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Was born to Bruce Lee and Linda Lee Cadwell, on 1st February 1965. When his father died he moved to Seattle with his mother and Sister ‘Shannon Lee’ . He attended several high schools but was expelled due to bad behavior – on one occasion he drove his car in reverse through oncoming traffic. While at one school he was president of the student union. Upon finding out about the death of Beatle John Lennon in December 1980, Brandon dismissed all of his grade out of respect to Lennon, however the principal didn’t share his good nature and expelled Brandon from the school.
He restarted his Martial Arts at age 18 where he met fellow stunt choreographer and future best friend Jeff Imada. It upset Brandon to see all the posters of his Dad in the Dan Insano Academy and so he quit. For the next couple of years Brandon was more interested in soccer and basketball than Martial Arts. But once again at age 20 he took up and excelled in certain types of Martial Arts including Thai Kick-Boxing, Jeet Kune Do, and Yee Chuen Tao. His first movie role was in the ‘David Carridine’ movie Kung Fu: The Movie (1986) (TV), followed by Cantonese film Long zai jiang hu (1986). Next was a movie fimed in Africa, Laser Mission (1990), which was follwed by his American Movie Debut as a co-star to Dolph Lundgren in _Showdown in Little Tokyo(1991)_ . His first movie as the star was Rapid Fire (1992) where his co-stars were ‘Powers Booth’ and Nick Mancuso. Brandon played a guy on the wrong side of two different gangs each wanting him for a murder he witnessed, and the FBI.
But his breakthrough movie was next, the movie that was to catapult him to stardom and onto better things, the Gothic Thriller The Crow (1994), where he plays a murdered rockstar back from the dead to avenge his and his fiances’ murder. Apart from all the darkness and violence in the movie there is actually a romantic theme to it – Brandon played the role beautifully and this is where he really began to shine as a promising actor. He was to be married on April 17th 1993 to his fiance Eliza Hutton in New Mexico Two weeks after filming wrapped. On March 31st 1993, the 52nd day of a 58 day shoot, Brandon prepared to film his first real scene without make up on. The scene was to explain how he and his onscreen fiance’ were murdered. It was recalled as a strange day because the way the two characters were to be killed was changed several times before they decided that Eric Draven (Lee) was to enter his apartment and come across his fiance’ being beaten by four thugs, upon which one was to turn and shoot Eric and leave him wounded. The cameras began to role and Brandon entered the apartment in character. The Michael Massee character, Fun Boy spots Eric, holds the gun up and shoots as planned, Brandon held his stomach, motioned to the director to ‘Cut’ then fell backwards against the door. Seconds later the director Alex Proyas shouted ‘CUT’, Brandon remained on the floor, Jeff Imada ran over to Brandon with a paramedic to see if he’d hit his head on the door when he fell and knocked himself out. They discovered a thin slit an inch below to the right of his navel, but this didn’t hold any clues as to what happened. They removed Brandon’s jacket and spotted a hole in his T-shirt.
By this time Brandon had slipped into unconciousness. An ambulance was called and Brandon was rushed to hospital. He underwent 5 hours of surgery upon which they discovered a bullet had been the cause of the damage. Eliza Hutton made it to the hospital just in time, at 1:04pm Brandon Lee died. His funeral was held days later – over 400 people attended, including ‘David Carridine’ ,David Hasselhoff and Kiefer Sutherland. Both Brandon’s closest friends and Fight choreographers Jeff Imada and Jeff Cadiente were so shocked they couldn’t speak, Linda reminded everyone "Brandon would want this to be a happy occasion, we are here to celebrate his life".
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