US actor known for roles in cult TV and film hits
DAVID CARRADINE, who has died aged 72, was a member of a distinguished Hollywood family who was never exactly a star, but had a sporadically interesting film and television career.
He achieved television fame initially in the early 1970s but then saw his career dip only to explode once again through his recent role in the Quentin Tarantino-directed Kill Bill films.
His first, and biggest, career peak came with the television series Kung Fu (1972-1975), which was a huge cult hit. It managed to mix western action with eastern philosophy – a long and abiding interest for the actor – in a way that was novel at the time.
Carradine’s character, Kwai Chang Caine, was a 19th-century Shaolin monk wandering the American 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 loner who reached deep into prairie folks’ souls by uttering Zen-like paradoxes.
The show caught the tenor of the times in the US. It arrived toward the tail end of the counterculture movement, when Americans were questioning authority and dabbling in eastern mysticism, reading books such as Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A year earlier, the cult film Billy Jack had fused karate-macho antics with the figure of a rebellious anti-hero.
Caine, a kind of bareheaded, barefooted, beatnik poet, reflected a national mood of vague spiritual yearning, mixed with unease over the durability of western values and partially prompted by the US’s dispiriting experience with the Vietnam War.
It was a sad irony that Carradine was to die in Bangkok, Thailand, where the dominant religion is Buddhism. Sadder still for his family and friends was the manner of his passing: his naked body was found hanging in a wardrobe in his hotel suite in unexplained circumstances.
Kung Fu was originally a television movie but it grew into a show that lasted for 46 episodes. By the time the series began, Carradine was already 36.
After leaving San Francisco State College, he had spent time as a soldier, commercial artist and stage actor. He appeared in Shakespearean rep and on Broadway, notably in Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965), as the Inca chief Atahualpa.
From the early days, Carradine played a variety of races, and his countercultural credentials were established with roles in Martin Scorsese’s first film, Boxcar Bertha (1972), and (uncredited) in the director’s celebrated Mean Streets (1973) as a memorable drunk in a ruckus in a bar.
A co-star in the former was Barbara Hershey, his partner in the Kung Fu days. This was a hippie affair: she changed her name to Barbara Seagull, and their child was named Free. They were never married, but Carradine was to wed five times. There were two other children and four divorces before his final wife, Annie Bierman.
Though he was born John Arthur Carradine in Hollywood, the name David distinguished him from his actor father John Carradine, a grand old man of Hollywood who claimed to have appeared in more movies than any contemporary. David was his eldest son.
When Walter Hill came to make The Long Riders, a 1980 film about the James and Younger gangs, David topped the bill as Cole Younger, alongside his half-brothers, Keith and Robert.
Carradine’s career took in more than 200 film and television credits. He started mainly in westerns, playing the title role in a series based on the hit film Shane in 1966. Other memorable films included Robert Altman’s radical reworking of The Long Goodbye (1973, again uncredited), and the lead in the exploitation film Death Race 2000 (1975), also starring Sylvester Stallone.
He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of the American folk singer Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory (1976), which also showcased his vocal abilities, a talent shared with his brother Keith, who played a country singer in Nashville (1975).
David was in Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977), but his star waned after the 1970s, assisted by a gonzo reputation. In 1989 he served 48 hours in jail for drink-driving.
Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) gave him a rare interesting part, and he appeared in 12 episodes of the television mini-series North and South (1985-1986), which brought him another Golden Globe nomination. He was to revisit his Kung Fu character from time to time, in Kung Fu: The Movie (1986) and in the television series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1993-1997).
“Every day,” he once said of the role, which won him several Emmys, “at least six people will come up to me and say, ‘Your show changed my life’.”
The actor also turned his hand to directing, initially on the Kung Fu series and also in three feature films: You and Me (1975), Mata Hari (1978) and Americana (1983).
But his career had been in the doldrums for some time when the celebrated occupation-reviver Tarantino cast him in the title role of Kill Bill: Vol 1 and Kill Bill: Vol 2 (2003-2004), a demonic character that leaned heavily on a screen personality that was freewheeling, laconic, and always tending towards the maverick outsider.
Carradine said it was as close to him as any part he had played, and it provided him with another onscreen musical number, The Legend of Pai Mai.
The director had thought of him for some time: “He wanted it to be a revelation to the world that he would show me like people don’t know me,” Carradine explained.
Tarantino drew inspiration from Carradine’s autobiography, Endless Highway (1995).
More recently, Carradine was a kung fu master in a Jonas Brothers video and played a 100-year-old Chinese gangster in the recently released Crank: High Voltage.
The role, like all of his memorable parts, fitted his personality as an Irish-American with a little Cherokee blood.
“I’m like a renegade and that rubs people wrong,” he said.
He is survived by Bierman; two daughters, Calista and Kansas, by his first two wives; and Free, later known as Tom.
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David (John Arthur) Carradine: born December 8th, 1936; died June 4th, 2009