27 November: Bruce Lee

Martial artist and actor Bruce Lee was born on this date in 1940. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. Although his parents lived in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, because his father was an Opera singer and had taken his family on a US tour. He was born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon, on the Day of the Dragon, and at the Hour of the Dragon, which according to tradition is an extremely fortuitous omen, and led to him being nicknamed "Little Dragon".
2. His mother was half German.
3. His parents gave him the name Lee Jun Fan, which means "return again", because his mother was sure that he would one day return to America. The name Bruce was given to him by one of the staff at the hospital where he was born. His parents never used the name Bruce when he was a child.
4. His first appearance in a film was when he was a baby, in the film Golden Gate Girl. By the time he was ten, he was a child star in Hong Kong. His first starring role was in the 1950 film The Kid, in which he played Kid Cheung, a streetwise orphan and troublemaker, based on a comic strip from the time. Lee's father was also in the film.
5. The film was successful enough that a sequel was planned, but by this time, the teenage Bruce Lee was becoming something of a bad boy, getting into fights at school. His punishment was not being allowed to act. One time, he beat up the son of a feared triad family; another he took part in a rooftop fight between two rival martial arts schools. He knocked out one opponent's tooth which resulted in the boy's parents calling the police. Lee's mother had to go to a police station and sign a document saying that she would take full responsibility for Bruce's actions if they released him into her custody. It was at this point she realised that it might be best if he went to America to live, before he ended up in a Hong Kong jail. She suggested this to her husband who agreed he'd get a better education there, and never told him about the police incident.
6. As a teenager, his passion was dancing, and he was pretty good at that, too, winning the Hong Kong cha-cha championship in 1958. He was quite obsessive about it, too, carrying notes on the 108 cha-cha steps around with him so he could memorise them all.
7. He studied philosophy at university but dropped out to start a martial arts school with a friend. Before his big break in Hollywood, he would teach other actors martial arts. Among Lee’s students were Steve McQueen, James Coburn, James Garner, Roman Polanski, and Sharon Tate. In fact, he lived close to Roman Polanski, and Sharon Tate at the time of Tate's murder. Polanski actually thought he was the killer after Lee mentioned he'd lost his glasses, and a pair had been found at the crime scene. Polanski offered to take Lee to the optician to get a new pair, not out of kindness, but so he could see if Lee's prescription matched the glasses found at the crime scene. It didn't.
8. Some of the feats Lee could perform included snatching a coin off a person's palm before they could close it, and replace the coin with another and catching a grain of Rice in mid-air with chopsticks. In 1962, Bruce Lee landed 15 punches, a kick, and knocked out his opponent in a fight that lasted just 11 seconds. In fact, his reaction times, kicks and punches were so fast that for one scene in Enter the Dragon, they had to re-film it in slow motion so it wouldn’t look fake.
9. His secret hobby was writing poetry.
10. He died in 1973, aged just 32. The cause of his death was reported as "misadventure" and thought to be from swelling of the brain caused by an allergic reaction to a pain killer he took before lying down for a nap from which he never woke. There were other theories, including that he'd been killed by triads, or that he'd died as a result of having his underarm sweat glands removed so he'd not have sweat stains on his clothes on camera, which made him more susceptible to heat stroke, and that was what killed him. He even appeared in a film after his death. When he died, he'd been directing and appearing in a film called Game of Death. There was a brief plot outline (“The big fight. An arrest is made. The airport. The end.”), and 40 minutes of footage. Normally such a project would have been abandoned, but the producers wanted to do something with it, so they brought in Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse to cobble together something from that, plus footage from Lee's previous films and scenes using stand ins and even a cardboard cut-out of Lee. When the film called for Lee’s character to fake his death, they used footage from his actual funeral, complete with mourners, pallbearers, and close-ups of the open casket.

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