David Carradine is the latest 1970s icon to have his career revived by Quentin Tarantino - but the 'Kung Fu' star always knew he'd make a comeback, he tells Donald Clarke
After our interview David Carradine, the 67-year-old star of Quentin Tarantino's smashing Kill Bill Volume 2, leans forward and urges me not to write the kind of article he has been reading about himself for the last three decades. He was tempted not to answer the questions I asked about the wilder times in his life but felt - and this is a very Kill Bill thing to say - that he detected something "honourable" about me. I'll do what I can.
The period that Carradine is most concerned about is the early 1970s, when he and actress Barbara Hershey became the signature couple of the counter-culture. I can imagine that it must be more than a little tedious to still be making excuses for your patchouli-scented adventures more than 30 years down the line.
There is, after all, plenty else of interest in his life: his complicated childhood for a start. The man who, in the vintage TV series, Kung Fu, would inspire a million schoolboys to inject artistry into their playground brawls, grew up thinking that his father, the splendidly cadaverous actor John Carradine, was a sea captain.
"He had a 54-foot schooner and he always dressed in his yachting cap," Carradine says, as we stroll out of Dublin's Clarence Hotel to enable him to suck down a cigarette. "It was the most amazing sort of childhood: thinking your dad was a sea captain and then later seeing him on stage in Shakespeare."
This rather takes me aback. I had read that Carradine had a pretty wretched time of it as a youth. Following the break-up of his parents' marriage, he was shuffled from foster home to boarding school and, after a period of truancy, ended up in reform school.
"My father thought that would teach me a lesson, and it worked," he says.
There was even a story that he attempted suicide while still a toddler.
"Yeah, that's funny, isn't it," he ruminates in his chocolatey drawl. "I was about five. It is hard to explain. I think I might have been unaware that it would hurt and that it would be irretrievable."
Carradine, who had been deeply disturbed by his mother's attempt to separate him from his half-brother, Bruce, flung a rope over a beam and attempted to hang himself.
"Miraculously, my father just came round the corner at that moment," Carradine says. "I don't know how he knew that his firstborn son was about to cease to be."
These are just the sort of childhood traumas that are supposed to poison adult lives. But Carradine seems a fairly mellow chap. Thin and taut, his face elegantly crinkled by the years, he looks like the kind of fellow you would expect to meet leaning against an empty water tower in the dustbowl.
Only those terrifying American teeth - as solid and regular as the tombstones in a military cemetery - speak of a life in the entertainment industry. So, does he still carry any scars from that difficult upbringing? He laughs.
"I'm not really sure that could happen to an Irishman. Psychology means nothing to the Irish," he says.
He is proud of his Irish heritage and has pinned a sort of Celtic brooch to his tweed jacket to advertise the fact.
But he has a thimbleful of Cherokee blood to thank for much of his success. When he threw himself into acting in the mid-1960s, his vaguely exotic features enabled him to play characters from a bewildering array of racial groups. But to the generation now in its late 30s and early 40s he remains best known as Caine, the philosophical Chinese nomad with the deadly fists, from Kung Fu. The series, which ran from 1972 until 1975, combined slow-motion brawling with fortune-cookie aphorisms to charming effect and still has many fans throughout the world.
I wonder whether he ever resents the fact that so many people still identify him with that one role.
"No, because firstly I am not like William Shatner, who is only allowed to play that one part," he says. "I have been in 102 theatrical movies, aside from all the TV. Every part has been different. I have worn a dress. I've played heroes and villains. I've played idiots. But also fans don't just come up to me and just say: 'Boy, I sure liked that series.' They say: 'Your series changed my life.' Or they even say sometimes: 'Your series saved my life.' I don't see how you can feel bad about that. This little Chinese hobo has had that effect on people, and that's really great."
He delivered a superb performance as Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory and, alongside his half-brothers, Keith and Bobby, was one of several reasons to savour Walter Hill's fine western, The Long Riders. But real movie stardom eluded him. I wonder whether he was the victim of the snobbery Hollywood then felt towards actors who had come to fame on TV (stars such as Bruce Willis and George Clooney have softened those attitudes in recent decades).
"Well, no. Stardom was possible," Carradine says. "I was definitely in the running. And after I made Bound for Glory the president of United Artists said: 'I want to build you.' I said I wanted to do a dancing movie. It had to be about this guy who actually is a dancer - we don't want the music to start out of nowhere - and it has to be modern music. He said: 'What?' "
The chiefs wanted Carradine for Karel Reisz's post-Vietnam drama, Who'll Stop the Rain. Then Ingmar Bergman called and asked him to appear in the bizarre highbrow potboiler, The Serpent's Egg.
"So I had to turn United Artists down," he says. "They said: 'You can't.' I said: 'I have to do this. This is a once-in-a-lifetime - once-in-an- eternity - chance.' As a result the studio head cast Michael Moriarty and Nick Nolte and the next time I saw him he had his arm around John Travolta and was talking about making a dance movie. That is what happened. I took the artistic rather than the commercial choice."
Somehow I can't see Carradine - who would by then have been more than 40 - in Saturday Night Fever, but let's allow him that fantasy. Others have suggested that his wild living and devotion to alternative lifestyles proved a barrier to mainstream success. At the height of his fame, during the Kung Fu years, he and Barbara Hershey were deeply into the hippie experience. They named their son Free and, following an unfortunate impact between her car and a seabird, Hershey became, briefly, Barbara Seagull.
"That is what we were. We were very public about it," he says. "I have never kept secrets. I am very open. That is why I have a reputation for this and that. I just sat there and told People magazine flat out. People magazine, in particular, has always liked to trash me. They printed this cover which said 'David Carradine has taken 500 acid trips'."
And was that accurate? Are the tales of his drink 'n' drugs hell exaggerated?
"The psychedelic experimentation we did a lot of. And we smoked a lot of pot," he says. "Liquor was not something we did. We looked down on alcohol and smoking tobacco in those days."
But it has been reported that he took to booze in a big way in the decades that followed.
"I didn't get into drinking till I was in my 40s and by that time I had stepped away from the rest of drugs," he says. "There was only a period of a few years when I was drinking too much. I had a friend who was a mentor and he suddenly said: 'I've never seen you abuse a substance before.' I said: 'Am I doing that now?' And I was. That was spring of 1996. I like to think that I stopped drinking on St Patrick's Day, but it was actually a month later."
For whatever reason, the years after Kung Fu saw him appearing in a huge number of low-end exploitation features - some as good as Death Race 2000 and Q - The Winged Serpent, most as grim as Safari 3000 and The Mad Bunch - while his name began to slip out of A-list agents' Rolodexes. He did manage to direct the decent, if neglected, film, Americana, in 1981 and reappeared as Caine in the TV series, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, in 1993. But his profile wasstill far lower than he would have wished.
"But I knew that at a certain point I'd come back to the centre again," he says. "I also knew that it would take somebody with enormous courage, like Quentin [Tarantino], to do it."
The world of the exploitation picture is, of course, Tarantino's hinterland, the place from where he draws many of his ideas and (re-)discovers many of his actors. It was therefore utterly appropriate that he should cast Carradine as Bill, the grizzled samurai master, against whom Uma Thurman directs a rampage of bloody revenge in the second part of his violent epic.
"Within a few moments of me returning Quentin's phone call I got a call from [Lethal Weapon director] Richard Donner and one from Tom Cruise wanting to know if I could speak Japanese," he says. "It is just one of those moments that can fix things. It was a vortex of a moment and things cluster around those moments."
Though Bill was originally written with Warren Beatty in mind, Carradine makes the part his own. Husky-voiced, gimlet-eyed and leathery, he rekindles memories of Lee Van Cleef and Jack Palance, while investing the role with something approaching humanity. He must have had mixed feelings when the director told him he was cutting the picture in two and that he would not appear in part one.
"I did think it might be a marketing mistake, because I do have a lot of fans," he says. "About 200 million people watch Kung Fu even now. But I knew that even if I wasn't in the first movie I would be in the first scene of the second and I would dominate it. I realised that rather than dominate the second half of a movie I would dominate an entire movie."
After 102 mostly forgotten pictures, four failed marriages and a fair amount of antagonistic press coverage, Carradine deserves a break. Is he now getting the respect he feels he is due?
"Well, it is funny," he says. "Ever since Kill Bill came out the press hasn't wanted to bend my words any more. They actually want to use the good quotes."
Wait till he sees what I intend to do to him. His eyes narrow.
"Well, just remember: I know where you live," he says.
And, of course, he has been studying Kung Fu for decades.
"Yeah," he says. "I know Kung Fu. I also know a lot of Kung Fu masters and some very big guys and I know a lot of Hell's Angels. So, I wouldn't f**k around with me."
I think he's joking, but I wouldn't like to put it to the test.
• Kill Bill Volume 2 is on general release