Review | Bruce Lee’s death: biography offers a bizarre new theory

Bruce Lee: A Life
by Matthew Polly
Simon & Schuster

Bruce Lee may have died 45 years ago this month, but he remains one of the best-known Chinese celebrities. Lee’s films kick-started the kung fu genre, turning martial arts into a global phenomenon and boosting the Hong Kong movie industry’s reputation internationally.

Lee is one of the top-earning dead celebrities – and on a relatively slim body of work: he featured in just three kung fu films that were released while he was alive (The Big Boss [1971], Fist of Fury [1972] and Way of the Dragon [1972]). Two others (Enter the Dragon [1973] and Game of Death [1978]) were released after his death, at the age of 32, on July 20, 1973 – just six days before the release of Enter the Dragon would make him a global superstar.

Matthew Polly’s new biography is long overdue but does Hong Kong’s most famous son proud. And Polly has credentials: he studied kung fu himself, at the celebrated Shaolin Temple, in Henan province, in the early 1990s. The writer vividly describes how Lee mastered and advanced various martial arts forms, and he exercises a pleasing biographical rigour, with extensive notes and citations, as well as a 14-page bibliography.

With a background in the wing chun form of kung fu, Lee added nimble movements learned from boxing and cha-cha dancing (he had been a champion dancer in his youth). He strived to develop a fighting style tailored to the indivi­dual, and changed Hong Kong cinema along the way: sudden­ly, movie stars were as or more important than the studios, which had traditionally treated lead actors as dispos­able camera fodder.

He was determined, individualistic and proudly Chinese at a time when minorities were expected to be quiescent and actors to do as they were told. (Polly writes that people working with Lee on Enter the Dragon found him difficult, yet the changes he demanded improved the film.)