Bruce Lee essays

Bruce Lee essays It was Bruce Lees ability, on screen and off, to cross this gap between Zen intent and violent result that made him truly special. He was a great fighter and an interesting human being who knew how to communicate to both East and West. Alex Ben Block, The Legend of Bruce Lee In light of this quotation, how did Bruce Lee bridge the gulf between Eastern and Western audiences to become an international film star? For many of his fans all across the world, Bruce Lee has achieved an almost God-like status. Many of the books written about him posthumously are written by people who greatly admire the man, people who negate the value of Bruce Lee: the international film star and instead focus, to an almost obsessive level, on Bruce Lee: the king of Kung Fu, Bruce Lee: the Eastern philosopher, Bruce Lee: the mystical sensei, Bruce Lee: the legend. This may be due to his sudden and untimely death in 1973. Less than a year after his death, the writer Alex Ben Block predicted, quite rightly, that, Someday far down the line, after East and West have met, people will tell Bruce Lee stories in the same dreamy way people tell Jimmy Dean or Buddy Holly or Janis Joplin stories. My aim in this essay is to discard all the myths that surround Bruce Lee, all the speculations about the man himself. My focus will be Bruce Lee the film star, the image that he created which appealed to both East and West. In his unfortunately short adult career he completed four films and I will examine these to try and find what it was about Bruce Lee that made him an international star, the qualities that made him popular in both Hong Kong and Britain/America. In the Chinese Year of the Dragon, on 27th November 1940, a baby boy was born to Lee Hoi Cheun (a minor star of the Cantonese Opera Company of Hong Kong) and his wife, Grace. The city of the birth was San Francisco, but this ...