Linda Lee Cadwell

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Linda Lee Cadwell

Birth name	Linda Emery
Born	March 21, 1945 Seattle, Washington
Spouse(s)	Bruce Lee (1964-1973) Tom Bleecker (1988-1990) Bruce Cadwell (1991-)
Official site	http://www.bruceleefoundation.com

Linda Lee Cadwell (born 21 March 1945), a.k.a. Linda Emery, is a teacher and the widow of martial arts master and actor Bruce Lee, founder of Jeet Kune Do. She was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, USA. She is of Swedish and English descent.

Linda met Bruce Lee while she was attending Garfield High School, where Bruce came to give a Kung Fu demonstration; he was attending the University of Washington at the time. Eventually, she became one of his Kung Fu students when she was attending the University of Washington as a pre-medical student.

She continued to take Kung Fu lessons from him while attending college. They married on August 17, 1964, Linda a few credits short of graduation from the University of Washington. They had two children together, Brandon Lee and Shannon Lee. Bruce Lee had opened his own Kung Fu school at the time and was teaching Jeet Kune Do. Bruce Lee suddenly died on July 20, 1973 of a cerebral edema.

Linda was then briefly married to Tom Bleecker, beginning in 1988, but they divorced in 1990. She married stockbroker Bruce Cadwell in 1991 and they live in Boise, Idaho. Bleecker published a tell-all book on his version of how Bruce Lee died in 1996. Linda Lee Cadwell attempted to stop its publication, but was unsuccessful.

Her son Brandon Lee, an actor like his father, died in a fatal shooting accident on a movie set while filming The Crow on March 31, 1993, nearly 20 years after his father's death. Linda together with Brandon's fiancee Eliza Hutton settled an out of court settlement with the producers of The Crow in 1993, and were instrumental in having the film released in 1994.

Linda has continued to spread the message about and promote Bruce Lee's martial art Jeet Kune Do (JKD). She and her daughter Shannon, together with son-in-law Ian Keasler, run the Bruce Lee Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to Bruce Lee's martial arts teaching and philosophy writings.

[edit] Books

Linda wrote the 1975 book Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew (ISBN 0-446-89407-9), on which the 1993 feature film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story was based.