Thursday, June 04, 2009

The Legend No Longer Continues

David Carradine died today; it appears that he may have committed suicide, for reasons unknown, or there are some who theorize that it may have been something else.

Whatever the cause, I hate to hear of his passing. Carradine was 72 years old; in some lives, that's the end of a lifetime, but in Carradine's case, it appeared that he his vitality was far from running out. He was working on a new film at the time of his death, and his career (revitalized by his work in Kill Bill) continued to flourish. I had hoped that at some point a new Kung Fu project might allow him to complete the work that began with him as a young man and continued in Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (an underrated series, I think) as a middle-aged man; it would have been nice to see him in the role of older teacher, but that will never happen.

I knew him only through his work, but I had come to like him as a quirky, sometimes eccentric actor who didn't always make the best choices but who always made the best of the choices he had made, if that makes any sense.

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