Bruce Lee’s daughter says Quentin Tarantino ‘could shut up’ as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood row escalates

Shannon Lee hits back after director says her father was ‘kind of an arrogant guy’

‘On the one hand, he wants to put this forward as fact and, on the other hand, he wants to stay in fiction’

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Shannon Lee is in a war of words with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino.

Published: 10:36am, 16 Aug 2019Updated: 11:50am, 16 Aug 2019

Shannon Lee has hit back in a war of words with Quentin Tarantino over the “arrogant” depiction of her father, the martial arts icon Bruce Lee, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

“He could shut up about it,” she told Variety. “That would be really nice. Or he could apologise or he could say, ‘I don’t really know what Bruce Lee was like. I just wrote it for my movie. But that shouldn’t be taken as how he really was.’”

Tarantino defended his portrayal of Lee – played by Mike Moh – at a press conference for his latest film in Moscow last week.

“Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy,” the American director said. “The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that, to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well he never said he could beat up Muhammad Ali’. Well, yeah, he did. Not only did he say that, but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read. She absolutely said that.”

The passage Tarantino referred to in Linda Lee Cadwell’s book, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, does not in fact quote her, but a critic:

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