His extremely untimely death at the peak of his fame will no doubt have helped making him the legend he is, but there is also no doubt about the man's very real charisma and very real skills.
The debate is still ongoing about how good he really was at martial arts, and if his true prowess is even noticeable for laymen like me. Probably not, but I can see speed. There is one part in Enter The Dragon, in which Lee's character pulverizes his evil opponent Oharra just by being a LOT quicker than him. It's an outdoors scene in bright daylight, and there are trees, branches and flags in the background, all swaying in the wind as Lee has his fight. If you look at those, not ONCE do you spot any signs of speed-up, and as this was shot decades before any sort of digital post-production clean-up, the only conclusion is that the man was really ludicrously fast.
Some of the recent quizzes have grown huge, but with Bruce Lee we never got the luxury of seeing him develop a big resumee. A crying shame.
So once again I'm going to use (only) eight pictures of one of my favourite thespians to make a quiz. Click through the images, and guess which movies they're from. No competition, no prizes, just for fun, try to see how far you get without using IMDb!
And I'll post the answers next Thursday, or earlier if someone gets all of them right. But who am I kidding? I'm predicting this fight will be over in seconds...
And here he is in a publicity photograph from the early 1970s.
This picture doesn't count yet for the quiz, but all others do, so please browse through the gallery: click on the edge of the picture to get the next one, and see how many of them all you can identify!
And we begin, with quiz picture number one. Pow!
Quiz picture number two:
Quiz picture number three:
Quiz picture number four:
Quiz picture number five:
Quiz picture number six:
Quiz picture number seven:
And finally: quiz picture number eight.