Brandon Lee

Biography

Brandon Bruce Lee (???, pinyin: L? Guóháo February 1, 1965–March 31, 1993) was an American actor, the son of actor Bruce Lee and his wife Linda Emery.
Early life
Brandon Lee was born in Oakland, California to Martial artist and actor Bruce Lee, and his American wife Linda Emery. The family moved to Los Angeles, California when Brandon was three months old. When offers for film roles became limited for his father, the family moved to his father's homeland of Hong Kong in 1971, where Bruce Lee made several films from 1971 - 1973.
When he was 8 years old Brandon's father Bruce died from a cerebral edema. After his death his mother moved Brandon and his younger sister Shannon (born in 1969) back to the United States. They lived shortly in his mother's hometown of Seattle (where Bruce Lee was buried) and then to Los Angeles, where Brandon grew up in the affluent area of Rolling Hills.
He attended high school at The Chadwick School, but was kicked out three months shy of graduating for insubordination. He received his GED in 1983 and then went to Emerson College in Boston, MA where he majored in theatre. After one year Lee moved to New York City where he took acting lessons at the famed Lee Strasberg Academy, and was part of the American New Theatre group founded by his friend John Lee Hancock.

Theatric career
Lee returned to Los Angeles in 1985, where he worked for Ruddy Morgan Productions as a script reader. He was asked to read for the part in Kung Fu: The Movie in 1985 and got the part. He continued to study acting privately and appeared in local theatre productions and low budget films. In 1991 he starred in Showdown in Little Tokyo, his first studio film, and then did his first starring role in Rapid Fire. He signed a multi-picture deal with 20th Century Fox in 1991 and was slated to do two more films for them. In 1992 he landed the lead role of Eric Draven in the movie adaptation of The Crow, the popular underground comic book of the same name. It would be his last film.

The Circumstances Leading Up To Brandon Lee's Fatal Accident
Because The Crow's second unit team were running behind schedule when the union’s bond company were due to inspect, it was decided that rather than invest in dummy bullets that were needed for certain scenes, they would be ‘made’ from illegal real bullets that had unknowing been brought on to the set some weeks earlier. Bruce Merlin, a vastly experienced effects technician set about dismantling the real bullets by removing the lead tips, empting out the gunpowder, reattaching the tips and then detonating the primer at the base of the casing. In effect there would be no primer and no gunpowder, but because the tips had been reattached the object would appear as a real bullet but be completely safe. Merlin and his Propmaster Daniel Kuttner got to work and soon took the intuitive that they should also create some ‘blank bullets’.
Blank bullets exist only for the visual effect which is created by the amount of powder in the casing. To create these Merlin and Kuttner removed the tips from the real bullets and replaced the gunpowder with firework powder. Full, half and quarter load display different sizes of light when the gun is fired, the primer would obviously not be detonated because that would be needed to ignite the powder. The tips were not reattached.
It’s safe to assume that one of the blanks with little powder in it was mistaken for a dummy and had its tip reattached - creating an item which was made up of a primer, powder and tip. In other words, a real bullet. During second unit scenes this was fired and contained just enough power to eject the tip out of the chamber, but not enough to get all the way out of the barrel, where it remained undetected.
Weeks later when the first unit required the gun to shoot Lee’s death scene the chamber was loaded with full load blanks, which Kuttner, as always, made sure had no tips. Fatally, perhaps understandably, he did not think to check the barrel. Consequently Lee was accidently shot and killed as cameras rolled in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was buried next to his father in Lake View Cemetery, Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington.
The shooting was ruled an accident, though many fans suspected foul play. (Bruce Lee's own death in 1973 at age 32, apparently from a reaction to painkillers, was also considered suspicious.) Oddly, Bruce Lee's character in Game of Death is shot in a similar fashion. Bruce's character, like Brandon's in The Crow, does return ("from the dead," although the character did not actually die) to get revenge on his adversaries.