Shannon is working it. Good on her.
* March 30, 2010, 4:00 PM ET
Bruce Lee Legacy Lives On Through Film Retrospective, Brand Awareness
By Dean Napolitano

Bruce Lee’s family kicked off a celebration in Hong Kong Tuesday night honoring the legendary kung-fu star, as interest in his movies continues to grow nearly 37 years after his death in 1973.

Lee’s wife, Linda Lee Cadwell, 65, and daughter, Shannon Lee, 40, presided over the opening of an exhibit at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre featuring costumes, movie posters and other memorabilia from his life and career. The show coincides with a retrospective of Lee’s movies at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, which runs through April 6.

Since buying back the rights to her father’s image from General Electric Co.’s Universal Studios in 2008, Shannon Lee has been working to develop her father into a major global brand and spread awareness of his life to new generations.

“He was a man of great depth,” Linda Lee Cadwell said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “He read all the Chinese philosophers. … He read both Eastern and Western philosophy.”

Part of that philosophy is on display at the exhibit, where the script for planned — but unmade — film titled “The Silent Flute” reveals a passage of Lee’s writing: “True mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself — the ability, developed through self-discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings,” it reads in part.

“Bruce Lee always said that a person must know themselves and not follow others blindly,” Linda Lee Cadwell said. He took action in his own life, her daughter said, by breaking social and racial barriers.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Lee’s birth, and his popularity endures: Broadway is preparing a musical based on his life for the 2010-11 theater season, and his former home in Hong Kong — now a “love hotel” — is being transformed into a museum.

Shannon Lee said she wants to recreate the look of the house as it was when she lived there as a child. “It’s a unique opportunity to capture that point in time.”