Saturdays with the Stars: Bruce Lee

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Steve McQueen, one of the quintessential figures of New Hollywood, and maybe the ultimate "cool guy" of the era.  With June, we are nearing the halfway point of our year, and also nearing uncharted waters.  In the first six seasons of Saturdays with the Stars, we would occasionally sneak in actors who would make films post-1975, when New Hollywood began to make way for the Blockbuster Era.  This season, though, we will be spending the entire back-half of the year with six actors that (though some made films before 1975) almost exclusively led movies in the post-Jaws era, most of them still working today.  So as a dividing line between the two, we're going to talk about a man who would fit neither of these positions, primarily because his best-known work is not in Hollywood, but in Hong Kong, where he would become less an action movie star and more a living deity, someone whose death at just 32 would enshrine him in a type of immortality that only a few actors ever achieved.  This month's star is Bruce Lee.

Born Lee Jun-fan, Bruce Lee is different than a number of our other stars in the past few months as he felt more at home in entertainment.  The son of an opera singer, he was born not in Hong Kong but in San Francisco while his father was touring with a stage company in Chinatown.  His mother's ethnicity has invited a lot of debate through the years (it is likely that she was biracial), and Lee was appearing in films as early as 1941, just a year after his birth, in bit parts due to his father's connections to cinema.  As a teenager, he began to study martial arts under Ip Man, one of the most storied martial arts grandmasters of the 20th Century, which led to him both becoming a skilled fighter and having run-in's with the law, eventually fighting members of crime families that led his parents to ship him to the United States (as he was born in San Francisco, he was eligible for US citizenship).  For much of the decade, Lee alternated between teaching martial arts and acting in random Hollywood productions that would make use of his fighting skills, specifically as Kato in The Green Hornet, the American production he is most known for today.

Lee is an interesting star, because in many ways his career mirrors that of James Dean, of someone who was incredibly famous in his life, but because of his young death (and the celebration of his movies that followed), he became an icon in a way he wasn't in life.  As we'll talk about this month, most of Lee's most well-known films like Enter the Dragon (adjusted for inflation, one of the most profitable films ever made) and Game of Death came out after he died.  We'll discuss that, and how these films in many ways caused Lee's acting career to appear bigger than it probably was, as well as talk a bit about his death, which more than 50 years later, is still surrounded in conspiracy & enigma.