李小龍生活故事 Bruce Lee life stories

Bruce Lee arrived in America a poor immigrant, but rich in talent. He set his sights on the Hollywood dream, but Hollywood was not ready for Bruce Lee. Everything that Bruce did was raw, was fresh, was innovative and just so much ahead of his time. He was good looking, he was muscular, he was fast. First Bruce Lee changed the concept of martial arts around the world. Then he conquered a film industry that refused to take him seriously. Hong Kong answered to James Dean, I mean he's the rebel, he's the outsider, the one who doesn't accept his place in this scheme of things. His persistence and skill paid off. He broke the Hollywood mould and became a martial arts superstar. He was the first Asian actor to be put center stage and allowed to be the hero that triumphs at the end. Bruce Lee had an unmistakable war cry that required no translation. His fists and feet did most of the talking and his face became recognized around the world. On screen Bruce Lee came across as larger than life, but in person he was just 5 foot 7 and weighed 10 stone. Despite his diminutive size, the effect he had on generations of martial artists was massive and it can still be felt today. The impact of him as an individual is huge and it's just growing all the time and we've got clubs everywhere. People were initially drawn in by the movie stuff, the flash stuff, the kicking and stuff, and I think people were drawn in because of that. But then his real art was very simple and direct and effective. Formless, shapeless, like water. Put the whole hip into it and snap it. Ultimately martial art means honestly expressing yourself. Bruce Lee loved being in front of the camera as this early home video footage shows. He filmed training sessions in order to improve his performance. But it was not just physical agility that made him the success he became. Okay, now let's run it back and see what happened. Bruce was definitely a fighter, but he was underneath a very deep person rooted in philosophies that went back thousands of years. He was a very old soul come to visit us for a short time. On November 27, 1940, the year of the dragon, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, while his father, a Chinese opera singer, was on tour in America. His parents called him Lee Jun Fan, but a nurse gave him the name Bruce, a name that the entire world would come to know. Three months after he was born, his family returned to their home in Hong Kong. The third of five children, Bruce Lee grew up in a theatrical family, so it's not surprising he was a natural as a child actor. He had appeared in over 20 Chinese movies before the age of 18. His screen name was Lee Soo Leung, which means the little dragon. Bruce Lee's style was apparent at an early age. What are you doing here? But the little dragon was more of a street fighter than a movie star. Growing up on the streets of Hong Kong is what sent Bruce to get an education in martial arts. Bruce studied the Wing Chun style of martial arts. This involved hours of arduous training against a wooden dummy. He drilled and practised. This early discipline provided Bruce Lee with a solid foundation in martial arts that eventually led to his superstardom. Obviously, it is hard work. It wasn't something easy. It was something that you had to nurture. But you can see he's got this energy, and it's not just something that's God-given. It's like he's worked hard at it. He's a boy from Hong Kong who's transformed himself, and I think everyone had that thing of, I could also transform myself. During this early period, between the ages of 13 and 18, his most influential teacher was Yip Man. But there was a side to Bruce Lee's character that would get him into trouble. He was more interested in throwing punches than doing schoolwork. Bruce, I think he would describe himself as grown-up street fighting. I think it was not until he came to the United States that he actually became serious about his studying. He was not a real good and serious student in school in Hong Kong. But he didn't just hang around on street corners. A natural competitor who never did anything by halves, when he took up dancing, it wasn't enough just to be good. He wanted to be the best. Bruce Lee's determination to win paid off, and he became the Hong Kong Cha-Cha Champion of 1958. I think it's quite natural for him to have combined the characteristics of being a street-wise young punk, that he would have called himself, I think, and combining that with being the coolest cha-cha dancer around, because those things kind of went together. Expert coordination, fluid footwork and rhythm. This physical elegance would prove to be an essential part of his superstardom as a martial artist. But to make it, he was going to have to betray an age-old Chinese tradition. Mr Lee, are you ready? The coolest martial arts master in the greatest martial arts movie. Enter the Dragon, part of Bruce Lee Night. 5 past 10, tonight on Five. Bruce Lee changed action films forever. Suddenly martial arts became popular with mainstream audiences the world over. But his journey to become a superstar was not an easy one. As a teenager in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee fancied himself as a street-wise rebel. He got a reputation for brawling. His parents wanted to keep him out of trouble and possibly even jail, so they sent him off to America to study. When he came to the United States, he had $100 in his pocket, and he looked around at everything and said, now what? The options for new Asian immigrants in the States, even now, let alone 30-odd, 40 years ago, are pretty restricted. And, you know, outside the restaurant business, what is there? Well, Bruce Lee had particular skills. He wanted to turn those into some kind of job opportunity, and he saw that as a way to hopefully penetrate the American entertainment business. But first, Bruce Lee had to work his way up like everybody else. In 1959, he stayed with a friend of the family in Seattle. While studying philosophy at university during the day, by night he worked in a restaurant. But soon he turned to what he knew best and started to teach kung fu. In the early 1960s, the Western concept of martial arts was largely limited to karate and judo. But a revolution was about to take place, and Bruce Lee would be the catalyst. Bruce Lee set up his first martial arts school, the Jun Fang Kung Fu Institute, after the name he was given at birth, in what is now a restaurant in Seattle's Chinatown. Bruce Lee's approach to teaching got him into trouble. He flouted an age-old tradition by revealing the ancient secrets of the martial arts to guilos, foreign devils, as they were called by the Chinese community. He was willing to teach anyone and everyone, as one of his first students and friend, Taki Kimura, remembers. He didn't want to adhere to the barriers that were there for centuries, and he felt that in teaching, he didn't say, well, if you're black or if you're yellow or white or whatever, I mean, I'm not going to teach you. He looked at your character and he said, if you show the genuineness, he's going to teach you. Bruce Lee's classes grew. One student, Linda Emery, found herself coming to his lessons. But she was interested in more than just learning kung fu. And so he was demonstrating on me and he threw me down to the ground, gently, of course. And so as he was showing the others how to do this, he said to me quietly, would you like to go to the Space Needle for dinner? And I said, all of us go to the Space Needle? And he said, no, just you. And I was like... And so I guess that was the first time that we actually went out alone together. After dating, the young couple were ready to take the next step, but interracial marriages in early 60s America were frowned upon. Bruce and I, when we decided we would get married, had decided not to tell my family. Very unwise and immature. I was 19, you know. But my family would have objected to me marrying a non-Caucasian person. And they had my best interest at heart. They didn't want me to go into a situation that would lead to heartache and struggle. However, I was 19 and I knew better. And so Bruce and I had decided we would get married and run away and then tell them all later. But their secret came out when they applied for a licence. The local newspaper printed the names of all those who wanted to get married. So my mother came to the place where I was working and said she needed to talk to me, that my Aunt Sally had called and said that my name was in the paper. And oh, my goodness, it hit the fan. It sure did. With their secret out, they had to face her parents. But Linda's family just needed time to adjust to the idea of their daughter marrying a Chinese man. I can understand their concern, but I felt it was the right thing to do. So with my mother's blessing, we did get married and we got married in a church and my mother and grandmother were there, as was Taki Kimura, as the best man. They moved to Oakland, California, where Bruce Lee set up the second branch of the Jun Fang Kung Fu Institute. But his open approach to who he taught, particularly white people, got him into trouble. Bruce's attitude toward teaching whoever wanted to learn, particularly Caucasians, angered many of the elders in the Chinese community. With the result that when he was teaching in Oakland, they sent a challenge. A challenge which he accepted. It was like a scene straight out of the movies. Members of a San Francisco Kung Fu school confronted him. He had to either stop teaching non-Chinese people and close the school or fight a top martial arts expert. Bruce Lee never walked away from a fight. I was present at that fight. In fact, I was eight months pregnant at the time with Brandon. And I never had a moment's fear myself because I had such confidence in Bruce's ability. Bruce Lee was confident in his technique and didn't think that a fight would last more than ten seconds. They battled for three exhausting minutes. He emerged victorious, but he was drained, both physically and mentally. Bruce was so despondent, so disappointed in his performance, and actually this was a real turning point in his life and in his martial art development because he realised that maybe he didn't have the tools to take somebody down instantly and that he wasn't in good enough aerobic shape, physical shape, to do this without getting winded. So he set out to increase his stamina and trained obsessively. He was driven by the thought of losing a fight. And so from that point on, he applied himself completely, 200%, to the mission of refining his martial arts skills and thus began the development of his way of martial arts, which he called Jeet Kune Do. Jeet Kune Do is a conceptual approach to training a martial arts. As against his Jun Feng Kung Fu, which is fixed. And that's what's great. That's what's ever-changing about his art, is it goes on. Whereas if it was fixed, it has a time, it's of its time, it's of the 60s or of the 70s, where if you're dealing with principles, principles are forever. Jeet Kune Do means literally the way of the intercepting fist. To develop it, he adapted aspects of other fighting disciplines that would give him the edge. His aim was always to win. Bruce Lee studied any and all forms of combat. He read widely and collected more than 2,500 books, often on seemingly unrelated fighting techniques, like fencing. This is a book that Bruce Lee learned a lot from, but you can see as you turn through the pages of this book, Bruce's underlinings and some of the lessons that he then applied to Kung Fu as opposed to fencing. This is a fencing book, but Bruce took many of the principles from fencing and incorporated them into his own martial development. He studied the thrusting movements of fencing as a way to engage an opponent quickly. He displayed the results of all his hard work at karate tournaments. He impressed the audience by doing push-ups with just two fingers and he demonstrated his particular brand of martial arts and the power he could wield with just a short thrust of his fist. He called this a one-inch punch. A young martial arts fan saw Bruce Lee at one demonstration and became a student and then a teacher of Jeet Kune Do. His exhibition in his Chinese Kung Fu was awesome. It was for real, it was simple and it was direct and explosive speed. I'd never seen explosive speed like Bruce Lee did. A television producer searching for an actor to play the part of Charlie Chan's number one son saw a film of one of Bruce Lee's demonstrations and he called to set up a screen test. I actually took the call and Bruce wasn't home and when Bruce got home I said, this guy from 20th Century Fox just called you, he wants to talk to you about doing something on TV. Test X-1. Bruce, just look right into the camera lens right here and tell us your name, your age and where you were born. My last name is Lee, Bruce Lee. I was born in San Francisco in 1940. I'm 24 right now. When I see Bruce in that original screen test, what goes through my mind is remembering how he was apprehensive. Now look over to me, Bruce, as we talk. I understand you just had a baby boy? Yeah. And you've lost a little sleep over it, have you? Three nights. He had not been before a camera for many, many years, had never planned to go before a camera again. That was not part of his planned future at that point. And here he was now in Hollywood doing a screen test. There is the finger jab, there is the punch, there is the back fist and then low. Of course, then they use leg, straight at the groin, or come up. Or, if I can back up a little bit, they start back from here and then come back. He's kind of worried. He has nothing to worry about. The film never happened. But Bruce Lee was cast in a new TV show, The Green Hornet, as the quick-footed sidekick Kato. He faced the American press for the first time. Well, I'll say it the Chinese way. Thank you very much. Bruce Lee set aside his plans to open a chain of kung fu schools and pursued an acting career. The Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato blasted onto television screens in 1966. Bruce made the human body a weapon in a way that people hadn't seen before. There's a difference between being tough and being cool. And Bruce was cool all day long on that show. I mean, just the look in his eye, the way he'd walk, or swagger or saunter, he was cool. Kato's screen partner was a crime-fighting newspaper man played by Van Williams. He is so fast, and he's in black, and you're never going to see him. So, evidently, the next day, in dailies, they went in to look at some of the stuff before he slowed him down some, and sure enough, it was just... A bunch of yelling and a black blur and people flying, and he was something else. To promote The Green Hornet, the stars appeared on the hit series Batman. Bruce Lee's temper flared up when he found out he was to fight Robin and lose. I'll never forget the day that the scripts came down on the set. All of a sudden, I heard this... ROAR, BANG, SLAM, BANG, WHAM! I said, Jesus Christ, because Bruce had a short temper. So did I. And occasionally, we'd get ticked off about something and blow up, and then it'd all be over, you know. But it just kept going, and it went further and further away, and all of a sudden, I heard an outside door slam, and then I heard a car... SCREECHING ..and screeching brakes. Bruce Lee put out the word that he was going to fight Robin for real, enough to worry the hardest of crime fighters, and certainly an actor. I tell you what, it's amazing that he didn't wet his pants. He might have, his costume. But it was a very touchy situation there for a while. But Bruce Lee made a joke out of it. In the end, the scene was shot without incident. Robin and Cato fought to a draw. What do we have here? A Mexican stand-off? Cato and the Green Hornet could not win the ratings fight, and the show lasted for just one series. Bruce and Linda moved to Los Angeles and started a family. Their son Brandon was born in 1965. And then four years later, their daughter Shannon arrived to complete their family. He did the best at everything that he could, which includes being a father, being a husband, as well as being a martial artist and an actor and a philosopher and being a good friend to many people. With his career in television faltering and a family to support, he returned to teaching Jeet Kune Do, but now his students were Hollywood stars, like James Coburn. He filmed the lessons to help his students, like Coburn, learn Jeet Kune Do, and at the same time, Bruce Lee was learning how to choreograph fights for the camera. Another regular student was basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who gave him a unique challenge. I certainly tested him. My reach was a big problem for him. He liked problems like that, because most people didn't test him. He was a lot more of a challenge for me than I was for him. Steve McQueen became another one of his students. In the only television interview that exists with Bruce Lee, he talks about their training sessions. Now, as a fighter, Steve, Steve McQueen, now, he is good in that department, because that son of a gun got the toughness in him. Yeah, see it on the screen. I mean, he would say, all right, baby, here I am, man, you know, and he would do it. In the late 60s, Bruce Lee continued to be involved with the Hollywood film industry and its stars. He worked with Dean Martin as a fight choreographer on The Wrecking Crew and appeared in the film Marlowe with James Garner. He also developed a film script and even went as far as scouting locations in India with James Coburn. He did manage to land a lead role in a pilot episode of a TV series opposite James Franciscus. He essentially played himself, a teacher of Jeet Kune Do. This is what it is, OK? I said, empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Despite him having had various acting roles, Hollywood was still not ready to invest in a Chinese star and the lead in the TV series Kung Fu went to a white actor, David Carradine. They were afraid that a Chinese star would not be bankable in Hollywood. He decided if he could not get into Hollywood through the front door, he was going to go around the back and come in the side door. And that is exactly what he did. Ever the rebel, Bruce Lee had found a cause to fight for. He would take on the establishment and beat them at their own game. In Hong Kong, Bruce Lee's popularity as a child star had been kept going through his role as Kato in the television series The Green Hornet. So he returns, with his son Brandon, to the city where he was recognised wherever he went and turned his back on Hollywood. I've never seen anybody enjoy the celebrity that he was having in Hong Kong or any place, I mean, anybody else enjoyed it as much as he enjoyed it. Sometimes people say, you know, was he spiritual? I say, yeah, perhaps, but I can see him much better in a Bentley than in a monastery. But while Hollywood kept its doors firmly shut, the Asian film industry saw his potential and were keen to sign him up. He went to Shaw Brothers first, because that was the biggest company in Hong Kong. And Shaw's offered him their standard contract, which was a lifetime's servitude for about 50 bucks a month and ten films a year, and you do exactly what we tell you at all times, you stay in our dormitory, you never go out, we promote you as a star in our magazines. And he, I mean, I don't think I can repeat exactly what he said to them, but you can imagine the tenor of it. And at that moment, a group of people had recently left Shaw Brothers, headed by Raymond Chow, who had been the head of production at Shaw's, and had started a rival company called Golden Harvest. Raymond Chow offered him a better deal. He said, OK, the money is no better, you still have no control, but we only want you to do two pictures for us and let's see how it goes. He signed up for $15,000 and his first film, The Big Boss, was shot on a budget of just $100,000. The first director was fired halfway through the production and much of the script was made up along the way. What Bruce Lee brought to the production was a sense of gritty reality to the fight scenes. It's just a wonderful combination of an artistic fighting format with the physical aspects. And he's actually, in one point, he's doing a back somersault whilst kicking somebody under the jaw, rotating round in the air and doing a lay-out back somersault. And it just comes from a guy who's just looking at you eye-to-eye contact. It comes from nothing. The film premiered in Hong Kong, where Bruce and Linda waited nervously for the audience's reaction. So the movie was over, it was stone quiet. Nothing for about 10, 15 seconds, seemed like forever. And then cheers, cheers erupted in the audience. People stood up, they turned to find where Bruce was in the audience, applauding him, cheering. It was the most thrilling moment of his career. Probably his single strongest influence in Hong Kong in 1972, when he started making films as an adult, was that he reintroduced unarmed combat. The dominant genre in the 60s had been swordplay. So Bruce Lee brought things back towards unarmed combat, or predominantly unarmed combat, which became known as kung fu and became the big thing in the 70s. The big boss smashed every box office record in Hong Kong. And Bruce became a martial arts superstar. Bruce in Hong Kong, it's tough to envision now, but then, he was the equivalent of a Michael Jackson times 10. Bruce was so massive that he could not leave his house. Young Chinese males particularly just looked up to him as being the guy. Again, for the same element, he was cool, he was well built, he was good looking, he was a terrific martial artist, he was successful, he was everything that every young male aspires to be. The word superstar really turned me off, and I'll tell you why. Because the word star, man, it's an illusion. It's something what the public calls you. You should look upon oneself as an actor, man. I mean, you would be very pleased if somebody say, hey, man, you are a super actor. It is much better than, you know, superstar. His first films were not well reviewed. Nevertheless, they found an enthusiastic audience. When kung fu films first appeared in the West, there was a huge amount of snobbery, of course. The mainstream critics were all highly negative and very dismissive and very patronising and everything. The audience that they connected with right from the word go was essentially the immigrant audience. So, you know, in London, if you wanted to see Chinese movies, Hong Kong movies in the early 70s, you went to Halston, and you would be the only white guy in a cinema entirely full of whooping black guys who would be cheering on these strange Chinese. I mean, those audiences, I think, had no trouble with Bruce Lee at the time. They understood very quickly what was going on, they related to it rather directly, and they thought it was terrific. With a star to bank on, the Hong Kong film company doubled the budget for his next movie, Fist of Fury. What the audience didn't know was all the fight scenes were shot while he was in pain from a back injury. What's ironic about that is that despite the fact he had this debilitating nerve problem with his lower back, he blossomed as a martial artist. He became a better martial artist after the back injury than he ever was before it. The doctors prescribed bed rest. He used this time to write up his philosophy on martial arts, the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. This has now been published in nine different languages. Not fully recovered, he willed himself to start training again. Ignoring doctors' orders, he went back to work. Even though he could do those fabulous fight scenes that you see in the movies, afterwards it was always ice and heat and stretching and rest, and it was a trial. He capitalised on his box office success by taking near virtual control of his third film, Way of the Dragon. He was the star, he wrote the script, choreographed all the fight scenes and directed the film. In addition, he broke new ground in martial arts filmmaking. It was the first Chinese film to be shot in Europe. The big fight scene used Rome's Colosseum as its backdrop. And he cast real martial arts champions in the film rather than actors and stuntmen. So Bruce Lee's central importance in the Hong Kong sense is that he brought genuine physical skills back into play here. Whereas pretty much anybody could have been an action star in Hong Kong movies before 1971, after 1971, you had to have at least a modicum of authentic skill to cut it, because the industry wouldn't accept you if you didn't. And so all kinds of new people were recruited precisely because they had the skills. Yeah, I work with a lot of fighters who have got many different qualifications and different fighting categories. I studied Shotokan for about five years. Some of the top guys that I use have studied all sorts of martial art formats. Blue screen and CGI and all of that stuff is all very well and good in today's filmmaking, but the thing that Bruce Lee had then was such a great physical prowess and physical performance, and I think people are wanting that more and more again now. Bob Wall played thugs in three Bruce Lee films. Bruce liked the way he delivered a punch and was adept at taking whatever was dished out, especially the kicks to the groin. He was very clever about knowing what the Chinese audience looked for, what they wanted. The Chinese liked to see him get kicked in the groin, they liked that extra pain, because they felt psychologically they'd been kicked in the groin for a lot of years. And so he really knew he was a psychological master of playing on those feelings, those maybe unspoken feelings that the Chinese people had. He turned to karate champion Chuck Norris for the Coliseum battle in Way of the Dragon. The fight scene is still considered to be one of the best ever made, and it helped to launch Norris' career in the movies. His third film took even more at the box office, so Bruce Lee planned his next film, Game of Death. This was to feature a remarkable mismatch. The 5ft7 martial arts star was to do battle with his 7ft tall student, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Bruce wanted to make it a depiction of the problems he had boxing me, basically all of our little episodes in the backyard, and the problems I presented to him with my reach and my relative quickness for someone of my size. Game of Death had just started in production when Hollywood finally took notice of Bruce Lee. Their offer was one he could not refuse, so he stopped shooting Game of Death and started work on the film that made him into an international martial arts superstar. Warner Bros presents Enter the Dragon, the first martial arts film produced by a major Hollywood studio. He understood that this picture was going to be his showcase to Hollywood and to the West, and so he wanted it to be as good as it could be. This high level of production values had never been applied to a martial arts film before. Its budget was six times the size of his first film in Hong Kong. When the movie started shooting, the producers were faced with a serious problem. Bruce Lee was so nervous, he couldn't face the camera. So the crew had to shoot every scene they could without him. Bruce was terribly nervous when we started filming, very nervous. We were shooting for two weeks almost, and Bruce hadn't showed up yet. I was telling Warner Bros the rush is a sensation, and Bruce hadn't shown up yet. I could sense he was very nervous. His voice was like a cheese cutter. I mean, it was like a wire. And I could almost swear that he was ready to levitate off the ground. He was, like, so wired. But in fairness to Bruce, whatever nervousness there was the first two or three days of filming was completely gone by the end of the first week, and it was back to business as usual. It was a strenuous shoot and dogged by problems. Both the cast and the crew had to struggle with a language barrier, and as an action superstar, he was constantly being asked to prove himself. Everybody was always trying to challenge Bruce. It was part of the macho kind of thing that went on. Never one to back down, Bruce Lee accepted one challenge made by an actor on the set. There was a stupid kid who was saying something to him in Cantonese, and I think he said, I think he was sitting on, like, Simple Simon. I swear, he was sitting on a wall, you know. And he said, Why don't you come down? And the kid did. All of a sudden, I could just see it in his eyes. I saw his eyes change, and he immediately went into Too Bad Guy, and he kicked the s**t out of this guy. And when that was done and he backed off, he smiled, he helped the guy up and said, Back up on the wall. The film's climax was shot in a room filled with thousands of mirrors. But this now-famous fight scene almost didn't happen because Bruce Lee did not think it would work. Bruce did not want to do it. Bruce did not want to do it, and he fought all of us on it. But once he got into it, like everything, once he got it, he made it better. You know, that was the other part that makes him great. He took it, developed it, and made it better. And that's what was wonderful. Everything that Bruce Lee did was raw, was fresh, was innovative, and just so much ahead of his time, it's just... I don't think people realise. Once filming was over, in May 1973, Bruce Lee went straight into the studio to dub the film's dialogue. On one particular day, he left the studio suddenly, and a few minutes later was found by a crew member. He had collapsed, and when he came to, lost consciousness again and went into convulsions. They did call me from the hospital and say that Bruce had been taken into the hospital unconscious. Of course, we had no idea what in the world was the matter. So I rushed to the hospital, and Bruce was unconscious, and they didn't know what was wrong. Following his collapse, Bruce Lee visited the best doctors in Los Angeles and underwent a battery of tests. I didn't know he was in town. I said, ''What are you doing here?'' He said, ''I've got to go see the doctor.'' And then he said something very grave, like, ''Maybe there won't be a Bruce Lee.'' I thought, ''What are you talking about?'' I mean, those are grave words. ''Maybe there won't be a Bruce Lee.'' It's a kind of crazy premonition, in a way. The test results were surprising because they showed that absolutely nothing was wrong. We don't really know what caused that. He was under a lot of stress and probably dehydrated because it's so hot in Hong Kong, so humid, and when you're working all the time, sometimes you forget to have enough liquids or whatever. But the medical report from the doctors in the United States pronounced him in perfect health. He was excited. He was the same old Bruce again. I mean, his colour was coming back, and certainly he hadn't gained his weight back, but the doctors said, ''Body of an 18-year-old.'' Reassured, he headed back to Hong Kong to complete Game of Death, the film he had started before Hollywood called. But this was destined never to be finished. July 20th, 1973, was a working day like any other. I was actually with him that the day he passed away. He seemed fine. The only thing he complained about was having a headache. That evening, he went to a home of a friend to work on a script, but still complaining of a headache, he took some medication and laid down to rest. I think late in the evening, maybe about ten o'clock or something, I got a phone call from Raymond saying Bruce had been taken to the hospital and all he could say was, ''Something like the last time.'' And so I rushed over to the hospital. Bruce was unconscious and was never conscious again. Fans were devastated by his sudden death. A crowd of more than 25,000 people jammed the streets around the Hong Kong funeral parlour where his body lay. His loyal followers silently queued up to pay final homage to their hero, unbelieving that one so fit could have died so young. The autopsy revealed that he had died from a cerebral oedema, a swelling of the brain. It was ruled to be a death that was caused by hypersensitivity to a medication that Bruce had been given for a headache. It's so extremely rare that this kind of thing happens. What it's like is an allergy to, say, penicillin. Bruce Lee was buried in Seattle, where he had first taught his method of martial arts. The pallbearers were family, friends, and movie stars Steve McQueen and James Coburn. Thank you. May peace be with you. The tickets that Warner Brothers had sent to Bruce and Linda to come for the opening, they were going to be on The Tonight Show, were the tickets that I used to bring Linda and the children back to Seattle for the funeral. The film opened two weeks later. I was still in Los Angeles, actually finishing up business when the film opened, and the lines in front of the now Man's Chinese Theatre up on Hollywood Boulevard stretched down the street and around the corner. It was quite an amazing sight. I did attend the premiere of Enter the Dragon, and the theatre was decorated with Chinese dragons, and it was wonderful. Yes, it was very sad and very sweet, very rewarding. It's even more rewarding now, 25 years later, that Enter the Dragon has become the classic of the genre, and I think that Bruce would be very satisfied with that. He really started something. Enter the Dragon has become a classic martial arts film. When Warner Brothers re-released the movie 25 years later, they put back several minutes that had been cut from the original, and these provide an insight into Bruce Lee's philosophy on martial arts. When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, I do not hit. It hits all by itself. Bruce Lee has a delayed impact, and I think the metaphor of a pebble in a pond sending out ripples is a rather good one, actually. It's much more relevant anyway than the master-disciple chain. He changes the industry by making it absolutely mandatory that actors in action films can really do it. They have to be genuinely physically skilled. In terms of The Matrix, let's say, or some of the other Hollywood movies that have attempted to get into this particular area, Kill Bill would obviously be quite a good example as well, it's been mandatory for Keanu Reeves, Uma Thurman and these people to actually spend months training in martial arts before they shoot a frame of the film, because they have to be able to cut it. The director now insists that it's not going to be done by CGI, it's going to be done because you're going to be good enough to cut it on screen. So, of course, having had that kind of impact on the industry, it produced a new generation of people who were not direct disciples of Bruce Lee, they were not people trained by Bruce Lee, but they're people who ripple out from Bruce Lee. They're people who start to use the principles that he has dramatically established in doing that brief, you know, firework-comet-like passage through the Hong Kong film business. I think Bruce can be considered the greatest, not because of how high he could kick or hard he could punch or how well he could tell a joke. I think it was more and deeper than that. Bruce was the greatest because of the level of intellectual and spiritual awareness that he had achieved in his life, which led him to make great accomplishments and to share those achievements, not only to benefit his own life, but to inspire and motivate others to do their best. He was the first Asian actor to be put centre stage in a Western film and allowed to be the hero that triumphs at the end. You're talking about an industry where they had John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. Come a long way. And coming up next on Bruce Lee Night... You have offended my family and you have offended Shaolin Temple. Yes, a man you definitely wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. Bruce Lee, starring...