Why Bruce Lee's legendary fight with Chuck Norris was illegal

Bruce Lee cemented his place in cinema history with a famous fight involving Chuck Norris but it turns out that the scene was in fact illegal.

Lee died 50 years ago but he is still considered to be the greatest martial arts actor of all time. That's thanks in part to a string of kung fu movies he made in the 1970s which involved incredible authentic and well-choreographed fight scenes.

The most iconic of these occurred during Lee's 1972 film The Way of the Dragon, Lee's third film.

Lee was given full creative control of the movie by Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest and so he decided that he wanted himself and Chuck Norris to shoot the final fight scene in the Coliseum in Rome.

The pair pulled it off and the scene has since earned iconic status in cinema history. However, it turns out that the scene was illegal and could quite easily never have happened.

Lee originally wanted to film the movie in the United States, but when that fell though he moved the project to Rome.

His big idea was to fight Norris inside the Coliseum, but there was a snag: filming inside the Roman arena was illegal.

Hollywood blockbusters such as Spartacus and Gladiator had to use recreations of the Coliseum, but Lee was desperate to get geniune footage.

According to author Matthew Polly, Lee and his crew resorted to bribing Italian officials to let them film at the famous landmark.

In his book Bruce Lee: A Life, Polly claimed that Lee and his crew were allowed to sneak cameras into the Coliseum in their bags. As long as they pretended to be tourists then the security staff would turn a blind eye.

Because of the strict rules the crew only had time to film a few shots, so the final fight sequence involves footage shot at the Colisem blended with footage taken at the Golden Harvest studio.

It's a pretty remarkable story, but then Bruce Lee was a pretty remarkable man.