Cadwell was born in Everett, Washington, the daughter of Vivian and Everett Emery. Her family was Baptist and 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 was 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 died suddenly on July 20, 1973 of cerebral edema.

Linda was remarried to Tom Bleecker in 1988, but they divorced in 1990. She married stockbroker Bruce Cadwell in 1991 and they live in Boise, Idaho. In 1996, Bleecker published a book on his version of how Bruce Lee died. 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 twenty years after his father's death. Linda and Brandon's fiancee, Eliza Hutton, were involved in an out-of-court settlement with the producers of The Crow in 1993, and were instrumental in having the film released in 1994.

Cadwell has continued to promote Bruce Lee's martial art Jeet Kune Do. She retired in 2001, and her daughter Shannon (who is now in charge of the Lee family estate), together with son-in-law Ian Keasler, run the Bruce Lee Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching Bruce Lee's philosophy on martial arts and his writing on philosophy.

Books

Linda wrote the 1975 book The Man Only I Knew (ISBN 0-446-89407-9), on which the 1993 feature film The Bruce Lee Story was based. She was portrayed by actress Lauren Holly in the film adaptation. Lee also wrote the 1989 book The Bruce Lee Story (ISBN 0897501217).