Chuck Norris, the martial arts champion who became the epitome of the 1980s action star, died on Thursday. He was 86 years old.
Norris’ family confirmed his death on Instagram Friday morning after reports previously surfaced that Norris had been hospitalized in Hawaii earlier in the week following an unspecified medical emergency. A cause of death was not given; The family said they wanted to “keep the details to themselves.” At the same time it said: “Please know that he was surrounded by his family and left in peace.”
The family’s statement continued: “To the world, he was a martial artist, an actor and a symbol of strength. To us, he was a loving husband, a caring father and grandfather, a wonderful brother and the heart of our family. He lived his life with faith, with purpose and with an unwavering devotion to the people he loved. Through his work, his discipline and his kindness, he inspired millions of people around the world and left a lasting mark in so many lives.
Like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood before him, cut from the same cloth
“While our hearts are broken, we are deeply grateful for the life he led and the unforgettable moments we were able to share with him. The love and support he received from fans around the world meant so much to him, and our family is deeply grateful for it. To him, you weren’t just fans – you were his friends.”
Norris was one of the most sought-after action stars of the 1970s and 1980s, appearing in a mix of major studio productions and independent martial arts films. His 1983 film “Lone Wolf McQuade,” in which Norris played a Marine who becomes a Texas Ranger, later inspired his hit TV series “Walker, Texas Ranger,” which ran for nine seasons and 203 episodes on CBS in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Son of a Cherokee father and an Irish-English mother
Like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood before him, cut from the same cloth, Norris was drawn to roles in which he played strong, silent types. Long before he embodied the archetypal, ultra-masculine modern cowboy in Walker, Texas Ranger, Norris exuded the quiet strength and discipline he learned from martial arts training. On screen and off, he maintained a stoic expression, a perfect poker face that never hinted at what his next move would be. When The New York Times published a profile of Norris in 1985, it introduced him by saying that the interview showed him doing two things he doesn’t often do on screen: smiling and talking.
Growing up in Ryan, Oklahoma, where he was born Carlos Ray Norris on March 10, 1940, to a Cherokee father and an Irish-English mother, Norris later said that he saw Wayne’s characters as a kind of “surrogate father.” His father, an alcoholic, left the family when Norris was ten years old. His parents divorced in 1956. The rest of the Norris family, Chuck had two younger brothers, Wieland and Aaron, later moved to Torrance, California.
Martial arts and first film roles
“I was shy, unathletic and just a C student,” Norris told The New York Times in 1993. “I made the football team, but I was only an understudy. The coach wanted those aggressive types. I just wasn’t one of them.” He had low self-esteem as a child, fueled by racial slurs like “mongrel,” he said, adding that he dreamed of being strong enough to fight back.
Although it seemed like he was born for martial arts, Norris didn’t get into it until he joined the Air Force and served in South Korea. He took up karate, he told the Times, so that it would serve him better when he returned to the United States, where he wanted to become a police officer. But he became so passionate about martial arts that he instead opened a chain of karate schools in Southern California, where he also honed his own talent and became the world middleweight karate champion from 1968 to 1974.
It was the right time and the right place, as kung fu films were just starting to boom, thanks in part to “Fists of Fury,” aka “The Big Boss,” a 1971 film starring Bruce Lee. At the suggestion of Steve McQueen’s son Chad, one of Norris’ karate students, Norris decided to try acting. He made his film debut in a small role in The Wrecking Crew, a 1968 Dean Martin film in which Lee served as an action choreographer.
Breakthrough with Bruce Lee
Lee and Norris later faced each other in “Return of the Dragon,” also known as “The Way of the Dragon,” which was widely released in 1973. A showdown between the two actors in Rome’s Colosseum catapulted Norris into the spotlight. “I had never been in a film before and I was intimidated,” Norris recalled in Nick de Semlyen’s book “The Last Action Heroes.” “So I started eating pasta. Then I stopped working out for almost a month. I went from 167 pounds to 185, and that’s why you don’t see me doing jump kicks in the movie. I didn’t think I was going to get off the floor.” Still, Norris cut an impressive figure, and the role set him up for a long-lasting acting career, even if it initially seemed like it would fizzle out.
Hard recognition in the eighties
A series of films in the 1970s in which Norris acted and occasionally served as fight choreographer, such as “Breaker! Breaker!” (1977) and Good Guys Wear Black (1978), had only moderate success, and the critics’ disdain angered Norris. When he got back into the swing of things in his mid-forties with Missing in Action (1984) and Code of Silence (1985), he appreciated what he saw as long-overdue recognition.
“I have worked hard for the last nine years to make the critics see me in a different light,” he told the Times in 1985. “They’re usually more into things like ‘Passage to India,’ and they’ve been hitting me hard over the years, especially in the beginning.”
Political fears as film material
Around this time, Norris also tried his hand at writing and co-wrote the screenplay for “Invasion USA” (1985), in which he also starred. The idea for the film came to him after an article in Reader’s Digest suggested that hundreds of terrorists were plotting against the United States. “I thought, ‘Man, this is scary,'” he told the Times. “‘What if some guy on the scale of a Khomeini or a Gaddafi mobilizes these people and starts sending them to every major city?'” So in the film, terrorists start blowing up shopping malls and settlement houses, “all the places where working people go,” Norris explained at the time. He later returned to the subject of terrorism with “The Delta Force,” a huge hit in 1986.
Off-screen, Norris espoused conservative politics, particularly in his later years. In 2008, he recorded a 30-second commercial in support of the National Rifle Association. “Hello, I’m Chuck Norris, a black belt patriot,” he said. “If some thug breaks into my house, I can use my roundhouse kick, but I would prefer them to look down the barrel of my gun.” Four years later, he claimed that if Obama were re-elected, “our country as we know it could be lost forever.” In 2015, Norris campaigned for Mike Huckabee as the former Arkansas governor ran against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
Career break and TV rescue
During the ’80s, Norris appeared in sequels to “The Delta Force” and “Missing in Action” before his career stumbled again in the ’90s. Although 1992’s Sidekicks, a comedy-drama in which he played himself opposite Jonathan Brandis, was a success, audiences’ appetite for his brand of action film was waning. In 1995, he starred in Top Dog, one of many cop-with-a-dog movies of the time, and the film didn’t make back its budget. Many of his films have been released directly to video.
Norris’s saving grace in this era was “Walker, Texas Ranger,” the melodramatic crime series that premiered on CBS in April 1993 and ran for eight seasons, ending in May 2001 on a cliffhanger that was never resolved. Norris played Sergeant Cordell Walker, a Texas Ranger raised by his uncle, a Native American named Ray Firewalker, notable since his father’s name was Ray and Norris had starred in 1986’s Firewalker.
With his partner James Trivette, actor Clarence Gilyard Jr., Walker fought crime in and around Dallas every week. Norris sang the series’ theme music. Although never a smash hit, the series reliably garnered audiences in Nielsen’s Top 20 throughout the ’90s.
Comeback, memes and advertising
Norris returned to film in the 2000s, with a memorable cameo as himself in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004) and by joining the cast of The Expendables 2 (2012), a sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s successful vehicle for once-popular action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme and himself.
His genuine martial arts talent, mixed with the imposing, uncompromising attitude of his characters, also famously made Norris the perfect material for an early internet meme. “Chuck Norris Facts” revolved around comically hyperbolic examples of the actor’s actions, such as: “Chuck Norris doesn’t flush toilets, he scares the shit out of them” and “Chuck Norris has a grizzly bear rug in his bedroom. He’s not dead. He’s just too afraid to move.” Norris embraced the memes and even appeared on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” which had long exploited “Walker, Texas Ranger” as a source of jokes, where he read out the facts and took part in skits.
By 2011, he managed to turn irony into substance, appearing in detergent commercials with the slogan “Chuck Norris approved” and later for “Mountain Dew.” He also promoted the Glock weapons company.
Books, foundations and family
Outside of acting, Norris has authored many books, including the 2008 nonfiction book Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America, which laid out his views on conservatism, and co-founded two philanthropic organizations. The United Fighting Arts Federation, launched in 1979, was intended to combine Norris’ karate with Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu through tournaments. Another, “Kickstart Kids,” founded in 1990, which “teaches character through karate,” according to its website, is aimed at middle and high school students.
Norris married his first wife, Dianne Holechek, in 1958. The couple had two sons, Mike and Eric. Norris fathered a daughter, Dina, born in 1962, outside of his marriage. Norris and Dianne divorced in 1989, and Norris married his second wife, Gena O’Kelley, in 1998. They had fraternal twins Dakota and Danilee, born in 2001.
Conclusion and legacy
“All I wanted to do in films was to be a positive image,” Norris said in the 1993 Times interview. “I wanted to be likable, like I am in real life. I don’t like violence for the sake of violence. … In my films I never attack anyone. I don’t start trouble, but I stop it.”
