David Carradine, who rose to fame as a young monk in the popular 1970s television series Kung Fu and more recently starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room yesterday.
The 72-year-old American was naked with a rope around his neck when he was found by a hotel employee.
Thai police believe that his death was suicide and they estimate that he had been dead for as long as 12 hours when his body was discovered. It has also been suggested that Carradine’s death may have been a result of an attempt at sexual auto-asphyxiation.
Aurelio Giraudo, the general manager of the Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel in Bangkok, told The Times that Carradine was in Thailand to make a film and had checked in alone on Monday. The actor had spent a lot of time with the crew shooting Stretch.
Mr Giraudo said: “We are just saying, from respect to the family, that we will not comment.”
A spokesman for the US Embassy in Bangkok said the investigation into Carradine’s death was a matter for Thai police and refused to speculate on the cause of death. “We are taking the situation very seriously as we do with any American who dies overseas,” he said last night. “We send our condolences to his family.”
The actor’s body was reportedly taken to the Chulalongkorn hospital in Bangkok for a postmortem examination. The results are expected within a few days.
Carradine came from a respected Hollywood acting family and had staged a comeback when he starred in Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. His latest completed film, Portland, is scheduled to be released later this year.
Although he appeared in more than 100 films and television dramas, his career had stalled after he abandoned his role in Kung Fu as Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin monk travelling through the American West in the late 1800s. He reprised the role in a mid-1980s television film and played Caine’s grandson in the 1990s syndicated series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.
In the Kill Bill films he was the leader of a group of assassins, and he won a Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actor for his role in the second film.
“All I’ve ever needed since I more or less retired from studio films a couple of decades ago is just to be in one,” Carradine said in 2004. “There isn’t anything that Anthony Hopkins or Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery or any of those old guys are doing that I couldn’t do. All that was required was somebody with Quentin’s courage to put me in the spotlight.” He also admitted past difficulties with alcohol and drugs, but said that he had conquered his addictions.
He wrote a memoir called Spirit of Shaolin and continued to make instructional videos on tai chi and other martial arts. Carradine was married five times, most recently to Annie Bierman in 2004, and had two daughters, Calista Miranda and Kansas.
