Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the film which Lee made just before his death in 1973 at the age of 32, and that would in turn seal his worldwide stardom. There, on one side, stands Lee himself. There, on the other, is the villainous Han, who has a set of metal talons where one of his hands ought to be. The two men leap across each other, leaving Lee with an unpleasant gash on his shirtless torso. He pauses, dabs a finger in the blood, raises it to his mouth — and licks. It is weird, gruesome and oh-so-cool, all at once.
Why did Lee do this? The answer is in Matthew Polly’s biography. One of Lee’s disciples had performed exactly the same move during a bar-room scrap and, unsurprisingly, found that his opponents were rather unnerved by it.
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