How Bruce Lee Died & Why Controversy Still Haunts His Cause Of Death

Bruce Lee's action career is the stuff of legends. Even over 50 years after his death on July 20, 1973, he remains the martial arts movie star all other representatives of the genre are compared to. Even so, while his life was undoubtedly impressive, it's his death that continues to captivate minds. This is because, while we know that Lee died unexpectedly in Hong Kong at the age of 32, he was a famously fit guy, and there's so much uncertainty about the cause of his death that it has been ripe ground for all sorts of theories.

Lee was found to have died of  cerebral edema. The cause of this is often said to be an allergic reaction to pain medication, but some feel the true cause of death was a heat stroke. In 2022, a study revealed Lee's possible cause of death as hyponatraemia. This is a type of water poisoning where rapid intake of too much water drops the body's saline levels to dangerously low levels, potentially leading to fatal issues like, say, cerebral edema.

Apart from the ambitious scientific minds who have looked into the star's death in order to find out the truth behind Lee's strange cause of death, another school of thought persists. There is a long-standing conspiracy theory that Lee's death wasn't natural and that he was instead murdered. With all the uncertainty and strange theories floating around, is it any wonder that Lee's death remains controversial?

The strange circumstances surrounding Bruce Lee's death make the tragic event intriguing in its own right, but when you combine it with his son Brandon Lee's tragic story, things get doubly strange. Like his father, Brandon also died well before his time — at age 28, to be precise. He was filming what in all likelihood would have been his big breakout movie, "The Crow," when an on-set prop gun accident killed him. This forced the production to navigate some serious hurdles in order to finish "The Crow" after Lee's death, and the combination of the cool movie and the tragic real-life story behind it propelled the younger Lee to nigh-mythical status.

Combined, these two early deaths that occurred when the actors were near the brink of superstardom have given birth to a theory about a Lee family curse, which adds its own flavor to the numerous theories surrounding the elder Lee's death. Regardless of what the full truth about his death may be, it's clear that Lee continues to captivate people through both the way he lived his extraordinary life and the way it ended.