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Brandon Lee
February 1st 1965 - March 31st 1993
Actor son of Bruce Lee
Cause of death - Accidentally shot during filming of the movie "The Crow"
Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington. (next to Bruce Lee)
Early life
Brandon Lee was born in Oakland, California, to the legendary martial artist and actor Bruce Lee, who's three quarters Chinese and Linda Emery, an American of Swedish ancestry. The family moved to Los Angeles, California when Brandon was three months old, but when offers for film roles became limited for his father, the family moved back to his father's childhood home of 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 (including daughter Shannon, who was born in 1969) back to the United States. They lived briefly in his mother's hometown of Seattle (where Bruce Lee is buried), 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 Chadwick School, but was expelled 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 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.
Career
Early work
In 1986, Lee got his first movie role in the Hong Kong action thriller Legacy of Rage in which he starred with Michael Wong and Bolo Yeung, who also appeared in his father's last film, Enter the Dragon. The film was made in Cantonese, and directed by Ronny Yu. It was also the only film Lee made in Hong Kong. Regarding the pressures of being the son of a legendary father, Brandon said, "You only have the burdens on you that you choose to put there."
Kung Fu sequels
Lee then returned to Los Angeles, 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, which was to be a feature-length television movie, and had been developed by David Carradine and Radames Pera (the actor who played the young Kwai Chang Caine in the original television series). Carradine and Pera had orginally planned for Pera to play the role that was eventually offered to Lee, but due to the fact that the fame and reputation of his father, Bruce Lee, had continued to grow, the role eventually went to Brandon Lee. Ironically, Carradine was chosen for the lead role for the television series Kung Fu, over Bruce Lee, due to Carradine's abilities as a dancer and the fact that, at the time of casting in 1971, he was better known. (Rumour has it that the television executives were uncomfortable with an half-Asian actor appearing so prominently on western television.).
Brandon Lee would become a pivotal figure in two television movie sequels to the series. In the first, Kung Fu: The Movie (1985), Caine (played by Carradine) is forced to fight his hitherto unknown son, Chung Wang (played by Lee). In the second, Kung Fu: The Next Generation (1987), the story moves to the present day, and centers on the story of Johnny Caine (Lee), who is the great-grandson of Kwai Chang Caine.
Later work
Lee then had a guest appearance in the short-lived American television series Ohara (1988) as Kenji, son of title character Lt. Ohara (played by Pat Morita). 1990 saw the release of his first English language B-grade film, Laser Mission, which was filmed cheaply in South Africa in 1988. In 1991, he starred opposite Dolph Lundgren in Showdown in Little Tokyo, his first studio film and American debut.
Lee signed a multi-picture deal with 20th Century Fox in 1991. He then had his first starring role in Rapid Fire, and was slated to do two more films for them. Screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh wrote a script entitled Simon Says that was originally developed for Lee, but was later used as the blueprint for the movie Die Hard With a Vengeance .
In 1992, Lee landed the lead role of Eric Draven, an undead vigilante avenging his murder, and that of his fiancée, in the movie adaptation of The Crow, a popular underground comic book. About his character Lee 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 Lee's last film. Shooting began on February 1st 1993, which was his 28th birthday.
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 was to walk into his
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