July 20, 1973: The Death of Bruce Lee

July 20, 1973, 50 years ago: Bruce Lee dies, shocking the world, which was just getting to really know him. He was only 32 years old.

He was born on November 27, 1940, as Lee Jun-fan, in San Francisco, where his Hong Kong-based parents were living at the time. A nurse at the hospital nicknamed him "Bruce," although his parents never used it. His father, Lee Hoi-chen, was an opera singer in the Cantonese dialect of Chinese. The family returned to Hong Kong the following year, surviving the Japanese occupation of the British colony during World War II. In 1950, father and son both appeared in the film The Kid. By the time Bruce was 18, he had appeared in 20 films.

He got into street fights, and his parents decided he needed martial arts training. By 1958, he was not only the Hong Kong schools boxing champion, but also the winner of the Crown Colony Cha-Cha Championship. He returned to America, to Seattle, and attended the University of Washington, but dropped out in 1964, and moved to Oakland. There, he continued his martial arts education, and developed two of his signature moves, the one-inch punch and the two-finger push-up.

He caught the attention of William Dozier, the producer who created the 1966 TV version of Batman. He had an idea for a similar crimefighter series, based on the Green Hornet, who'd been on radio in the 1930s and '40s, and in 2 early 1940s film serials.

The Green Hornet was Britt Reid, a newspaper publisher who saw a crime wave in his city, and decided what was needed was a modern-day Robin Hood, so he took on the masked persona and pretended to be a competing gangster, muscling in on bad guys' territory, and setting them up to be captured by the cops.

He was assisted by Kato, an Asian mechanical genius, who designed and built the character's knockout-gas gun, and turned Britt's car into the souped-up "Black Beauty." Originally, Kato was said to be Japanese. But by the time of the 1st film serial in 1940, the Japanese were committing war crimes against China, so the character was rewritten as Korean. Although a capable fighter, his only use of martial arts, in either The Green Hornet (1940) or The Green Hornet Strikes Again! (1941), was the occasional judo chop.

Dozier cast former Surfside Six star Van Williams as Reid, and Lee as Kato -- allegedly, because he was the only Asian-American actor he could find who could properly pronounce the name "Britt Reid." The character was every bit the genius as before, adding to the hero's arsenal a "Hornet Sting" that used sound waves as a weapon. To match Lee, his ethnicity was changed to Chinese, and one episode included Kato taking on the unnamed city's Chinese gangs, or "tongs." The show only lasted 1 season, but, in spite of his earlier experience, Lee wrote Dozier a letter thanking him for "my start in show business."

Van Williams (left) and Bruce Lee.
Kato never got a "superhero name."

In 1967, after leaving the show, he founded Jeet Kune Do, a martial arts philosophy in which he spoke of "the style of no style," or its variation "Using no way as way." Basketball star Allen Iverson wouldn't have liked him, as he emphasized practice: "Do not beware the man who has practiced a thousand kicks. Beware the man who has practiced a single kick a thousand times."

By 1969, Bruce was married to the former Linda Emery, and they had a son, Brandon, and a daughter, Shannon. And Bruce's brother, who goes by Robert Lee Jun-fai, had a rock band, The Thunderbirds, which was big in Hong Kong.

Also big in Hong Kong -- a British colony until 1997, when by treaty it went back to China, and with 6.2 million people on a series of islands the most densely-populated city in the world -- is their movie production industry. Martial arts films had been popular there in the 1930s, and by 1970 had returned to prominence after a long period of suppression.

In 1971, Bruce starred in The Big Boss, followed in 1972 by Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon, with Bruce having written and directed the last of these. In The Way of the Dragon, released in America as Return of the Dragon, a fight scene was filmed inside the Roman Colosseum, with Chuck Norris, already a renowned martial arts practitioner and instructor. Chuck has always insisted that, if it was a real fight, he would have won. But it was Bruce's film, and he had to win. In the Internet Age, someone who was tired of the silly "Chuck Norris Facts," posted this meme.

With these films being shown in America, it inspired the TV series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, a half-American-half-Chinese martial arts master in the Wild West. In flashbacks, Caine's mentor, Master Po, is played by Keye Luke, who had played Kato in the 1940s Green Hornet serials. (A sequel series in the 1990s, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, featured Carradine as the original Caine's grandson and namesake, and Chris Potter as the great-grandson, a Los Angeles detective.)

Between them, Lee and Carradine made martial arts enormously popular in America. What's more, along with the Civil Rights Movement making "blaxploitation" films popular, Bruce Lee elevated the profile of Americans of Asian descent, giving them a point of pride and making them cool for the first time.

It inspired martial arts scenes in a kung fu sequence in the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. It also inspired "Kung Fu Fighting," a song by soul singer Carl Douglas that hit Number 1 in 1974. In turn, that song inspired a curious trend of black men becoming martial arts fans and practitioners, culminating in the 1985 film The Last Dragon, starring Taimak Guarriello as "Bruce Leroy."

In late 1972, Bruce began work on Game of Death, including a fight scene with a former student of his, basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. At 5-foot-8 and 165 pounds, Bruce was not a small man, and was as solidly built as a man can be. But Kareem was 7-foot-2 and 225, so Bruce was, literally, punching above his weight.

But in mid-filming, Warner Brothers offered Bruce the lead in Enter the Dragon. He filmed it in Hong Kong from February to April 1973. It was set to be released on July 26.

But on May 10, while doing automated dialogue replacement for Enter the Dragon -- it had become a trope that Hong Kong martial arts films had the English dialogue way out of step with the Cantonese original -- Bruce collapsed, and went into seizures. He was taken to a hospital, where doctors diagnosed cerebral edema: Swelling of the brain. He was told to get rest.

On July 20, Bruce and film producer Raymond Chow went to the home of co-star Betty Ting Pei, to go over a script. Bruce developed a headache, and Ting gave him Equagesic, a painkiller containing aspirin and a tranquilizer called meprobamate. At 7:30, he took a nap. When he didn't show up for his dinner meeting, Chow went back to the house, and they were unable to wake Bruce up. He was dead on arrival at the hospital.

There is doubt as to the cause of his death. An autopsy revealed a new edema, which explained the headache. But Chow believed the real cause was an allergic reaction to the painkiller. Heatstroke has been suggested as a factor, as both May 10 and July 20 were hot days in Hong Kong, which is only at 22 degrees north latitude. (For comparison's sake: Los Angeles is 34, and New York is 41.) Rumors abounded that Bruce had offended someone in organized crime, who ordered his murder, but there was no evidence of foul play.

He was buried in Seattle, Linda's hometown, and pallbearers included his brother, and actors Steve McQueen and James Coburn, both former students of his. That's how cool Bruce Lee was: He taught two of The Magnificent Seven. (Coburn maintained an interest in Asian culture for the rest of his life, including playing a Japanese musical number with Animal to close his appearance on The Muppet Show.)

Enter the Dragon was released on time, and, on a budget of $850,000, made over $400 million worldwide over nearly half a century -- about $2 billion in today's money.

Game of Death took until 1978 to be released, with stand-ins. Lee's yellow jumpsuit with black piping became legendary, and was copied for Uma Thurman's character Beatrix "The Bride" Kiddo in Quentin Tarantino's 2003 film Kill Bill, Vol. 1.

Linda married twice more, and now goes by the family name of her 3rd and current husband, Linda Lee Caldwell. Brandon Lee and Shannon Lee followed their father into acting and the study of martial arts. Brandon was also on the verge of superstardom in 1993, when an accident killed him on the set of the film The Crow. He was just 28, and this has led to the belief of a curse on the Lee family. At the time of his death, he was engaged to Eliza Hutton. Shannon became a film producer, married a man named Ian Keasler, and has a daughter named Wren, Bruce Lee's only grandchild.

Although the San Francisco Giants have held Bruce Lee Tribute Night, calling him a "Bay Area icon," I can't find any reference to him being a baseball fan. Given that he was already 17 years old when the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco, it isn't obvious that he would have rooted for them. And he moved to and left Oakland before the Athletics moved there from Kansas City, and died between the failure of the Seattle Pilots and the arrival of the Seattle Mariners, so it's not clear he would have rooted for a team in his adopted hometowns, either.