Some sad news. David Carradine, the actor who achieved fame playing zen-filled mystical character Caine on the TV show Kung Fu has passed away.
CNN has this report
CNN) -- American actor David Carradine has been found dead in a Bangkok, Thailand, hotel, according to his personal manager, Chuck Binder.
Binder said Thursday that the death is being investigated but could provide no other details.
Carradine's death was "shocking and sad. He was full of life, always wanting to work ... a great person," Binder said, according to People magazine.
Carradine, who became famous in the 1970s when he starred as traveling Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine in the television series "Kung Fu," was 72.
Modern audiences may best know him as "Bill" in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" films. He earned a 2005 Golden Globe nomination for his role in the second movie in the two-part saga.
His career included more than 100 feature films, two dozen television movies and theater work, according to the Internet Movie Database.
I loved Kung Fu when I was a kid. I also really liked him as Woody Guthrie and in Kill Bill. I've never seen Boxcar Bertha, but I am a huge Scorsese fan, so I'm guessing I'd like it, as well.
In an interview in The Onion, Carradine explained how he got into acting. He also comes across here as a cool old hipster.
Well, when I was a little kid, I didn't even know he was an actor. I thought he was a sea captain. He always dressed like that. That's all he talked about, his schooner. He was a master sailor. It seemed to me that that was all he cared about. The show-business people he knew, I suppose I met them all. John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, and all those cats—to me, they were just old guys, and drunk most of the time, too, probably. Then, later on, I lived with my father in New York. He was on Broadway. That's when I became totally aware that he was an actor.
In between, though, I used to get into fights at school. I went to school for a while at a New York City public school. They had a big gang thing going on. One guy stopped me in the hall and said "Your dad killed Jesse James!" [in the 1939 film Jesse James] and threw a punch at me. I started getting really tough, and then I stopped going to school. I had all this acne and I wouldn't talk right. It was always like that. I went to 17 different schools when I was a kid. Every time I went to school, no matter what I talked like, it was always from the wrong place. I never knew anybody, so contact sports were out and the cafeteria was out, so I would go down these back stairs, put a matchbook in the door, and have lunch outside. One day, I was coming back up, and that's when the guy met me at the stairway and threw a punch at me. After that, I actually beat up a couple of these guys that used to beat me up, somehow or another.
Finally, I'd go to school in the morning, and then I'd take my lunch money and go to Broadway to see a first-run movie. In those days, if you got in before 1 o'clock, you could go for 50 cents, and you'd get a first-run movie and an entire act. It could be a band, it could be jugglers, it could be a dog act, and then a headliner from the studios, like Frank Sinatra, Eddie Fisher, or Martin & Lewis, stuff like that. So that's what I did. Fuck school. The truant officer caught me and I went to reform school. That was interesting. I learned how to box, which was the main thing I got out of reform school.
I did get to hang out with my dad for a little while. I went with him to summer stock. I watched him be a real king of the world. He'd ship out as a star in summer stock. He sometimes directed the shows. I learned a lot from him—not just about acting, but about everything, how to handle a woman. Then I went back to live with my mother, and I plunged back into the regular world. This was in Oakland, California, which was about 80 percent black. I really got a whole street education by the time I got out of high school.
I went to college at San Francisco State and supported myself working the graveyard shift at a brewery, and did a little theater. It was great. I'd do Shakespeare and stuff like that. What you'd do is, you'd rehearse in the evening for eight weeks, and then you'd open the play and do the play on the weekends, then start rehearsing the next play. So I would go to college in the daytime, rehearsing on the swing shift and performing and working at the brewery. When was I going to sleep? In college, where else? In fucking class. So I gave up on college. I wasn't going to give up on the theater, and I couldn't quit my job. Then the Shakespearean Repertory came to town, and they were missing a juvenile, so they held an open audition, and eventually I got the part. It felt good to be doing Shakespeare. I remember thinking, "Shit, I could do this for the rest of my life."
Then I got drafted. While I was in the army, I formed a theater company, which was pretty cool. I was an artist in the army. You can't train an artist, you have to find one, because no artist is going to want to join the army. When I
Rest in peace, David Carradine! You will be missed.