Father and Son

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.