Bruce Lee^†

Hollywood spent years telling him no. Lee spent those same years playing a sidekick in The Green Hornet, lobbying for leading roles he couldn't get, and eventually taking his pitch to Hong Kong. The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and The Way of the Dragon broke box-office records across Southeast Asia and made him a genuine phenomenon in a market Hollywood barely cared about. By the time Enter the Dragon went into production with a real studio budget, he'd already proved the audience was there. He died six days before it opened.

Fifty years after his death, he's still the benchmark, and the distance between him and whoever comes next hasn't closed. Enter the Dragon grossed an estimated $200 million without him alive for a single day of promotion. The 'Be water, my friend' line from a 1971 TV interview circulates on the internet like scripture. His cultural footprint is larger now than at the moment he died, which is not a compliment to the Hollywood that spent years turning him down.

His mother was Eurasian with European ancestry, which almost got him barred from training in Wing Chun under Ip Man, who had a rule against teaching non-Chinese students. He got an exception. In 1958, he won the Hong Kong Crown Colony Cha-Cha Championship. At the University of Washington, he majored in philosophy, met Linda Emery (who became his wife), and filled notebooks with ideas that read nothing like a fight manual.

Enter the Dragon premiered in Hong Kong on July 26, 1973, six days after his death, the first Hollywood film to open there before the US. His wife Linda brought his body back to Seattle after a Hong Kong funeral; he's buried at Lake View Cemetery beside his son Brandon, who died on the set of The Crow in 1993. Golden Harvest released Game of Death in 1978, a film he'd left unfinished, using a lookalike for the footage he never shot.