David Carradine
David Carradine Dies
By Dave Itzkoff
David Carradine, the star of the 1970s television series “Kung Fu” and the title villain of the “Kill Bill” movies, has died in Thailand, The Associated Press reported. The United States Embassy in Bangkok told The A.P. that Mr. Carradine had been found dead in his hotel suite in Bangkok, where he was working on a movie. He was 72.
Mr. Carradine was part of an acting family that included his father, John; his brother, Bruce, and half-brothers Keith and Robert; and his nieces Ever Carradine and Martha Plimpton.
After a short run as the title character in the 1966 television adaptation of the Western “Shane,” he found fame in the 1972 series “Kung Fu” as Kwai Chang Caine, a wanderer raised by Shaolin monks to be a martial arts master. He enjoyed a career resurgence in recent years when he was cast by Quentin Tarantino in the action movies “Kill Bill: Vol. 1″ and “Vol. 2.”
Updated | 10:58 a.m. Thai police have told BBC News that Mr. Carradine was found on Thursday morning by a hotel maid in a wardrobe with a rope around his neck.Our Favorite David Carradine Moment
By Dave ItzkoffThe Superman monologue from “Kill Bill, Vol. 2″:
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The yin-yang of David Carradine
As a younger man, his lean, taut frame suggested both graceful self-possession and a capacity for explosive violence. Several of his best roles, both in film and television, cast him as a thinking-person's action hero, poised in perpetual tension between contemplative inner peace and outward aggression and hostility.
In his most iconic role, Kwai Chang Caine, the philosophy-spouting, butt-kicking hero of ABC's drama "Kung Fu" (1972-75), he played a half-Chinese man who was raised by Shaolin monks. On the lam in the American Old West, in search of his half-brother, Caine (like his biblical namesake) was a man divided against himself: a soft-spoken, flute-playing martial arts demon; a wandering loner who reached deep into prairie folks' souls by uttering Zen-like paradoxes.
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Photos:David Carradine Life in Pictures
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Caine, a kind of bareheaded, bare-footed, 19th century beatnik poet, reflected a national mood of vague spiritual yearning, mixed with unease over the durability of Western values, and partially prompted by the United States' dispiriting experience with the Vietnam War.
Three decades later, Quentin Tarantino would seize on Carradine's dualistic (and dueling) star persona when he cast him as the title character in "Kill Bill." The sprawling, two-part epic drew on Hong Kong martial arts movies and Italian spaghetti westerns, and was shaped by contrasting Eastern and Western notions of the aesthetics and metaphysics of violence.
The actor, who made more than 100 films over a more than 40-year career, was found dead on June 3 in his hotel room in Bangkok, where he had been on location shooting a movie. Details remain murky. Police reported that the actor had been found by a hotel maid, dead in a wardrobe with a rope around his neck and body. But Carradine's manager said the actor had died of natural causes.
A member of the dynastic Carradine acting clan, which also includes family patriarch John Carradine and half-siblings Keith and Robert, David Carradine studied music and served in the Army before taking up stage acting. He landed his first bit-part film role in an adaptation of Louis L'Amour's western novel "Taggart."
Carradine's rugged, hard-to-place features and his terse, sometimes laconic manner gave him the ability to be cast in roles as varied as Caine, folk troubadour Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory" (1976), and as a renegade driver in Paul Bartel's 1975 apocalyptic thriller “Death Race 2000,” which prefigured George Miller's "Mad Max" films.
Destructive impulses, and the individual's struggle to master them and bend them toward good, was a recurring motif in Carradine's film and TV roles. Good men, in Carradine's acting universe, may harbor brutal instincts and yield to primitive reflexes. Bad men, despite their flaws, may adhere to their own rigid, if twisted, codes of honor.
In Walter Hill's 1980 western “The Long Riders,”, Carradine was cast with his brothers Keith and Robert as members of the outlaw Younger gang. The movie included a memorable scene in which Carradine squares off in a saloon knife fight, a riveting piece of cinematic choreography that invited viewers simply to enjoy the actor's physicality and calculated stoicism.
Carradine could evince a very convincing, sinewy toughness, one that he used in other roles to memorable effect. Caine's gently quizzical manner had been replaced by an insinuating, softly menacing voice and a hard stare. You wouldn't want to mess with this guy.
Carradine's martial arts proficiency was largely faked in "Kung Fu." But the actor later took up these skills and even turned out a video series in martial arts training that he produced and starred in. In fact, Carradine dined out on this martial-arts-guru image for years, even deploying it for tongue-in-cheek television commercials. And while his résumé kept growing, many of his late-career roles were forgettable lower-end features.
Married five times, Carradine had a personal life as volatile as any of his film roles. One reviewer described Carradine's autobiography, "Endless Highway," as a "dreary catalog of human disaster," i.e. the actor's own life. Characteristically candid in public -- sometimes disarmingly, sometimes abrasively -- he acknowledged struggling with both drug and alcohol abuse.
His complex nature flared up in public this spring during an American Cinematheque screening and discussion of "Bound for Glory," at which Carradine got into an extended shouting match with audience members and Haskell Wexler, the esteemed cinematographer who won an Oscar for "Bound for Glory." According to a lengthy account of the evening by entertainment writer Chris Willman, Carradine lashed out against labor unions and publicly berated Wexler for making "Bound for Glory" look too beautiful.
"I would have said, turn up the contrast, show the grit under the fingernails, don't make any beauty about it, make it [expletive] ugly," Willman quotes Carradine declaring to the stunned audience and the visibly (and understandably) infuriated Wexler.
Carradine will be remembered for his grittiness, to be sure, but also for imparting a certain strange beauty to ugly acts and dark arts.
reed.johnson@latimes.com
BANGKOK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor David Carradine, star of the 1970s U.S. television show "Kung Fu," was found naked and hanging dead from a rope in the closet of his luxury Bangkok hotel room on Thursday, Thai police said. No signs were found of other people in the room and the body of the 72-year-old actor was sent to a hospital for an autopsy, police said. David Carradine, the lean, laconic star of the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu" and the arch villain of Quentin Tarantino's two-part saga "Kill Bill," was found dead June 4 in a Bangkok hotel room.
A Thailand newspaper, the Nation, reported that a hotel maid found the actor's body. Thai police said he apparently had hanged himself with a curtain cord.
Mr. Carradine, 72, was in Bangkok to shoot his latest film, "Stretch," his manager, Chuck Binder, told the Associated Press.
Although his best-known roles celebrated his martial-arts prowess and his coiled-snake cool, he was a serious actor who appeared in more than 140 movies and worked with directors as varied as Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman. He also was a member of a distinguished acting family, which included his father, John Carradine, who appeared in such movies as "Stagecoach" (1939), "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940) and "The Ten Commandments" (1956). Mr. Carradine's four brothers and two daughters also are actors.
Tarantino once described Mr. Carradine as "one of the great mad geniuses of the acting community," linking him to other "mad genius" actors Jack Nicholson and Christopher Walken. "Mad" was, at times, as apt as "genius," as in 1975 when a nude Carradine ended up in jail after vandalizing a neighbor's house while tripping on peyote.
He played his first leading role, as a Depression-era union organizer, in a 1972 feature film, "Boxcar Bertha," where his director was Scorsese, making his own Hollywood debut. "Boxcar Bertha" co-starred Barbara Hershey, Mr. Carradine's partner at the time and the mother of his son Free (who later changed his name to Tom).
Soon afterward, he was cast in the role that made him a star, playing Kwai Chang Caine in the ABC-TV series "Kung Fu." From 1972 to 1975, Mr. Carradine as Caine, a Chinese American Shaolin monk, wandered barefoot through the American West righting wrongs and quietly dispensing koans of faux-Zen wisdom. He reprised the role in a mid-1980s TV movie and played Caine's grandson in the 1990s syndicated series "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues."
"I am Kung Fu," he told The Washington Post years later. "I mean I'm not [messing] around you know. . . . "I'm really into revolution, but it's the revolution of the body and spirit -- seeking illumination is what I'm doing."
For his role as folk singer and union organizer Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory" (1976), he was named Best Actor by the National Board of Review and nominated for a Golden Globe. In "The Serpent's Egg" (1977), he played a Jewish alcoholic circus performer opposite Liv Ullmann in 1920s Germany. Although the movie is widely considered the low point in Bergman's directing career, Mr. Carradine received respectable notices.
He also won acclaim for his role in "The Long Riders" (1980), directed by Walter Hill. Mr. Carradine and his brothers Keith and Robert played the Younger brothers, members of the notorious James gang.
He also appeared in the occasional bomb, particularly in the 1980s when his reputation as a messy, temperamental drunk made him almost unemployable. He said he stopped drinking in 1996.
Alcohol did not always account for the low-quality of Mr. Carradine's projects. A 2008 TV mini-series called "Kung Fu Killer" also was forgettably bad. "Carradine, playing a character alternately called White Crane and the White Crane, brings new meaning to the word 'disheveled,' " Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote. "He looks like the bed got up on the wrong side of him."
He was born John Arthur Carradine in Hollywood on Dec. 8, 1936, the eldest son of John Carradine and Ardanelle Abigail McCool. He studied music theory and composition at what is now San Francisco State University but gravitated toward acting. He made his professional debut with the Theatre of the Golden Hind in Berkeley, dropped out of college and found the occasional role with the Shakespeare Repertory Theatre in San Francisco. He also sold encyclopedias.
Drafted into the Army, he formed an entertainment troupe and produced and starred in musicals, before being court-martialed for shoplifting from a base grocery store. Living in New York after being discharged, he played Laertes to his father's Hamlet at a theater on Long Island. He then signed a contract with Universal Studios and began appearing in small guest roles on television and supporting roles in movies.
He introduced himself to a new generation of movie-goers as the title character in Tarantino's over-the-top revenge epic, "Kill Bill," Volumes 1 and 2. In Vol. 1, released in 2003, he is a menacing voice on the phone; in Vol. 2, released the next year, he is revealed as a ruthless assassin and a doting father. For his performance in Vol. 2, he received a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe.
Mr. Carradine also composed and recorded more than 60 songs and was a painter, sculptor and the author of three books, including his autobiography, "Endless Highway" (1995)In addition to his six-year relationship with Hershey (also known as Barbara Seagull), he was married to Donna Lee Brecht, Linda Gilbert, Gail Jensen and Coco d'Este. The marriages ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of four years, Annie Bierman; four children; and four stepchildren.
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