Miramax FilmsWhen David Carradine talked, Quentin Tarantino listened.
Carradine, the always-working star of TV's Kung Fu and the omnipotent title figure in Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, has been found dead in a Thailand hotel.
A report out of Thailand said the 72-year-old actor was found hanged in an apparent suicide.
Prolific to the end, Carradine was to be seen next week in the new Fox series, Mental. He also recently appeared in the big-screen movie Crank: High Voltage.
Carradine earned an Emmy nomination for Kung Fu, his iconic 1970s series that married the martial arts to the Old West. He rated one of four career Golden Globe nominations for Kill Bill, the Tarantino revenge movie that, according to Carradine, was partly written under his influence.
"I wrote this autobiography called Endless Highway, a few years back," Carradine told ARTISTdirect this year. "Quentin was reading it, while he was writing the part for me, so it's full of my own rhythms."
As on Kung Fu, the real-life Carradine was a student of the martial arts, studying it for nearly 40 years.
The son of John Carradine, an incredibly prolific actor of the 1930s-1980s, the younger Carradine was, by comparison, merely very prolific. By his own count, he appeared in 118 films, although it's unknown if the 13—13!—2009 titles listed on his IMDb credits page were included.
Other notable films included: the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, and the original 1970s cult favorite Death Race 2000.
Survivors include his acting brothers Robert Carradine (Revenge of the Nerds) and Keith Carradine (Nashville).