I was never a particular fan of David Carradine, “Kung Fu” having hit the airwaves just past the time when I broke my addiction to television. Nothing against him, mind you, I just never saw him in a role that really caught my attention. (I will shamefacedly admit to not having seen him as Woody Guthrie in Bound For Glory or the film he directed as a labor of love, Americana.) But I was always interested in him, as an outgrowth of having followed the career of his father, the character actor John Carradine.

The elder Carradine saw himself as a Shakespearian actor, and for all I know he may have been a fine one on stage. In movies, though, he was relegated to villainous roles in an endless stream of B horror movies. In the best of them, he took over the role of Dracula from Bela Lugosi and reconceived it. As for the worst of them, well, there are dozens of them, and you can’t believe he was ever so desperate for money as to bother appearing in them.

David Carradine spoke at times of his carreer as having started as an act of revenge against what happened to his father. I don’t know if his brothers Keith and Robert shared that; the fact that there are so many Carradines in the business alone is a kind of revenge.

He certainly inherited his father’s work ethic, having made more than 220 appearances in film and on television. You’d be hard pressed to name more than a few of them, and when he did show up in a hit, like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, most people reacted as if he’d just come out of retirement.

(For all that Tarantino likes to cast his childhood favorites in leading roles, it hasn’t helped a lot of their careers. Sure, Pulp Fiction did wonders for John Travolta. But can you name any of the 40 movies Carradine made after Kill Bill? DId Pam Grier and Robert Forster’s careers take off again after Jackie Brown? Did you ever see Lawrence Tierney again after Reservoir Dogs? Did Sonny Chiba breakthrough to the mainstream after Kill Bill?)

Anyway, Carradine is dead, and while I didn’t get the lump in the throat that fans of “Kung Fu,” it’s sad news anyway, for one of two reasons. If he did indeed kill himself, it flies in the face of a man who claimed to have found peace in spiritual studies. (He knew nothing about martial arts when he took the role of Caine, but the role piqued his interest.) Still, it might be even worse if the other theory is true, the one that has lead to hundreds of smirking blog posts all day today and which, if true, will append itself to the man’s name for as long as he is remembered. I suppose an accidental end to a good life is better than suicide as a remedy for a life no longer valued. But no one deserves to be remembered as a dirty joke.