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Bruce Lee was the man who brought kung fu to
the West with his famous film Enter the Dragon.
Although Bruce Lee was born in Chinatown in
San Francisco in 1940, his parents soon moved back to Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Hong Kong
shortly afterwards but the family survived.
His father Lee Hoi Chuon was a famous
Cantonese opera singer and actor and his mother Grace was a
wealthy aristocrat from Hong Kong. In 1957 Lee fought and won
the Hong Kong high school boxing championship and then became
the Hong Kong cha cha cha champion for 1958.
At the age of 18, he returned to the United
States where his sister and brother lived. He studied drama and
philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle. Then he
opened his first martial arts school where he taught his friends
Jun Fan Gung Fu.
Bruce Lee then had the original idea behind
the very famous TV series Kung Fu but Warner Bros. decided not
to have a Chinese person as the star of the series. As a
result, Bruce and wife and children caught a plane to Hong Kong.
Back in Hong Kong, Bruce immediately made
three very successful films with director Raymond Chow called
The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon. There is a
very famous fight scene in The Way of the Dragon with Chuck
Norris filmed in the Colosseum in Rome where the gladiators
fought. His last film was Enter the Dragon and was also a huge
hit. The movie has made more than 200 million US dollars.
Bruce Lee was a philosopher as well as a
fighter and wrote a lot of books. He believed that all knowlegde
eventually became self-knowledge.
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