# Father and Son *A Biography of Bruce And Brandon Lee* — Legendary Biographies No. 058 - **Subject:** Lee Jun-fan (Bruce Lee) and Brandon Bruce Lee - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 196 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-491-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · 6h 17m · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-578-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/058-father-and-son.html ## About this book July 20, 1973, the Hong Kong apartment of the actress Betty Ting Pei. Bruce Lee, thirty-two, the founder of Jeet Kune Do and the star of Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, and the still-unreleased Enter the Dragon, takes a painkiller and lies down for a nap. He never wakes up. The autopsy will record a cerebral edema. Twenty years later, on March 31, 1993, his son Brandon Lee, twenty-eight, on the Wilmington, North Carolina set of The Crow, is shot in the abdomen by a prop revolver that has discharged the tip of a dummy round lodged in the barrel. He dies at New Hanover Regional Medical Center twelve hours later. Donovan Hadley's biography is the joint life of a father and son the American martial-arts cinema has never been able to consider separately. The book traces Bruce's San Francisco birth in 1940, the Hong Kong childhood and the Green Hornet American breakthrough, the Linda Emery marriage and the children Brandon (1965) and Shannon (1969), the Hong Kong return and the four Asian-market films, the Enter the Dragon posthumous release; and Brandon's Boston Conservatory years, the long apprenticeship in B-grade action films, the Rapid Fire and the Crow leading roles, and the prop-gun accident on the Wilmington set. What emerges is a portrait of the two American-Hong Kong actors whose careers the screens of both countries did not finish before either was thirty-three. ## Contents 1. Year of the Dragon 2. The Dragon Learns 3. The Way of No Way 4. The Green Hornet 5. The Big Boss 6. The Wall 7. Enter the Dragon 8. The One-Inch Punch 9. Game of Death 10. July 20, 1973 11. The Son's Burden 12. Rapid Fire 13. In the Shadow 14. The Crow Rises 15. March 31, 1993 16. The Investigation 17. Two Unfinished Films 18. The Hillside ## Questions **Who is Father and Son about?** Lee Jun-fan (Bruce Lee) and Brandon Bruce Lee. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Father and Son — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,260 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 196 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 6h 17m, measured from the finished masters. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.