Strictly Kung Fu dancing Dad
By ALISON MALONEY
Published: Today
BRUCE LEE would have been a perfect contestant for Dancing with the Stars, according to daughter SHANNON.
The martial arts supremo could swivel his hips with the best of them, she revealed in a recent interview with Sun Online.
“He was the Cha Cha champion of Hong Kong when he was 18,” she told me.
“And he also taught dance lessons on the boat when he came over from Hong Kong to the United States.
“His first job in the States was also teaching dance, so he was quite an accomplished dancer. He would have done really well on Dancing with the Stars!”
Shannon, who was just four when her father died, added, “I never saw him dance but I’ve seen him do the odd move here and there on home movies.”
This year is the 35th anniversary of Lee’s death and Shannon, along with her mother Linda Lee, will be in London in April, to mark the occasion at the martial arts exhibition, Seni '08.
“Seni have given us a great spot at the show and we are creating our own little Bruce Lee area,” she said.
“We’ll have a booth where we will sell merchandise from the Bruce Lee Foundation and we will hold seminars in Jeet Kune Do, my father’s art.
“There will be a display of memorabilia in celebration of the 35th anniversary of my father’s passing as well as Enter the Dragon.
“We’re bringing 35 items, which will range from the hand-written choreography notes from the fight scene with CHUCK NORRIS in Way of the Dragon to some of the clothing he wore in Enter the Dragon.
“If you’re a Bruce Lee fan you can come to Seni and find out a bit more about the man, see his own personal items, writings and thoughts.
“The writings show he was very introspective about fame, friendship and about his hopes and dreams when he was a young man.”
Shannon admits that her memories of her father are sketchy but, even at the age of four, she had learned some martial arts basics from him.
“I remember going to the set to visit him and I remember him playing with us, but not real lucid memories,” she said.
“I was pretty young but martial arts was sort of the thing in our house so he was always having us punch and kick even if we were just fooling around.
“My brother Brandon was four years older so he had a little more formal practice with Dad but even as a four-year-old I learned a move or two.
“My brother’s friends were afraid to come over to our house because there were always grown men beating each other up in the backyard!”
Lee died in 1973 after apparently suffering an extreme reaction to a painkiller and, 20 years later, the family faced new tragedy when BRANDON LEE was accidentally shot dead on the set of his movie, The Crow.
Because of their bizarre nature, various conspiracy theories have surrounded both deaths but Shannon is adamant that neither was suspicious.
“I know that there’s a lot of controversy but really what creates that is just the unfortunate circumstances,” she insisted.
“My father was a man who was so much in the prime of his life and to have something so small bring him down was hard to accept for a lot of people. Twenty years later, to have Brandon die in another freak accident fuelled the fire but there was a police investigation into Brandon’s death and we know exactly what happened. It was a really unfortunate set of circumstances and it was purely an accident.”
The former actress is now a director of the Bruce Lee Foundation, which aims to preserve and perpetuate the legacy of the great man.
At present, they are attempting to raise funds for a museum in his name to be built in the Seattle or Washington area and are hoping their trip to London will bring them closer to that goal.
For Shannon, who trained in Jeet Kune Do under her father’s pupil TED WONG, Lee’s legacy is clear.
“You can’t help but be inspired when you see him on screen,” she said.
“He had real dynamic presence and power that was so fast and so unique. His yell, his body and his movements had such grace and power and that’s what hooks you initially.
“Then you get to know a little a bit about him and you realise he was so far ahead of his time and he really brought a genre to the Western world in terms of martial arts films. If you dig deeper you find he was a real humanitarian, a philosopher, a family man and a teacher and that martial arts was really his life and not just what he did in the movies.”