David Carradine, actor
b. 8/12/1936; d. 3/6/2009
Born into a chaotic Hollywood childhood, the cult movie star, musician, sexual adventurer and barefoot legend David Carradine took a few detours on the way, but eventually followed the path of his father, John Carradine (1906-88), who was a prolific character actor dubbed ‘the Bard of the Boulevard’ – and a spectacular screen villain.
With intense good looks and a liking for psychedelic experimentation, David Carradine suited the 1970s, which saw him in a string of juicy roles, not least as the mixed-race Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine (‘Grasshopper’) in the much-loved television series Kung Fu (1972-75 and 1993-97). Carradine starred opposite his lover Barbara Hershey in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Boxcar Bertha’ (1972) and brawled drunk in the director’s follow-up Mean Streets (1973). Uncredited in The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), he went on to take the lead in such diverse films as Paul Bartel’s Roger Corman-produced Death Race 2000 (1975) and Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory (1976), in which he studiously underplayed folk legend Woody Guthrie. Carradine made an improbable Jewish trapeze artist in Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977), but was better cast in Walter Hill’s laconic, beautiful Western The Long Riders (1980), in which he rode with his half-brothers, actors Keith (the gorgeous one) and Robert (the underappreciated one).
Having notched up hundreds of film and television roles, not to mention five wives and several stints in rehab, Carradine’s vintage notoriety was fully revived when Quentin Tarantino cast him as the eponymous villain in his two Kill Bill films (2003-04, left), a character Carradine said was as close to him as any he had played.
Carradine was still working – shooting Stretch (2010) for director Charles de Meaux (producer of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – when he was found dead in the wardrobe of suite 352 of the Nai Lert Park Hotel, Bangkok, apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation. He was 72. Amidst the news of the extraordinary nature of the Kung Fu Cowboy’s exit, photographs of Carradine’s death scene and autopsy were published in the Thai press, in true Hollywood Babylon tradition.
Jane Giles