David Carradine stars in the new SF thriller Lightspeed with fellow Dragon*Con guest Karen Black. He was born in Hollywood, but he was brought up all over the country, mostly by boarding school teachers and reform school wardens. He has starred twice on Broadway, and performed in eleven productions of ten of Shakespeare's plays (he played Laertes in Hamlet twice, once with his father as Hamlet). He is best-remembered for his legendary role in Kung Fu, the television series. When he left at the end of the third season to get on with his film career, the show was at the top of the ratings. In the years following, he made close to a hundred films and a couple of dozen movies for TV, not to mention another series built around his Kung Fu character. He won the Best Actor Award from the National Board of Film Review for Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory. He carried Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg, opposite Liv Ulman, to international acclaim. He's played American Indians, Chinese, Irish, Italians; he's been a clone, a reincarnation, and even a ghost or two.

Last year, he starred in Natural Selection, a black comedy about a serial killer and the detective who is obsessed with his capture (David), with his youngest brother, Michael Bowen, as the serial killer.

Following that, he visited, for the first time, the Shaolin Temple in China where kung fu originated to film the documentary Shows of Strength, David Carradine's Martial Arts Adventure.

David's autobiography, Endless Highway, which isn't just a celebrity memoir, is a chronicle of the times from the Second World War to the assassination of Kennedy and the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. His handbook of kung fu philosophy, Spirit of Shaolin, has been a solid seller for a decade. He has three screenplays in preparation, and is working on an Irish love story and a gothic historical novel.

Credit: dragoncon.org