He didn’t become a really famous star before he died and before the internet, so people have discovered lots of surprising new facts about him. 

Here are some of the most interesting things about Bruce Lee after he died.

For example, he thought he would lose a fight with Muhammad Ali.

Because they were both famous athletes at the top of their game, many people in the early 1970s wanted to see a particular fight: Bruce Lee vs. Muhammad Ali. 

While Bruce Lee was proud of his martial arts skills, he wasn’t delusional. He understood what would happen if he, a 5-foot-7-inch, 145-pound man, fought the 6-foot-3-inch, 210-pound boxer: “Look at my hand. That’s a little Chinese hand. He’d kill me.” Although it was sad that Lee died before he could prove this, he would never have agreed to a spar. 

He was on a liquid diet

Bruce Lee knew how good his shredded physique looked on film and took extreme steps to achieve it. His wife said that before he died, Lee was living on a liquid diet, eating only carrots and apple juice. 

Lee died from swelling in the brain, but the big mystery has always been what caused this in someone so young and healthy. The official story was that it was due to an allergic reaction to some headache medicine he took, but there are several other surprising theories about what caused his death. One is that his excessive intake of water and other liquids is what killed him. He was on a liquid diet that was hot and humid in Hong Kong, so he was probably thirsty. Drinking too much liquid could have damaged his kidneys, meaning that too much water stayed in his body and caused brain swelling.

The producer of “Game of Death,” Raymond Chow, was with Lee when he died and remembers him getting overheated before having some water. Chow says Lee got dizzy, went to lie down, and died.

He had many affairs

Bruce Lee married his wife Linda on 17 August 1964. She was already pregnant, which might be why they married quickly. Even though he had a wife and daughter (and, a few years later, a son) at home, Lee still had a lot of affairs. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, though. 

He had a steady stream of girlfriends up until he died. 

Bruce Lee used marijuana and other drugs a lot. He started with weed but later moved on to hash. Once, Lee came to a friend’s house with huge joints and gave them to everyone there. He also used more complex drugs, including cocaine and LSD. But he said martial arts was the better, more natural high.

He had a procedure to remove his foreskin as an adult and chose to do this in Hong Kong instead of the US. A 1994 biography stated that it was his father who insisted he get circumcised, but this seems unlikely. The actor probably decided to do it himself after one of his American girlfriends commented on it, and biographer Matthew Polly believes this came from a mistranslation of Cantonese. 

His health had got worse before he died. In two years (but some say only two months), Bruce’s weight had dropped from about 140 pounds to about 120. The problem was that he was losing muscle, too. Even at 140 pounds, you can see that he had no fat on him in his earlier films. Instead, his body was losing muscle mass, which is much more unhealthy and could be a sign that something is wrong. 

As well as taking drugs, his friends noticed that Bruce was regularly drinking more than he had before. One friend said he would drink up to 20 bottles of sake a night.

Bruce Lee died at the home of his mistress.

On the day he died, 20 July 1973, he was in Hong Kong for work. In the middle of the day, before a planned meeting with actor George Lazenby, Lee went to his girlfriend’s home, the actor Betty Ting Pei. We only know what happened thanks to Pei and producer Raymond Chow. It seems Lee felt unwell, took one of Pei’s headache pills, went to sleep, and died.

But when the news of Lee’s death was shared with the public, the story was changed to make it less shocking. Instead of being with his mistress, Lee’s friend, the producer Zou Wenhuai, claimed the actor had been with his wife Linda at their own home.