Farewell, Grasshopper.
Actor David Carradine, famous for interspersing philosophical quips with flying kicks on the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu,” was found dead yesterday in a Bangkok hotel room.
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A maid at the Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel discovered his body hanging in a closet, a cord wrapped around his neck and “other parts of his body,” according to Thai police, who initially believed the 72-year-old actor had killed himself. “We found his body, naked, hanging in the closet,” Lt. Teerapop Luanseng said.
Asked whether the death might have been the result of auto-erotic asphyxiation, a sex act in which people choke themselves for sexual gratification, officials would only say they are investigating.
The actor’s manager and family also say they do not believe that Carradine, who was in Bangkok working on a film called “Stretch,” could possibly have killed himself.
“We know David, and he would never take his life,” manager Chuck Binder told the Post.
Carradine’s ex-wife Marina Anderson agreed.
“In his autobiography, he talked about being depressed,” she told Radar Online. “But I don’t believe David would commit suicide.”
Carradine’s death mirrors the suspicious choking death of 37-year-old INXS rock-band frontman Michael Hutchence, who was found hanged by a belt from the door of an Australian hotel room in 1997. Back then, Hutchence’s lover said he liked to choke himself during sex play.
An autopsy on Carradine will be conducted today.
Acting was in his blood. His father, John, made a career playing creepy, eccentric characters in film and onstage. His brothers Keith, Robert and Bruce also became actors. Actress Martha Plimpton is his niece.
“My Uncle David was a brilliantly talented, fiercely intelligent and generous man. He was the nexus of our family in so many ways, and drew us together over the years and kept us connected,” Plimpton said. His career peaked twice. First, in the role of Kwai Chang Caine on “Kung Fu,” an Eastern-tinged Western in which he played a half-Chinese Shaolin priest who wandered the West in the 1800s.
The second career peak came three decades later, when Quentin Tarantino cast him as the leader of a gang of assassins — and the object of Uma Thurman’s revenge — in “Kill Bill” Vols. 1 and 2.
He wanted to be a sculptor or a musician — and did a stint as an Army draftsman, but eventually caught the acting bug.
“I got my first acting gig, a production of Hamlet in a mall in New Jersey,” he said in his autobiography. “A year later, I was starring on Broadway.”
Carradine was married five times, most recently to current wife Annie Bierman. “My libido,” he wrote, has “always been overactive.”
Although the show “Kung Fu” aired only for a few seasons, it lived on in syndication, and came to define Carradine’s persona on and off screen in the public imagination.
“I wasn’t like a TV star in those days, I was like a rock ‘n’ roll star,” Carradine said in an interview in 1996. “It was a phenomenon kind of thing . . . It was very special.”
Prior to the series, Carradine knew nothing about martial arts or Eastern philosophy, but the show inspired a deep interest in both.
In the 2004 interview, Carradine talked candidly about his past boozing and narcotics use, but said he had put all that behind him and stuck to coffee and cigarettes.
“I didn’t like the way I looked, for one thing. You’re kind of out of control emotionally when you drink that much. I was quicker to anger.
“You’re probably witnessing the last time I will ever answer those questions. Because this is a regeneration. It is a renaissance. It is the start of a new career for me.
“It’s time to do nothing but look forward.” With AP