Bruce Lee’s forgotten child star start: before Enter the Dragon and breaking into Hollywood, the martial arts actor was Hong Kong’s ‘Little Dragon Li’ after landing his first role as a baby
- The martial arts superstar would miss the release of his final Hong Kong film, The Orphan, in 1960, as he had left for a new life in the US before it came out
- Lee followed in his father Li Hoi-chuen’s footsteps into showbiz, racking up a healthy number of film roles after his Hong Kong debut, The Birth of Mankind, in 1946
There are many iconic scenes from Bruce Lee’s films. There are the nunchucks and Colosseum fights from Way of the Dragon, the hall of mirrors showdown that marks the climax of Enter the Dragon, and the visually striking bout between the 7-foot-2-inch (2.18 metre) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the rather more diminutive Lee from Game of Death.
Lee started acting young – very young, in fact. His first-ever role came as a newborn baby in Esther Eng’s Golden Gate Girl, filmed in California. Lee’s father, Li Hoi-chuen, was a friend of Eng, who wanted a baby for certain scenes in her movie about an estranged family who eventually reconcile over the need to support China’s war effort against Japan.
Li, a former Cantonese opera actor, was all too aware of the vagaries of a career in acting and was reluctant to set his son on the same precarious path. However, given his friend’s request and the need for members of the Chinese diaspora to help each other out, Li eventually agreed.
At this stage of his life, Lee hadn’t even learned to crawl, but he was still ready for his close-up (and his one and only performance pretending to be a girl). Lee only appears for a couple of scenes – one where he is being rocked to sleep and another where he wails and flails like a typical disgruntled baby – but few stars can claim to have started work so young.
The film was The Birth of Mankind (1946) and for this minor melodrama Lee played a young runaway who eventually turns to petty crime before being hit by a truck. Unlike his later work, the film was no hit and is only notable for typecasting Lee as a tough, streetwise kid with a heart of gold – exactly the kind of role he’d be given, with slight tweaks, for most of his childhood acting career. This included his next film, Wealth is Like a Dream (1948), where he played a boy lost after the turbulence of World War II.
After these bit parts, Lee was able to sink his teeth into something meatier two years later. Director Fung Fung was adapting the popular comic Kid Cheung by Yuen Po-wan and needed a child actor with just the right mix of street smarts and kindness. Fung saw Lee’s previous work and went to ask his father’s permission to cast him in his film (which would be released as The Kid and, alternatively, My Son A-Chang in English).