main brandon

After gathering a lot of information from diverse article and try to come up with a good biography, and knowing that there are a LOT of them on the web, writting one that would surpass them all seems practically impossible so I decided to include a text that came from The Crow: the movie book. The information is clear and accurate! Enjoy! =)

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Brandon Lee was the son of the legendary film icon Bruce Lee and his wife Linda, who is of Scandinavian descent. He was born on February 1 st, 1965, in Oakland, California. Brandon recounted his years in Hong Kong to interviewer Jennifer Peters: "My dad wanted me to train in martial arts and he started training me himself, literally as soon as I could walk – when I was two, one and a half. My dad originated a style that's called Jeet kune do. He trained me in this style while he was alive."

After his father's untimely death at age 32, Brandon, his sister, and mother went to live in Los Angeles. He told reporter Caroline Hambrick: "I had a very normal childhood. After my father passed away, my mother was responsible for moving us out of the limelight as a very conscious act on her part. And I thank her for it very much because it did just that – it gave us a normal childhood. I never wanted another one."

It seems from the very beginning, Brandon was drawn towards performing. "Since my earliest memories, I always wanted to be an actor, and I pursued that from the time I was very young," Brandon told interviewer Wilson Goodson while on the set of The Crow. "I have really never felt that there were other paths for me. It is all I have ever wanted to do. My father was a martial artist first and that was his passion. That was what made him what he was, and he was an actor second. Not that he wasn't a very good actor, just that it was not his primary concern. To the degree that my father put his passions and his energies into the martial arts, I would only hope to be able to invest as much passion into acting."

After the usual 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. Brandon next joined Eric Morris' American New Theater Company in New York City. He followed the company's relocation to Los Angeles and appeared in their production of Full Fed Beast for playright John Lee Hancock (Hancock later wrote Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World).

Brandon returned to training at the Inosanto Academy of martial arts in Marina Del Rey, California, which was run by two of Bruce Lee's foremost students and instructors, Danny Inosanto and Ted Wong. Brandon described Bruce Lee's martial arts training and philosophy to interviewer Caroline Vie: "My father just mixed several existing techniques to find a style of his own. He used to say that he was using everything essential in each and every technique to get a very personal way of fighting."

At Inosanto's dojo, Brandon met fellow student Jeff Imada. He was impressed by the younger Lee's spirit and good humor. The two became close friends, and Jeff later seved as Brandon's stunt coordinator and collaborator on fight choreography.

On being the son of the martial arts legend, Brandon told Rachel Ambrick: "Well, there isn't negative. Sometimes it can be personally difficult, but I's imagine that everyone has personal problems, you know? Professionally, I can't pretend that it's anything except a positive thing. I believe it has certainly created opportunity for me that I would not have had as quickly, were I not Bruce Lee's son." Brandon told Vie:"I don't think my father would have liked his life accomplishments to become a burden upon his son's shoulders. It took me a few years to understand that, but once I got it, I didn't let myself be overwhelmed by Bruce Lee's personality nor his fame."

It bothered Brandon that Asian actors were not consistently getting starring roles in American films and television. He confided to Wilson Goodson: "The fact of the matter is that when my dad was over here, during the years he was doing The Green Hornet, he eventually had to go to Hong Kong to pursue his acting career." This was thirty years ago, when there were no Asian leading men working in either film or television. "There is still not a Chinese leading man in America – not one. There are some fine actors, but no leading men, no one somebody would bank a film on who is Asian."

Brandon himself had to travel to Hong Kong in order to make his feature film debut, starring in Legacy of Rage (1988). Made by D & B films, a rough and tumble purveyor of action product, his character is betrayed by a friend and takes the rap for a mobster's murder. Though he spoke fluent Cantonese at the time, Brandon's voice was dubbed in the film, which is standard practice for these quickly made assembly-line productions.

You may find Legacy of Rage in Chinese-language video and laserdisc stores, with which Brandon was obviously familiar, telling interviewer Jennifer Peters: "I have quite a (video) library at home. I've never been that big on the stuff that comes out of the United States. It's really so simple compared to the stuff they do in Hong Kong. I love John Woo's movies, I'd love to work with him. Hong Kong directors are the best in the world as far as action scenes are concerned."

Brandon's next film was the espionage thriller, Laser Mission (1990). Filmed in Namibia with featured star Ernest Borgnine, this low budget production managed to be both earnest and goofy at the same time. Brandon played likeable spy Michael Gold, with crusty Borgnine playing a laser weapons expert. When the world is imperiled, Brandon must sort things out with a blonde ‘patootie' claiming to be the professor's daughter. You can tell Brandon is having fun with the part, rising far above the clichéd material.

The following year Brandon finally made his American feature debut in Showdown in Little Tokyo for Warner Brothers. He played a policeman combating a new wave of invention in L.A.'s Little Tokyo by the Yakuza, Japan's organized crime syndicate. His unlikely partner Kenner, played by Dolph Lundgren, had a personal stake in the case and Johnny, played by Brandon, must keep him on the right side of the law. Again, Brandon outshone the material and established himself as a credible screen presence in the domestic market.

It wasn't long before Brandon landed a major starring role, that os Jake Lo in Rapid Fire for 20th Century Fox, written with Brandon in mind. He played an orphan who must come to terms with the death of his father who was killed in the Tienanmen Square massacre. A grizzled cop, played by Powers Booth, is in charge of protecting Jake after he witnessed a mob murder. A tentative father\son relationship develops between the two. Brandon identified with the role: "Jake is struggling to come to grips with the relationship with his father, which is something I've butted my head against many times."

Brandon worked with Jeff Imada on Rapid Fire's fight choreography to bring some Hong Kong movie flair to the film. He recalled to Wilson Goodson: "I simply felt that (Jake Lo) was a young man who was a highly-trained martial artist, but someone very much like myself, or most people, who is not accustomed to finding himself in violent life or death situations. This, once again, was an aspect of his character that had to be shown in the choreography. He was mostly out just to survive, to preserve his own life. Given an opportunity in any situation, he would certainly just as soon run, or get away from the conflict, because it was not a conflict of his choosing."

The fight scenes were made more natural by logically incorporating the setting into the sequence. "I always like to use what the environment has, "said Imada, "so you're not preventing yourself from getting full use of the set. I've always been taught to use what's around you. Whether it's a newspaper or a plate or a door – anything to give the fighter an edge. It's what you should actually do in combat."

Brandon was very happy with the results of his work with Jeff Imada, telling Goodson: "It was a particularly rewarding experience anything like it before, seeing something that we were involved with, thinking up the scenes and then seeing them realized the way we had imagined them." Brandon's power and screen presence made Rapid Fire a popular action film, above the usual pedestrian level for films of this sort. 20th Century Fox signed Brandon to do two more films for the studio.

Fox wasn't the only one to recognize Brandon's potential; Ed Pressman also put Brandon on his roster. "We signed him for three pictures. The last time we signed an actor for a multiple picture deal was when we signed Schwarzenegger for Conan the Barbarian, " said The Crow producer. "We saw the same potential. I think there's a grace in Brandon's movements and a power: The Crow was a perfect vehicle for his srenghts."

Production on the film began February 1, 1993, Brandon's 28th birthday. Final shooting in Eric and Shelly's apartment had been saved for the last week, allowing Brandon to work without makeup. On the night of March 31st, he was injured while filming on the loft set at Corolco Studios. A tip from a "dummy round" (a prop bullet that has no gunpowder) had lodged in a gun and was subsequently ejected from the barrel (like a piece of shrapnel) when a blank cartridge was fired. Brandon died hours later at the Wilmington Hospital.

The production immediately shut down while the filmmakers came to grips with the tragedy and tried to figure out what was next. Except for some flashback sequences, the entire story of The Crow had been filmed by the time of the accident. The question of whether or not the film could be finished was never a technical one, but psychological. "It was unbearable, " recalled Pressman. "The first reaction from Alex was that we couldn't go on. There was nothing left. It was all over."

"And then members of the cast and crew got together and all said that we had to continue, the performance itself was done and Brandon was so proud, " Pressman continued. "I felt compelled to finish this work to preserve Brandon's legacy, the incredible performance he'd given."