Lee was born while his father, a Chinese opera star, was on tour in America. The Lee family moved back to Hong Kong in 1941. Growing up, Lee was a child actor who appeared in some 20 Chinese films; he also studied dancing and trained in the Wing Chun style of gung fu (also known as kung fu). In 1959, Lee returned to America, where he eventually attended the University of Washington and opened a martial-arts school in Seattle. In 1964, he married Linda Emery, who in 1965 gave birth to Brandon Lee, the first of the couple’s two children. In 1966, the Lees relocated to Los Angeles and Bruce appeared on the television program The Green Hornet (1966-1967), playing the Hornet’s acrobatic sidekick, Kato. Lee also appeared in karate tournaments around the United States and continued to teach martial arts to private clients, including the actor Steve McQueen.In search of better acting roles than Hollywood was offering, Lee returned to Hong Kong in the early 1970s. He successfully established himself as a star in Asia with the action movies The Big Boss (1971) and The Way of the Dragon(1972), which he wrote, directed and starred in. Lee’s next film, Enter the Dragon, was released in the United States by Hollywood studio Warner Brothers in August 1973. Tragically, Lee had died one month earlier, on July 20, in Hong Kong, after suffering a brain edema believed to be caused by an adverse reaction to a pain medication. Enter the Dragon was a box-office hit, eventually grossing more than $200 million, and Lee posthumously became a movie icon in America.Like Hendrix and Morrison, you can identify his face in a heart beat.
We remember Alexander Dubček who was born in Uhrovec, nestled in the Strážovské Mountains of western Slovakia, on this day in 1921. He died in 1992.
We learned about Mr. Dubcek back in 1968 and "The Prague Spring". He was the face of that movement or a challenge to the old USSR and its control over Eastern Europe.
The USSR and The Warsaw Pact are now history. It all collapsed at the end of 1991. In other words, most young people younger than 35 have no emotional involvement with what we grew up with. They’ve probably never heard of the Berlin Wall or the 1956 Hungarian revolution or the atrocities of communism. Prague is now the capital of the Czech Republic and Slovakia is another country. It all seems like a past so long ago.
Some of us are old enough to remember this week when 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring.”
It was a dark day for freedom. Like the Hungarians in 1956, the people of Czechoslovakia were given a taste of Soviet “tolerance.” The “Prague Spring” was all about freedom and reforms but the Kremlin did not accept it and sent the tanks in.
A sad day for those of us who were watching from the West, especially when Fidel Castro defended the USSR. by saying among many things that the country was “…..heading toward a counter-revolutionary situation, toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism.”
We remember today all the people who stood up to Soviet tanks in Prague. And we remember more victims of communism.