When both of the most significant men in your life pass away at an untimely age, how do you cope? The martial arts icon Bruce Lee’s daughter explains what inspired her to continue and how she is carrying on the family tradition.
Shannon Lee is talking upbeat about her experience attending an Oregon darkness retreat. She spent four days in a pitch-black, underground cottage in the woods, unable to see her own hands. This would frighten most people. However, Lee claims it felt freeing. Your thoughts and feelings are all that you have, and they begin to surface. As a result, you get to see a lot, which may be uncomfortable. I left feeling really energized.
The 54-year-old granddaughter of legendary American martial artist Bruce Lee of Hong Kong has always been a kind person. She was like way because of the deaths of her father, who passed away when she was four years old and his 32-year-old brother, Brandon, 20 years later. Speaking on a video conference from her Los Angeles office, she herself as a “seeker” who has long been curious about other routes to “healing.” Her father, a self-proclaimed philosopher and prolific journaler who filled an ever-expanding stack of notebooks with his ideas and feelings about life and work, served as an inspiration to her.
Bruce’s letters, images, drawings, and poetry are collected in her new book, In My Own Process, which aims to convey “the depth of the challenges he faced, the depth of his accomplishments.” It features articles and interviews with a number of his well-known acquaintances and admirers, including as Ang Lee, Jackie Chan, and former co-star and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Lee wishes for her father to be recognized as “more than just the kung fu guy.” “A deep thinker, a very thoughtful and forward-thinking person,” is how she describes Bruce.
Bruce continues to be among the most accomplished and significant martial artists of all time. He battled against on-screen stereotypes, refusing to play any roles he thought racist, and overcome pervasive racism in the entertainment industry to become Hollywood’s first Asian superstar.
He moved to Hong Kong and made the enormous movie office hits The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and The Way of the Dragon after becoming dissatisfied with the dearth of strong roles in the US. Tragically, he passed away in 1973 at the age of sixty-six, six days before Enter the Dragon, a worldwide hit, was released. A cerebral oedema resulting from an adverse response to a headache medicine was the cause of death.
Lee doesn’t have clear memories of her father. His enthusiasm is what she remembers the most. “He had a really explosive playing style. He was a little rigid. I still recall the warmth and brightness of the moment spent with him. There is a lot of affection. She does remember clearly the thousands of people that lined the streets for Bruce’s funeral in Hong Kong. It was quite the show. I just recall how you were being taken through the entire parade in a condition of shock and detachment.
Since she was in her 30s, Lee has been the steward of her father’s legacy. She and her mother Linda, a former educator who first encountered the actor while she was a student in one of the actor’s martial arts classes at the University of Washington, co-founded the Bruce Lee Foundation. Following his passing, ludicrous conspiracy theories began to circulate, claiming he had overdosed on drugs, been poisoned by a jealous lover, or been killed by members of the Trinity.
According to Lee, the hypotheses “speak to the greatness of his life.” “When I was a child, it used to irritate me when people would claim that ninjas, rival gangs, or the martial arts technique known as the “death touch” were responsible for his death. However, after giving it some thought, I realize that he was a fighter and that no one should consider him to be just ordinary.
Lee has the cutest laugh and is sociable, insightful, and conversational. She and Brandon, who was four years her senior, grew raised in southern California. Later, her mother was married twice more. When Lee was younger, she used to chat to herself and love to lose herself in her fantasy. “I did a lot of role-playing. I used to write stories when I was a little older. I started reading a lot more now. She was more quiet than her brother and father, who were both “larger than life.”
Her brother, who Lee refers to as “a big, boisterous ball of energy,” and her were close. He enjoyed making jokes about her. “I was tortured by him.” But he was also my shield when it counted. He would intervene if someone was mistreating me. She assisted him on the 1992 movie Rapid Fire when he started acting. “I would get advice from him.”
Lee holds a degree in vocal performance and is a singer with classical training. She considered going into music as a career, but ultimately she chose to become an actor, just like her father and brother. In 1993’s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, a biography of her father’s life, she landed her first job as a party singer singing California Dreamin’ when she was just twenty years old. “Actually, it was quite sweet because my mother informs my father that she is expecting me in that scene.”
In her 20s, she took up martial arts as a means of strengthening her bond with her father. Bruce learned Wing Chun techniques before creating his own martial arts system, which is today called Jeet Kune Do. Lee claims, “He created his own art.” However, she felt pressured to uphold her father’s reputation as an actor. Lee played a prostitute in Cage II and a gangster’s mistress in High Voltage, her principal roles in action movies. Similar to her father, she was cast in the martial arts thriller Enter the Eagles, which was her first leading part in a Hong Kong production.
My father is a martial artist, and I have never been the same,” she declares. “There aren’t many people like that. It was exceedingly difficult due of expectations. They were only interested in hiring me for martial arts action scenes, and they expected me to be exceptionally skilled.
However, she was unable to dedicate herself to her new job because her brother passed away tragically on the set of The Crow, right when she was getting started. With his father’s seductive good looks and innate aptitude for martial arts, Brandon was on the verge of fame after appearing in Legacy of Rage and Showdown in Little Tokyo. However, in 1993, while filming, he was unintentionally shot and murdered by a malfunctioning prop gun that co-star Michael Massee had fired.
Lee’s mother received a call informing her of his injuries. From her home in New Orleans, she hopped on a plane to Wilmington, North Carolina, the filming location for The Crow. “While we were on the plane, I had a feeling that he had passed away,” she claims. Bruce was buried close to Brandon in Seattle, Washington’s Lake View Cemetery.
Lee was devastated. She and her brother had huge ideas. When he got engaged to personal assistant Eliza Hutton, he requested her to be his best man at his wedding. Lee intended to relocate to his current residence of Los Angeles in order to pursue acting. “We both had a great anticipation for spending time together.”
She went into a profound depression after his passing. “I was having a lot of discomfort and struggling. I silently repeated to myself, “I can’t feel like this,” over and over in my head. This is not how I can live. This is excessive. How do I put an end to it? The journals her father had kept had been crammed into filing cabinets and stacked in crates. Only after Brandon’s death did she begin to read them.
“The medicine for my suffering I had within me from the very beginning, but I didn’t take it,” is my favorite quote from him. It struck me hard in the chest. I was informed, “You are the only one who can find a solution for yourself.” Unexpected benefits resulted from this enhanced knowledge. “I began to realize that I had not realized I had been mildly depressed for the majority of my life.”
Bad memories of her brother’s death returned with the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in 2021 on the Rust set when a live round went off from a pretend handgun carried by actor Alec Baldwin. According to Lee, “the circumstances are very similar.” “It really just makes you wonder: Why is the life of a person less important than the making of a movie?” Rust’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted guilty of involuntary manslaughter last month. Baldwin has entered a not guilty plea to the additional charge of involuntary manslaughter and is scheduled to go on trial in July.
Lee is in favor of prohibiting live firearms on movie productions. “That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. However, if you’re not going to take that action, then I believe legislation and more effective safety measures than the ones in place now need to be put in place. The cause of Brandon’s death was determined to be negligence, and Lee’s mother filed a successful lawsuit against the filmmakers for an undisclosed sum even though no charges were filed.
Later this year, a reboot of The Crow, which was released thirty years ago, will star Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård and musician FKA Twigs. Lee has seen the initial photos of Skarsgård as Eric Draven, who has numerous tattoos. “I don’t think anyone will ever take my brother’s place in that capacity. He did a wonderful job embodying that character. Nobody enjoys seeing a person’s legacy overshadowed by something else. Since people adore this character, I can see why they keep making it. However, I believe that my brother’s performance will last forever.
She claims that losing a brother and then her father while she was so young was terrible. It is unbearable to have them gone from your life. All you can do is try to think out a way to go on. Afterwards, there are times when you think, “I wish that person was here.” Individuals frequently pose queries such as, “What do you think life would have been like if…?” I never indulged in that kind of daydreaming too much because it isn’t productive. To begin with, it will never be the case. Rather than dwelling on what might have been, I must deal with what is. However, assimilating all of that is the task of life.
A few months after Brandon’s passing, she relocated to Los Angeles and struggled to pursue her acting profession, but her heart wasn’t in it. She ultimately chose to resign. She explains, “It was a really torturous time in my life.” “I was grieving profoundly for my brother. Compared to currently, I would be able to attend to that much more easily. I was so harsh with myself.
At the time, Lee was too vulnerable to bear the constant criticism about her beauty and the barrage of rejections that accompany being an actor. It can be quite difficult if you’re not in a good place. Along with that, she was considering expanding her family with her husband, lawyer Ian Keasler, whom she had married in 1994 after they had become friends while attending university. Wren is the couple’s 21-year-old daughter.
She just returned to acting in Warrior, an Asian-led martial arts criminal drama based on Bruce’s eight-page script, marking her 21st year in the business. In addition to serving as the show’s executive producer, Lee made a brief appearance as a distraught mother. “I really enjoyed it, but it was nerve-racking.” Although she doesn’t currently have any acting projects in the works, she refers to her return as a “gift”.
Bruce is still a well-known character in popular culture. In his 2019 film Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino included a fight sequence with the martial arts legend that drew criticism for portraying Bruce as a brazen, untrained fighter. The director was criticized by Lee for portraying her father as a “buffoon.” She says, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” “Every time I talk about it, his fans send me hate mail.”
She acknowledges that it has occasionally been difficult to live a life so deeply entwined with her father’s and brother’s legacy, but Lee is thankful for the opportunity to show her family how much she loves them. “I have learned a great deal from death. It’s given me life lessons. You have to come to terms with your own mortality and learn how to let go when someone you love passes away. For if you try to hang on for too long, Your life will be ruined by it. It takes a while to learn this difficult lesson. However, you get at your destination eventually.