David Carradine found dead in hotel

David Carradine, the star of Kill Bill and Kung Fu, a cult 1970s TV series, has been found dead in a luxury hotel room in Bangkok. According to Chuck Binder, his agent, the 72-year-old actor was in the Thai capital filming a movie called Stretch. Suicide is suspected. The police told BBC that a maid at the hotel found Carradine this morning, lying on the floor of his wardrobe with a rope around his body and neck.

Carradine, who came from a notable Hollywood family, acted for both Martin Scorcese, in Boxcar Bertha, and Ingmar Bergman, in The Serpent's Egg during the 1970s. But he made his name starring as a Shaolin priest travelling in the frontier land of the Wild West.

More recently, his career received a fillip when Quentin Tarantino chose him to play the title role of Bill, the leader of an assassination squad, alongside Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

Since then, he has hosted a programme on the History Channel, promoted Lipton Ice Tea and starred as a Kung Fu master in a Jonas Brothers music video. In his most recent film, a Jason Statham action thriller called Crank: High Voltage, he played an aging Triad in need of a heart transplant.