Thanks to the golden opportunity of working with maestro Quentin Tarantino, after Travolta and Grier, he was unofficially the third person to benefit from a career re-boot. Known to a generation of new fans as “Bill” and most recently, as the elder Poon Dong, leader of the Chinese Triad in Crank: High Voltage, it was announced that Kung Fu legend David Carradine of the Carradine clan took away his life. He was 72. He’ll have left us with us with tons of memorable midnight watch type of stuff with his roles as Kwai Chang Caine in the 1970s television series Kung Fu, but Carradine was also seen in Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha (1972), Bound for Glory (1976) and in Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977). Here is a more complete bio from the NYTimes…:
Carradine made his directorial debut on a handful of episodes of Kung Fu. Upon leaving the series, he directed his first feature film, the drama You and Me (1975). The latter film co-starred Barbara Hershey and his brothers Keith Carradine and Robert Carradine were in the cast. His career across the next few decades involved a mix of major feature films, such as The Long Riders (1980), and offbeat smaller scale pictures such as Q (1982), interspersed with more personal projects such as Americana (1981), for which he served as screenwriter, director, and producer, as well as starring as a taciturn Vietnam veteran who heals himself and a troubled Midwestern town by refurbishing an old carousel. During the 1990s, he also returned to the role of Kwai Chang Caine in the series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Among the best elements of the series were Carradine’s interactions with his co-star, Robert Lansing (another Hollywood iconoclast), especially in the late episodes, when the latter actor was terminally ill. Even when he was doing action features such as Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) — in which he played the antagonist to real-life martial arts expert Chuck Norris’ hero — Carradine maintained a reputation for quality in the nature of his own work, which served him in good stead in the years to come. Longtime fans, appreciative of his work since his days on Kung Fu, could always depend on him to deliver a worthwhile performance, even if the vehicles in which he worked were less than stellar, as was often the case — outside of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues — in the 1990s. The stars finally lined up in his favor again in 2003, when Carradine appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 with Uma Thurman, which led to his much-expanded part in the follow-up movie. Since those films, he has been busier than at any time in his career, with dozens of screen credits in the years that followed.