Jason Scott Lee
Actor, Martial artist
© Layne Luna
[ Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.0 ]
[ Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.0 ]
Jason Scott Lee (born November 19, 1966) is an American actor and martial artist. Lee is well known for portraying Bruce Lee in the 1993 martial arts film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and for portraying Mowgli in the 1994 live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book.
Personal life
Lee was born in Los Angeles, California. He was raised in Hawaii and is of Chinese-Hawaiian descent. He attended school at Pearl City High School and is a friend of Carrie Ann Inaba, of Dancing with the Stars, whom he dated briefly.
Career
Lee started his acting career with small roles in Born In East LA (1987) and Back to the Future Part II (1989). He played his first leading role portraying Bruce Lee in the biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story in 1993. Lee has trained in Bruce Lee's martial art Jeet Kune Do since portraying Lee and continues to train and is now a certified instructor under former Bruce Lee student Jerry Poteet. He played leading roles in other films such as Map of the Human Heart (1993) and Rapa Nui (1994). He starred as Mowgli in the 1994 live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's stories. Lee was considered for the role of Liu Kang in 1995 film Mortal Kombat, but he turned down the role and was replaced by Robin Shou. He went on to co-star with Kurt Russell in Mortal Kombat director Paul WS Anderson's 1998 film Soldier. In 2000 he played Aladdin in the mini-series Arabian Nights.
Apart from voice-over work for the Disney animated film Lilo and Stitch (2002), he went on to appear in several direct-to-video films such as Dracula II: Ascension (2001), Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003), the sequel to the original 1994 film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and The Prophecy: Forsaken (2005). In 2007 he appeared in Balls of Fury which was his first worldwide theatrical release since Soldier in 1998.
Lee is among the actors, producers and directors interviewed in the documentary The Slanted Screen (2006), directed by Jeff Adachi, about the representation of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood.
Lee made his operatic debut in the non-singing role of Pasha Selim in Hawaii Opera Theatre's production of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio at the Blaisdell Concert Hall in Honolulu, Hawaii, in February 2009.
[ Wikipedia ]
- Born
- November 19, 1966 (age 58)
- Profession
- Actor, Martial artist
- Spouse
- Diana Chan
- Parents
- Robert Lee, Sylvia Lee