Bruce Lee’s Daughter Takes Issue With ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’

Bruce Lee and Maria Yi in a scene from the Kung Fu classic Fists Of Fury in 1971  -77449056
Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

On July 26, 2019, Quentin Tarantino released his latest installment, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Two stars who've never acted alongside each other finally teamed up to help make this Tarantino's biggest box office opening weekend. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio were the stars of the film, but a rendition of the late great Bruce Lee also made an appearance.

The story is fictional in this Tarantino project, but many of the characters come from real people in Hollywood during the '60s. The way the movie portrayed the late martial artist didn't sit well with at least one member of the Lee family.

Lee's daughter, Sharon Lee, argues that they got her father completely wrong.

"He comes across as an arrogant [expletive]who was full of hot air, and not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others," Lee said.

She noted to The Warp that it was natural for folks to challenge her dad to a fight. People wanted to see how they would fair against the lean machine, but Lee would do all he could to avoid those types of altercations. In Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Lee is the one starting a fight with Pitt's character.

In the movie, Pitt's character is a stuntman, but when he fights Lee, he manages to get some hits in. As unlikely as that is, that's not what upset Sharon. "I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-[expletive] who could beat up Bruce Lee," Sharon said. "But they didn't need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive."

It looks like Tarantino gave us the version of Lee that we thought to be true thanks to Hollywood, but possibly not the man the fighter really was.