The 1993 film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is the most famous biopic about the life and
death of Bruce Lee.
However, the movie definitely takes significant liberties with the details of Lee's life.
Here are a few of the times Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story lied to you.
Bruce Lee was proud of his Chinese heritage, but his background was actually quite multicultural.
Bruce Lee's biographer, Matthew Polly, discovered from Lee's ancestry that the legendary fighter
was only five-eighths Chinese, in addition to being one-quarter English and one-eighth
Dutch-Jewish.
According to Vice, Lee's mother, Grace, a member of a prestigious and affluent Eurasian
family, eloped with his father, Lee Hoi Chuen, a Chinese opera singer, much to the horror
of her family.
It was during one of Hoi Chuen's tours in America that Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco,
giving baby Bruce American citizenship.
Although Lee had a rich cultural background, it wasn't entirely beneficial when he started
studying kung fu in Hong Kong.
The young Bruce studied under the renowned master Ip Man, but many of his fellow students
didn't support Bruce receiving instruction since he wasn't full-blooded Chinese.
The oft-mentioned rule in The Bruce Lee Story about non-Chinese not being allowed kung fu
instruction was real, but eventually would fade out.
From watching the movie, it would be easy to believe that Bruce Lee didn't get his big
break in entertainment until he came to the United States.
Not so.
Coming from a family of industry veterans, Bruce already had plenty of experience in
film acting, long before he landed in America.
According to Biography, he had his first onscreen role at the age of three months, when he acted
as the stand-in for an American baby in the 1941 film Golden Gate Girl.
From 1946 onward, Lee appeared in over 20 Chinese films as a child actor.
His biggest break in American entertainment culture would come when he played the role
of Kato in the short-lived TV series The Green Hornet.
While he was a well-known actor in China, Lee would only cement his place in American
pop culture history after the posthumous release of the film Enter The Dragon.
In the beginning of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, we see the young Bruce living with
his father in a shabby little apartment in Hong Kong.
They appear to be living in near-poverty.
In reality, the exact opposite was true, the Lee family was quite wealthy.
According to Lee's biographer, the Lees had a nice home with a chauffeur and two live-in
maids, a far cry from the run-down flat we saw in the biopic.
When the Lee family sent young Bruce to the United States to keep him out of trouble,
they didn't even send him overseas alone to make his way,
"You'll have to leave Hong Kong."
"For how long?"
"Forever."
He went to live with family friends and worked as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, but
the restaurant belonged to the family friend.
In fact, unlike in the film, Lee never arrived in America as a ship passenger in steerage.
He was upgraded to first class after he started giving cha-cha lessons to ship passengers,
as Lee was also a renowned cha-cha dancing champion in Hong Kong.
"Did I ever tell you I was the cha-cha champion of Hong Kong?"
"About 15 thousand times."
The movie showed the young Bruce Lee leaving Hong Kong after beating up a few British sailors,
which isn't exactly what happened.
Hong Kong was still under British rule at the time, so Lee's affluent private school
consisted of both the children of Hong Kong's elite families and the children of the British
upper crust.
According to Newsweek, Lee and his fellow Chinese classmates were bullied by British
students.
In retaliation, Lee formed his own gang called the Junction Street Eight Tigers.
As further reported by Newsweek, Lee later recounted his street gang days in a 1967 interview
with Black Belt magazine:
"I was a punk and went looking for fights.
We used chains and pens with knives hidden inside.
Then, one day, I wondered what would happen if I didn't have my gang behind me if I got
into a fight."
According to Lee, he was beaten very badly when an older student used a kung fu technique
during a fight.
This prompted Lee to begin his studies under the grandmaster Ip Man to avoid feeling helpless
again.
However, his lessons never did keep him completely out of trouble.
After a run-in with the police, Lee was sent to America for a fresh start.
One of the most eventful scenes in Dragon takes place when Lee goes head-to-head with
a kung fu master named Johnny Sun.
When it looks as though Lee has won the fight and he turns to depart, Sun attacks Lee from
behind in what is regarded as a dishonorable move, breaking Lee's back.
It's a memorable scene, but the actual story is far less intense.
Lee never actually "broke" his back.
He injured his back very severely, but it wasn't from a power struggle with another
fighter.
According to his official website, Lee hurt his back in 1969 during a routine exercise
session, due to not warming up properly beforehand.
The cause of the injury might sound fairly mundane, but the damage was no joke.
The injury to his back was so severe that doctors told Lee that he could never practice
martial arts again, and might not even be able to fully walk properly.
Lee was confined to his bed for almost a year, where he spent his time researching his injury.
While he never "recovered" in the traditional sense, a combination of therapy and Lee's
knowledge of kinesthetics and martial arts helped create a path to healing to the point
where he was eventually able to go back to training and teaching.
Lee's fight with Johnny Sun in the film made for tense storytelling, but Sun didn't exist,
a martial arts master named Wong Jack Man did.
While the Chinese-only martial arts code was a real rule, the policy was dying off by the
1960s.
The real reason for the fight?
To put the nuanced situation simply, the fight happened as a result of Bruce Lee's trash
talk.
"I'll beat any man in this room in 60 seconds!"
"What!?"
According to Vice, Lee was critical of other teachers' kung fu practices, deeming them
"ineffective."
Lee often liked to demonstrate existing practices and then explain why they wouldn't work.
A particularly brutal lecture delivered at the Long Beach Tournament, during which Lee
appeared highly condescending, raised the ire of many martial artists.
Many challenged Lee, and Wong Jack Man was one such challenger.
There are a few theories explaining why Wong stepped up, but the likely one is that he
wanted publicity for a new martial arts school he aspired to open.
The fight between Lee and Wong took place behind closed doors, with only seven other
people to witness the fight.
"They just faced off and went at it."
The overall consensus was that the fight was rapid, intense, and raw, with Lee being the
more aggressive and Wong more elusive, but there's no consensus on who the overall winner
was.
By all accounts, Bruce Lee is widely regarded as a "kinetic genius," which Matthew Polly
discusses in his biography.
While Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story shows Lee's many struggles in overcoming his injured back,
it never mentions that Lee had other significant physical issues.
These issues came to light after Lee was drafted into the US Army in 1963, though he was ultimately
rejected from service when it was revealed he had poor eyesight, a sinus disorder, and
an undescended testicle.
While Lee was capable of mastering just about any form of martial arts, he had other physical
limitations, such as never learning to swim, according to his siblings.
Contrary to popular myth, Lee was able to ride a bike, however.
Bruce Lee met his wife, Linda Emery, while they were attending the University of Washington,
and Linda became a student at his kung fu school.
The two were very much in love and married in 1964, an unusual union for the time, as
Bruce was Chinese and Linda was white.
The movie did show Linda defying her racist mother and eloping with Lee-
"I don't wanna rain on your parade Mr. Lee, but the world needs hamburgers, it doesn't
need judo."
"Kung Fu."
"Whatever."
but according to Linda Lee Cadwell, her wedding day to Lee was a bit less dramatic.
It was true that her family did not approve of her marrying outside of her race over concerns
of hardships and discrimination, but Linda and Bruce did marry in a congregational church
with Linda's mother and grandmother in attendance.
The film also never mentions that, while Bruce and Linda married in 1964, their marriage
wasn't accepted everywhere at the time.
It wasn't just Linda's family that disapproved of their union, some state laws didn't approve,
either.
The Supreme Court wouldn't force all states to recognize interracial marriages until 1967.
It took Lee a while to find onscreen fame in the United States, but he was doing amazing
things behind the scenes.
One aspect The Bruce Lee Story never really covers is just how much of an impact Lee made
on the sets, by personally training many of Hollywood's biggest stars.
Such actors who came under Lee's tutelage included Stirling Silliphant , Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, Steve McQueen and James Coburn, with the latter two actually
serving as pallbearers at Lee's funeral in 1973.
Another of Bruce Lee's famous Hollywood acquaintances was none other than the future action star
Chuck Norris.
While he never trained Norris, Lee and Norris did work together, and the two filmed a fight
scene in the movie The Way of the Dragon.
In an interview with Black Belt, Norris recalled working with Bruce with immense fondness and
respect, saying-
"Bruce Lee learned from everybody.
He had a very open mind.
He never believed in only one martial arts style or that one was superior.
He believed that everything had strengths and weaknesses and that we should find the
strengths in each method."
One major plot point in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story dealt with Lee's struggles in the
American entertainment industry.
In one notable scene, Bruce Lee is shown discussing with a producer his idea to make a kung fu
western TV show.
"How about the Wild West?"
"Okay, great.
The Wild West."
"Okay."
"Chinese immigrant wanders the land."
"He's a good guy, a hero."
"Of course he's a hero, he's the star of the show."
Later, we see the show has been made, but with David Carradine in the starring role.
It was heavily implied that the producer essentially stole Lee's original idea for the TV series,
Kung Fu.
But Lee never actually came up with the story, a Jewish comedy writer with a passion for
Asian culture named Ed Spielman did.
Warner Brothers executive Fred Weintraub took an interest in the script and retooled the
idea, making Kung Fu a weekly TV show.
Lee was Weintraub's first choice for the lead, and he auditioned for the role, but studio
heads complained that his accent couldn't be understood.
After other Asian actors auditioned and were met with similar complaints, the white actor
David Carradine was selected, and the character's Asian ancestry was minimized.
Although Bruce Lee only starred in five films as an adult, the impact he made on the film
industry was remarkable.
Lee can also be given significant credit for sparking the martial arts rage of the 1970s.
Even after Bruce Lee's untimely death and the subsequent international success of his
final movie, Enter The Dragon, Bruce Lee fervor didn't die down, if anything, it only increased.
In fact, it could be said that Lee's fans weren't ready to let him go.
As described by Radio Times, what came after Lee's death was a slew of martial arts films
that were later dubbed "Bruceploitation" films.
Asian filmmakers still wanted to cash in on Lee's popularity, so they sought Bruce Lee
lookalikes to star in martial arts films.
Most of these Bruce "clones" were billed with similar names and a typical Brucepolitation
film usually highlighted iconic tropes from Lee's films, including a war cry and a set
of nunchaku.
Some of the movies featured wildly bizarre and often tasteless plots, such as The Dragon
Lives Again, where "Bruce Lee" fights Dracula, James Bond, and Popeye in the depths of hell,
or Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave, in which a Bruce Lee imitator literally pops
out of his tomb after it gets struck by lightning.
Throughout the film, we see Lee having nightmares of a strange demon, the result of a family
curse.
When the movie ends, Lee's death is revealed, through Linda Lee's final narration that her
husband died after slipping into "a mysterious coma" on July 20, 1973.
"Three weeks before the opening of Enter the Dragon, the film that brought him international
fame, Bruce fell into a mysterious coma and died."
Lee's premature death was startling but not terribly mysterious.
There have been many conspiracy theories around Bruce Lee's death, but the cause was ruled
as cerebral edema, a swelling of the brain that appeared to have been caused by an allergic
reaction to a painkiller.
However, Matthew Polly, Lee's biographer, suggests that heat stroke may have played
a role in Lee's brain swelling.
Polly notes that Lee collapsed from heat stroke three months earlier, after working in a hot
editing room with no air conditioning.
He had been sleeping and eating less.
The sweat glands in his underarms had been removed, as Lee disliked sweat stains.
On top of all that, the day Lee died was one of the hottest days in Hong Kong that year.
As Polly explained to CNN-
"If you haven't been sleeping, if you've lost a bunch of weight, if you remove the sweat
glands under the armpits, then you're less likely to deal with heat than you would have
beforehand.
Even a healthy man can die in those conditions."
In 2002, Linda Lee Cadwell and her daughter Shannon started The Bruce Lee Foundation in
honor of Bruce Lee's memory, and to share his art and philosophy with the next generation.
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