Fifty years after his death, Bruce Lee remains the legend of martial arts cinema. Born in San Francisco in 1941, the actor is one of the icons of popular culture of the last third of the 20th century. Lee was the promoter of a unique style of hand-to-hand fighting, the so-called Jet Kune Do. The fighter began in the world of cinema at a very young age, as a child actor in Hong Kong. Going by the name Lee Yeun Kam, he participated in dramas and comedies of considerable prestige in his early life.
Shortly after, once he had returned to his native country, the United States, Lee worked in many different trades, although he always devoted time to his greatest hobbies, which were wrestling and philosophy, a discipline he studied at the University of Washington. Lee enjoyed learning about Eastern tradition and reading thinkers such as Lao-tzu, Confucius, Gautama Buddha, and Jiddu Krishnamurt. Everything surrounding the actor's death—he passed away at the young age of 32—continues to be shrouded in mystery.
Despite the fact that the autopsy revealed that it was the result of an accident, his death has been the subject of endless conspiracy theories. Despite the fact that Bruce Lee's death occurred on July 20, 1973, it is said that the fighter began to feel bad a couple of months before. During the filming of the movie Operación Dragón, the actor suffered severe headaches and collapsed, which is why he was taken to a hospital to check his condition.
Lee was soon diagnosed with cerebral edema - an increase in fluid in the brain - and current treatments were applied to alleviate it. The truth is that the actor never fully recovered, since since then he had a chain of discomfort after another until one day the actress Betty Ting Pei gave him a medication that she herself took when she had a headache, a combination of the tranquilizer meprobamate and aspirin under the trade name Equagesic.
After taking the medicine, Lee went to rest and soon those present were surprised that it took so long to wake up. Seeing that he did not react, they called a doctor who tried to revive him without success. An ambulance took him to the nearest hospital and he was declared dead on his arrival. After his death, it was learned that Lee was allergic to the medication that Betty Ting Pei had given her.
Many wonder what Bruce Lee would look like if the fighter were alive today. Applications like FaceApp or other generative artificial intelligence like Stable Diffusion help us get an idea of what his face would be like. La Vanguardia has used both to recreate what the character would be like today if he had not died prematurely.
The truth is that the quality of the result is amazing, which maintains the characteristic features of Bruce Lee but with many wrinkles in different parts of his face and a face that is somewhat more tired over the years.
