Scot who’s taught Bruce Lee’s jeet kune do fighting style all his life on the actor’s legacy
- Tommy Carruthers’ life course was set the day he saw Way of the Dragon aged 14. He taught himself to fight like Lee, and has taught it to the world ever since
- Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Van Damme, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, they couldn’t tie Bruce Lee’s shoelaces, he says. He hopes to see films with real jeet kune do in them

Tommy Carruthers’ life changed in a darkened Glasgow cinema back in 1974.
“I saw Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon and that was the turning point in my entire life,” the Scotsman, now 60, reveals.
Over the ensuing 45 years, Carruthers has been keeping Lee’s teachings alive as one of the few instructors to have mastered the fluid jeet kune do style of kung fu created by Hong Kong’s “Little Dragon”.
“It’s about presenting martial arts but in a high standard that he would have been proud of,” Carruthers says of his mission to continue championing Lee’s simple but spectacular fighting style. “That’s the best thing we could do to preserve and enhance his legacy.”
The maverick American filmmaker chose the Cannes Film Festival for the grand reveal of his latest opus, starring the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, and set around Hollywood at the time of the notorious Tate murders of 1969 committed by the notorious Charles Manson cult.