David Carradine

David Carradine was born into the family business, as the son of John Carradine, and spent six decades saying yes to nearly everything. More than two hundred roles, more than a hundred features, a great many of them terrible, and a handful that are permanent.

Kung Fu made him famous in 1972. Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin monk walking through the American West and declining to fight until the last two minutes of each episode, was a strange thing for a network to broadcast, and Carradine played it with a stillness nobody else on television was attempting. It brought Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and typecasting he never entirely escaped.

The seventies were his best decade for actual films: Boxcar Bertha for Martin Scorsese, an uncredited drunk in Mean Streets, an uncredited turn in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, where he drives in a mask with real deadpan wit, and Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory, which brought a Golden Globe nomination and is the best work he ever did.

After that came thirty years of paid employment, much of it unwatchable, and then Quentin Tarantino handed him Bill. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 keeps him off screen almost entirely; Vol. 2 gives him long stretches of talk and produces an old man with a flute-soft voice and an appalling calm, and he won a Saturn Award for it. He worked until 2009, the year he died, including a Frankenstein voice in the Death Race remake and a wheezing crime boss in Crank: High Voltage.