Confronted with a choice between her two hot-blooded lovers, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee, actress Sharon Farrell saw it as no match.
Steve McQueen may have been the womanising ‘King of Cool’ and possessor of Hollywood’s most piercing blue eyes but the man she actually fell for was the 5’8 Chinese American martial artist.
Bruce Lee may famously have overpowered opponents with ‘fists of fury’ but he was irresistible to women in other ways.
Farrell gushed at Bruce Lee’s biographer Matthew Polly and she said that Bruce took her to the Moon and back, and he just turned her inside out, but he was married and didn’t have a pot to pee in.
She said that Steve McQueen was so successful, he was her protector but that she was in lust with Steve, but that Bruce Lee was the love of her life.
Matthew Polly tells how Bruce Lee surreptitiously came to see Farrell in late 1968 after flying down to rural Mississippi where she and Steve McQueen were filming together.
Some years before he became a star in his own right, Bruce Lee was there as Steve McQueen’s kung fu trainer, but he’d had his own ‘hidden reason’ for wanting to visit the set, his secret love affair with Farrell.
Polly wrote that when Bruce Lee spotted Sharon Farrell next to her trailer, he snuck up behind her and put his hand over her mouth and asked why she hadn’t returned his calls and asked, did she really think that he wouldn’t be able to find her. Bruce then dragged her into her dressing room and they made love as quietly as possible, hoping that no one would hear them.
Later, Sharon Farrell admitted that she’d already hooked up with her co-star Steve McQueen but told Bruce Lee that she was just using Steve to get over him and said that they couldn’t do this again and that she was sorry.
Polly’s acclaimed and thoroughly researched 2018 biography, Bruce Lee: A Life, revealed another side to the iconic actor, fighter and philosopher lionised by his army of starry-eyed fans. A controlling and heartless womaniser. Bruce Lee was arrogant, self-righteous and chauvinistic, according to the book.
This isn’t exactly the image of Bruce Lee presently being advanced by his daughter, Shannon Lee, on the 50th anniversary of his demise.
He was a legend, most will agree with that.
I’ve read a lot about Bruce Lee over the years, but I’ve never heard him labelled as a womaniser. Evidently, someone’s attempting to disparage him, but what’s the point, he’s dead and the only thing that people will do is hurt his family, but even if he was a womaniser, you’d hardly challenge him to a fight.
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