Bruce Lee’s offscreen activities put an end to his early acting career in Hong Kong. Long before making a reputation for himself as a martial arts superstar, Lee worked in films as both a child and a teenager until 1959. So why did the icon stop making Hong Kong movies?
Due to his father being an opera star, Lee was able to appear in movies at a rather young age. In fact, Lee’s first movie role came in 1941’s Golden Gate Girl when he was just an infant. Later, Lee developed into a successful child actor in the Hong Kong movie industry. When he was 9, he played the titular character in The Kid, where he worked with his father. Following The Kid, Lee was able to land several more major parts. This continued into Lee’s teenage years, with him appearing in movies like The Orphan’s Tragedy, The Thunderstorm, and The Orphan, which saw him play a teenager whose bad decisions caused his life to take a wrong turn.
The Orphan, which Lee made when he was 18, marked the end of this particular period in Lee’s life. Lee’s action career was interrupted by events going on outside of the movie studio. In his early years, Lee was bullied, and this resulted in a number of street fights. This had a lot to do with why he began learning kung fu from Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man in the first place. Part of the point of his kung fu training was to teach him discipline, but unfortunately, it didn’t keep him out of trouble. Years later, Lee admitted that he was a person who went “looking for fights.” The teenage Lee even had a gang called the Eight Junction Tigers that backed him up.
Based on an account from a fellow student of Ip Man’s, the Eight Junction Tigers were involved in a robbery, but Lee himself didn’t participate [via Newsweek]. However, his association with them and constant fighting presented a problem that Lee’s father sought to fix by sending him to the United States, where he was to finish his high school education. After that, he enrolled at the University of Washington and developed an interest in teaching kung fu.
Lee opened his own kung fu school, taught martial arts to Hollywood actors, and became determined to get back into acting. Lee co-starred in ABC’s The Green Hornet show as the main hero’s sidekick for the show’s first and only season between 1966 and 1967, but this didn’t lead to the success he had hoped for – or at least, not right away. Though it took some time for Lee’s career to go in the direction he wanted, Lee erupted into a martial arts sensation after giving up on Hollywood and returning to Hong Kong. While back in Hong Kong, he was cast in Golden Harvest’s The Big Boss, the kung fu movie that launched him into stardom in 1971. Once he had three box office hits in Hong Kong under his belt, Lee was invited back to Hollywood to make Enter the Dragon, the film that posthumously cemented his status as the biggest martial arts icon of all-time.