How James Coburn nudged Bruce Lee towards greatness: “I want to make more money than Steve McQueen”
Dishing out tough love as and when required is one of the bedrocks of any lasting friendship, as Bruce Lee discovered more than once when James Coburn not only grew irritated with his dedication to martial arts but actively dissuaded him from trying to make it in Hollywood.
Not that Coburn was instructing the iconic star to abandon acting altogether, but he’d been around the business long enough to know that Lee’s niche wasn’t one that was going to be easily filled in America. Instead, he suggested his buddy try his luck on the other side of the world, and it might well have been the smartest piece of career advice he’d ever been given.
The two first met at a party when Lee was showing off his famous one-inch punch, which was impressive enough for Coburn to decide he wanted to take up martial arts. Steve McQueen might have been his most famous student, but he wasn’t the Enter the Dragon frontman’s favourite.
Instead, that honour fell to Coburn, who he warmed to more than the rest outside the dojo. Lee carried himself with a natural aura that intimidated and enthralled those around him in equal measure, but from Coburn’s recollections, one of the reasons they became so close and stayed that way was because he operated more as an older brother-type figure.
Although they didn’t end up starring in the film, which wasn’t released until 1978 after Lee’s death, he and Coburn shared a story credit on 1978’s The Silent Flute, one of only two times the martial artist was recognised as a writer. He wanted more, though, only for his friend to remind him that Hollywood was a difficult place to make it.
Coburn was the only actor with whom he wrote a script, and he also doubled as a confidant and advisor, whether Lee wanted to hear it or not. When he was considering whether or not to take the lead role in the TV series Kung Fu, the former told him that his signature style “would be very tiresome watching for an hour on television.”
“So I said, ‘Go back to Hong Kong and make Southeast Asian movies. You’ll be a huge star,'” Coburn told Alex Simon. “‘But I want to work here’. I said, ‘You want to be a movie star, right? It’s what you’ve always wanted?’ He thought for a minute and said, ‘I want to make more money than Steve McQueen’. So he went to Southeast Asia, David Carradine did Kung Fu in slow motion, Bruce became a huge movie star and earned more money than Steve McQueen.”
At Coburn’s urging, Lee declined Kung Fu and achieved exactly what was promised would happen, shooting the star-making trio of The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and Enter the Dragon. While he can’t take all the credit for turning his friend into an international superstar, he definitely played a significant part.
Sadly, Lee never got to enjoy the fruits of his labours and reap the rewards of what turned out to be life-altering foresight on Coburn’s part after passing away at the age of only 32 in July 1973, with the actor serving as one of the pallbearers at his funeral.
