HONG KONG • A friend of gongfu legend Bruce Lee helped Nancy Sit escape a bid to kidnap her in the 1960s.

The Hong Kong artist was then a popular child actress and was in Taiping in Malaysia, staying in a hotel with her mother and Lee's childhood pal Unicorn Chan.

Sit, 69, related this dark episode in her life on TVB variety show Liza's Online last week, in a segment called True Or False.

At 3am, there was a loud knocking on her hotel room door, she recalled. She was told to "get up" and "run", which she did with her mother. "I was still holding onto my pillow and didn't know what was going on."

They, and other production crew, left in three cars, heading to Ipoh, but their progress was stalled mid-way. They had to stop as the tyres of all the vehicles were punctured.

Sit said Chan, armed with a knife, reacted by staying close to her. Alarmed by the situation, she cried.

"I had a bodyguard who said he would go and inform the police. There were no mobile phones then."

Sit said the police soon arrived, but they had been alerted by the boss of a company that had contracted her to perform in Malaysia.

"Chan carried a knife because he noticed that the bodyguard was looking suspiciously at the car tyres earlier."

It turned out that her bodyguard had conspired with others in the abduction attempt, and "had made an excuse to leave us to call the police, but was actually going to inform" his gang members to strike.

Sit did not tell the show audience whether her bodyguard was later caught and jailed, saying only that it was fortunate that Chan was with her then.