But the one constant in almost all his performances was his ease in front of the camera. As this ranking of his 24 films demonstrates, Lee appeared in a far wider variety of films than his legend gives him credit for, from comedies to melodramas. To commemorate the 45th anniversary of Lee’s passing and Enter the Dragon’s release, Simon & Schuster has published Bruce Lee: A Life, the first comprehensive biography of the icon’s life and work. It set him on a path to become the world’s first martial-arts megastar - a dream that came to fruition, bittersweetly, with the 1973 release of Enter the Dragon, one month after his death at the age of 32. It wasn’t until a karate tournament in 1964 when he was discovered by a producer who cast him as sidekick Kato in The Green Hornet TV series.

I said ‘To hell with it.’” Instead he decided to become the Ray Kroc of kung fu, franchising dojos along the West Coast. “And when it is required, it is always the typical houseboy or pigtailed coolie stuff. “How many times in a film is a Chinese required?” Lee later explained to Esquire. for college, Lee took a look at the type of roles Asians were offered and abandoned any acting aspirations. By the time he was 18, he had made nearly 20 Cantonese films - none of which were kung fu flicks. His acting career began in earnest at the age of 6 after his family returned to their native Hong Kong. His father, a famous Cantonese opera singer, and his mother, a seamstress and wardrobe woman, were touring America when Bruce was born in 1940 he faced his first movie camera before he was old enough to crawl. This story originally ran in 2018 and has been republished to coincide with Mike Moh’s portayal of Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.īruce Lee came from an entertainment family.

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