Robert Clouse

Robert Clouse was a film director, writer and producer whose 30-year career was devoted primarily to martial arts films, most notably his collaboration with the legendary Bruce Lee in the 1973 martial arts classic, "Enter the Dragon." The movie was a huge financial success for Warner Bros and Clouse, and gave him substantial momentum for future projects. It was essentially the only time the two worked together--though Lee also starred in Clouse's "The Game of Death" from 1978. The movie was composed of a mix of previously filmed footage, sequences from other Lee films, and several shots of stand-ins (Lee had died in 1973, prior to the release of "Enter the Dragon"). Clouse made his feature film-directing debut in 1970 with the action mystery "Darker than Amber," followed by the drama "Dreams of Glass," which he also wrote, that same year, but from then on action films became Clouse's calling card. He worked with an odd range of actors over the years, from Yul Brynner and Max von Sydow in the 1975 sci-fi thriller "The Ultimate Warrior" to Jackie Chan in the 1980 action comedy "The Big Brawl." From the mid-1980s through the end of his run in the early '90s, Clouse continued to make martial arts films, though without the benefit of Lee or Chan-like name recognition. His later muses included Richard Norton, whom he worked with on several films, and Cynthia Rothrock, the star of both "China O'Brien" and "China O'Brien II."