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Chuck Norris, the former world karate champion who used his fight prowess to become the star of a string of low-budget but financially successful action movies, has died aged 86.
His family posted a message on social media saying Norris had died on Thursday, adding: “While we would like to keep the circumstances private, please know that he was surrounded by his family and was at peace.”
Norris won a series of karate championships in the late 1960s, and his friendship with fellow martial-artist Bruce Lee led to his eye-catching appearance in Lee’s 1972 hit The Way of the Dragon. Norris then went on to make a number of action films over the next two decades, including Invasion USA and The Delta Force, as well as the long-running TV series Walker, Texas Ranger. Norris also acquired a level of political profile for his outspoken support for rightwing political causes.
A number of his fellow action stars posted tributes on social media, with Sylvester Stallone writing: “I had a great time working with Chuck. He was all American in every way. Great man and my condolences to his wonderful family.” Dolph Lundgren added: “Chuck Norris is the champ. Ever since I was a young martial artist and later getting into movies, I always looked up to him as a role model.” And although on the opposite spectrum politically, horror author Stephen King posted: “Seriously, I thought he was great. Silent Rage scared hell out of my boys … and me.”
Born in 1940 in Oklahoma, Norris joined the air force in 1958 and after being posted to a US airbase in South Korea, started to learn Korean martial art Tang Soo Do. After leaving the military in 1962, Norris started to fight competitively with considerable success, winning a number of titles including the World Professional Middleweight Karate Championship in 1968. Norris met Lee at demonstration event in 1964 in California and they became friends, both acquiring a celebrity clientele of Hollywood names eager for instruction.
Lee then cast Norris in his directing debut The Way of the Dragon, which culminates in their 10-minute final fight; the film was a major hit and despite Lee’s death a year later in 1973, Norris continued to appear in films, winning a lead role in 1977 trucker action comedy Breaker! Breaker!. A solid financial success, it set Norris on a path of low-to-moderate budget action films, which, while not making a critical impact, always performed to expectations and won Norris a reliable audience.
After early films such as martial-arts heavy thrillers A Force of One and The Octagon, Norris’s box-office presence piqued Hollywood’s interest, and his 1983 thriller Lone Wolf McQuade, in which Norris played a Texas Ranger who takes on an arms dealer, proved a breakthrough to reaching a larger audience. Code of Silence (1985) proved another breakthrough, in that Norris for the first time won mostly favourable critical notices. The following year Norris made possibly his best known action film: The Delta Force, in which he played a special forces operative opposite Lee Marvin.
Norris continued appearing in action films in the 1990s, many of them directed by his brother Aaron, but had arguably his biggest success with Walker, Texas Ranger, a TV series inspired by Lone Wolf McQuade. Premiering in 1993, it ran for eight years until 2001 and featured Norris as the law enforcement officer of the title, who more often that not resorted to martial arts. It went on to inspire the popular internet meme “Chuck Norris facts”. At the same time, Norris founded his own martial arts system, originally called Chun Kuk Do, in 1990.
In the 00s, Norris made increasingly sporadic screen appearances, though he did appear alongside other action movie legends including Lundgren, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Stallone-directed The Expendables 2. and became more high-profile politically, becoming a sought-after endorsement for conservative politicians. In 2007 he endorsed Republican candidate Mike Huckabee; despite winning the Iowa caucases Huckabee lost the presidential nomination race to John McCain. In 2008 he published a book called Black Belt Patriotism and in 2012 he endorsed Newt Gingrich and later claimed the US faced “1,000 years of darkness” if Barack Obama was elected president. In 2016 he backed Donald Trump’s successful campaign against Hillary Clinton.
Norris was married twice, first to Dianne Holechek between 1958 and 1989, and after their divorce to Gena O’Kelley in 1998, who survives him, along with his five children.
