Actor David Carradine was reportedly found dead in his hotel room in Bangkok. He was 72.
My memories of Carradine, beyond Kill Bill, are mostly limited to distant foggy memories of seeing Kung Fu when I was three or four years old. I re-watched some of the series when it came out on DVD, however, and what impressed me about his performance as Caine—a.k.a., popularly, “Grasshopper”—was probably pretty much what I picked up back then: his quiet, cool, stoic ability to just be on the screen.
This, I suppose, was a big part of the appeal of his Eastern Western back in the ’70s: his quiet heroism both resonated with the strong, silent heroes of traditional Westerns and had the tang of Zen counterculturalism. It was a performance as notable for what Carradine didn’t do as what he did. On behalf of three-year-old me, my respect.