page_title: David Carradine
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: David Carradine / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: David Carradine met vrouw en kind in Hilversum voor persconferentie i.v.m. serie Noord en Zuid
context_page_description: David Carradine was an American actor best known for playing martial arts roles. He is perhaps best known as the star of the 1970s television series Kung Fu, playing Kwai Chang Caine, a peace-loving Shaolin monk travelling through the American Old West. He also portrayed the titular character of both of the Kill Bill films.
  David Carradine was a member of the Carradine family of actors that began with his father, John Carradine. The elder Carradine's acting career, which included major and minor roles on stage and television, and in cinema, spanned more than four decades. A prolific "B" movie actor, David Carradine appeared in more than 100 feature films in a career spanning more than six decades. He received nominations for a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award for his work on Kung Fu, and received three additional Golden Globe nominations for his performances in the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, the television miniseries North and South, and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 2, for which he won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor.
  Throughout his life, Carradine was arrested and prosecuted for a variety of offenses, which often involved substance abuse.
context_section_description: Shortly after being drafted into the Army in 1960, Carradine proposed marriage to Donna Lee Becht (born September 26, 1937), whom he had met while they were students at Oakland High School. They were married on Christmas Day that year. She lived with him off-base in Virginia while he was stationed at Fort Eustis. In April 1962, she gave birth to their daughter Calista. After Carradine's discharge, the family lived in New York while Carradine established his acting career, appearing on Broadway in The Deputy and Royal Hunt of the Sun. The marriage dissolved in 1968, whereupon Carradine left New York and headed back to California to continue his television and film careers.
  In 1969, Carradine met actress Barbara Hershey while the two of them were working on Heaven with a Gun. The pair lived together until 1975. They appeared in other films together, including Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha. In 1972, they appeared together in a nude Playboy spread, recreating some sex scenes from Boxcar Bertha. That year, Hershey gave birth to their son, Free (who when aged nine changed his name to Tom, much to his father's chagrin). The couple's relationship fell apart around the time of Carradine's 1974 burglary arrest, when Carradine began an affair with Season Hubley, who had guest-starred on Kung Fu. Carradine was engaged to Hubley for a time, but they never married.
  In February 1977, Carradine married, in a civil ceremony in Munich, Germany, his second wife, Linda (née Linda Anne Gilbert), immediately following the filming of The Serpent's Egg. Gilbert was previously married to Roger McGuinn of The Byrds. Their daughter, Kansas, was born in 1978.
  Carradine's second marriage ended in divorce, as did the two that followed. He was married to Gail Jensen from 1986 to 1997. She died in April 2010, at the age of 60, of an alcohol-related illness. He was married to Marina Anderson from 1998 to 2001. By this time Carradine had proclaimed himself to be a "serial monogamist."
  On December 26, 2004, Carradine married the widowed Annie Bierman (née Anne Kirstie Fraser, December 21, 1960) at the seaside Malibu home of his friend Michael Madsen. Vicki Roberts, his attorney and a longtime friend of his wife's, performed the ceremony. With this marriage he acquired three stepdaughters, Amanda Eckelberry (born 1989), Madeleine Rose (born 1995), and Olivia Juliette (born 1998) as well as a stepson, actor Max Richard Carradine (born 1998).
  In one of his final interviews, Carradine stated that at 71, he was still "in excellent shape", attributing it to a good diet and having a youthful circle of friends. "Everybody that I know is at least 10 or 20 years younger than I am. My wife Annie is 24 years younger than I am. My daughter asks why I don't hang with women my age and I say, 'Most of the women my age are a lot older than me!'"
  In June 2010, Marina Anderson, Carradine's fourth ex-wife, published David Carradine: The Eye of My Tornado, a memoir that discusses intimate details of their marriage.
caption: Carradine and his daughter Kansas with wife Gail in 1987
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