Today would have been the 49th birthday of Brandon Lee, martial artist and actor best remembered for being the lead role in The Crow, a film which was marked with tragedy when Lee died of an accidental gunshot wound during filming. Lee was also the son of the legendary monarch of the martial arts, Bruce Lee.
Born on February 1, 1965 in Oakland, CA, Brandon Bruce Lee’s life has been wrapped in a sort of shrouded mysterious enigma ever since his fateful death back on March 31, 1993. Like his father, Brandon Lee died young, under unorthodox circumstances and was also on the precipice of super stardom as an actor and practitioner of the martial arts. That unfortunately never got attained for him and in the wake of his death, Brandon Lee didn’t become the kind of iconic almost mythical figure that his father became in the wake of his passing in 1973, but instead, the younger Lee became a sort of footnote to the whole Hollywood pool of unfortunate, work-related deaths. But make no mistake, Lee was on a path to put himself as a successor to some of the empire his father had built; films like Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire were starting to put Lee in the driver’s seat as an action star of these kind of purposely bombastically cinema potboilers, where dialogue and narrative took a back seat to the stunning visuals of the martial arts on screen, and he seemed poised to become the next action star, like a Van Damme or Steven Seagal.
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