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It's been close to 20 years since
Bruce Lee died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of age 32, leaving
behind a widow, and eight-year-old son, and a legacy as the most popular
martial arts hero in movie history. Today, that
legacy has been taken up by his son, Brandon, now 27, and about to appear as
a chop-and-sock heart-throb in a couple of movies due for release in Sydney
later this year.
They are Showdown in Little Tokyo,
opposite Dolph Lundgren of Rocky IV, and Rapid Fire, with Powers Boothe of
Extreme Prejudice.
In displaying martial arts skills
in the cinema, Brandon proves he's got what his father had - plus more
acting talent and better looks. In Sydney to talk about his movies, Brandon
doesn't look like someone who could throw an adversary across a room with
alarming ease. But don't let appearances fool you. The lad has been in
martial arts all his life.
"Dad always had people training in
our house in Hong Kong and I began lessons with him in the backyard from the
moment I could walk," He says. When his father died, his mother, Linda
Emery, returned to California.
"At school, I always had trouble
with someone wanting to take me on because I was Bruce Lee's son."
He always wanted to be an actor
and consequently his academic record is far from impressive, having flunked
most of his exams as he ducked off to acting classes. He was 20 when he got
his first professional acting job - as a villain in Kung Fu: The Movie, a
spin-off from the TV series.
Brandon isn't troubled when
people say he's living in the shadow of his famous father.
"There are people who'd like to
make that into a problem for me, but my solution to that is simply to do the
best I can. My mother has always been behind me as an actor. When dad died,
there were lots of unscrupulous people wanting to make a buck out his name
so she's been wary about what I was getting myself into."
When asked how he feels about the
mystery surrounding his father's ultimately death, he shrugs. "That sort of
talk is on the same level as whether Elvis is still alive. The tough thing
for me was moving from Hong Kong to America. All my friends were Chinese at
school and I considered myself Chinese. Moving to America meant getting into
an entirely different school system where I had to learn to speak English
more than just around the house with my mum. I had to learn what was cool
and what wasn't cool with American kids."
When he returned to America,
Brandon went into martial arts training with Danny Inosanto who had been his
father's senior student and is still Brandon's instructor.
Brandon's first movie, Kung Fu,
was released in America on February 1, 1985 - his 21st birthday. He made a
few lightweight films after that, but spent more time riding around the US
on his motorbike than facing the camera.But over the past couple of years,
things began happening for him and he's particularly proud of being invited
back to Hong Kong to make a movie in Cantonese.
Now he has two major movies due
for release within two or three months of each other, including Rapid Fire,
a well-produced Karate thriller packed with action in which he choreographed
all the fight sequences. Brandon does all the fight scenes himself.
"I don't want to stay all the
time doing martial arts films but I don't want to move completely away from
the genre. I want to have creditability as an actor to make an occasional
big action drama like Mel Gibson," he said.
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