee and wife Linda Emery.
As soon as he learned how to walk,his father started
training him in the martial arts.Bruce Lee originated a style,
called Jeet Kune Do.He trained Brandon in this style,while he was still alive.
Brandon Lee was only 8 years old when
his father Bruce Lee died. After his father's death,Brandon,his mother and
sister Shannon,moved to Los Angeles.His mother,
Linda, wanted to take her two children out of the limelight, which gave them a chance at a normal childhood.
Since the
beginning, Brandon was drawn towards performing. He always wanted to be an actor and pursued that from
a very young age.
It was all he wanted to do. He wanted to be known for his acting ability instead of who his father was.
He only hoped to
be able to invest as much passion into acting as his father did in martial arts. After taking high school drama classes, Brandon
left to attend acting classes with Lee Strasberg,later going on to study acting at Emerson
College
in Boston, Massachusetts. He later joined Eric Morris'American New
Theater company in New York
City and followed
the company's relocation to Los Angeles and appeared in their production
of Full Fed Beast for playwright John Lee Hancock. Brandon later returned to training at the Inosanto
Academy of Martial Arts in Marina Del Rey, California, which was run by two of Bruce Lee's former students and
instructors, Danny Inosanto and Ted Wong.
Brandon's
first professional acting job came at the age of 20 when he appeared in the CBS television film Kung Fu:The Movie in 1986.He played the long lost and revengeful son of David Carradine's character
Caine.
Brandon also made several appearances on Hong Kong television
with his father. He later landed a role of the evil son
of Yakuza godfather
on an episode of O'Hara with
Pat Morita.
It bothered Brandon that Asian actors were not consistently getting
starring roles in American films and television.
Brandon had to travel to Hong Kong in order to make his feature
film debut,starring in Legacy of Rage(1988).
Brandon then landed a role in the 1990 movie Laser Mission which was filmed in Namibia with featured star Ernest Borgnine. Brandon finally made
his American feature film debut in Showdown in
Little Tokyo for Warner Brothers,in which he played a policeman. Brandon then landed a
major starring role,that of Jake Lo in Rapid Fire for 20th Century
Fox,
written with Brandon Lee
in mind. Brandon also helped work on Rapid Fire's fight choreography to bring some Hong Kong movie flair to the film.20th
Century Fox signed Brandon to do two more films for the studio.
In 1993,the production of The Crow starts. On March 31st, he was injured while filming.A tip from a "dummy round"
(a prop bullet that
has no gun powder)had lodged in a gun and was subsequently ejected from the barrel when a blank cartridge was fired. Brandon
died hours later at the Wilmington Hospital.
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