I normally don't blog much about salacious Hollywood gossip, but the weird death of actor David Carradine makes me think of this clip from Kill Bill 2:

Bill (Carradine's character): Isn't it supposed to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony?

Hubby-to-be Tommy Plympton (leans in): I guess I just believe in living dangerously

Bill: I know just what you mean

For me, that was a great, tiny cinematic moment (specifically between the 25 and 40-second marks on the video). I would give Kill Bill Vol. 2 near-masterpiece status, in part because of the strength of Carradine's performance.

More on Carradine's penchant for living dangerously from the ABC News story:

Actor David Carradine was found dead in the closet of a Bangkok hotel room Thursday with a cord wrapped around his neck and genitals, leading Thai police to suspect his death was not a suicide but an accident resulting from dangerous sex practices. 

Carradine, 72, best known for his role in the 1970s television drama "Kung Fu," was found by a chamber maid at Bangkok's Park Nai Lert Hotel naked and dead, slumped in a closet with cords bound and connecting his neck and his genitals, Bangkok police said.

"The two ropes were tied together," Police Lt. Gen. Worapong Chewprecha told reporters. "It is unclear whether he committed suicide or not or he died of suffocation or heart failure."

Citing Porntip Rojanasunan*, the director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science, told the Bangkok Post that the actor may have died from auto-erotic asphyxiation, the practice of cutting off one's air supply to heighten sexual pleasure. Carradine had been in Thailand since May 29 to shoot his latest film, "Stretch."

* Wikipedia has the name as Khunying Pornthip Rojanasunand. The NYT also used that spelling in a 2005 profile of her.

Thai Police completed the autopsy Friday, but would not release the results until next week, Police Col. Somprasong Yenthuam told the Associated Press.

Somprasong said there was no indication that there was someone else in the room with Carradine at the time of his death.

Recently discovered court documents from the actor's latest divorce posted by The Smoking Gun suggest that Carradine may have have long history of "deviant sexual behavior which was potentially deadly," according to ex-wife Marina Anderson.

ABC News was the most up-front and avid about how Carradine possibly died (from what little checking around that I did). The BBC and NYT were far more circumspect.

Here is what the Beeb had to say on the mechanics of Carradine's death:

The star was found naked in a wardrobe with a cord around his neck and other parts of his body.

Coroners in Thailand completed an autopsy on Friday, but said they had not yet determined the cause of death.

Much further down, the BBC added:

Police Lieutenant General Worapong Chewprecha told reporters that it was unclear whether the star took his own life, or if he died of suffocation or heart failure while performing a sex act.

The NYT obit focused mainly on Carradine's career. Here's how it recorded his Kung Fu period (which I avidly watched back in the day):

He was in his early 30s and had a decade of credits in the theater, in films and on television behind him when he was cast in “Kung Fu” as Kwai Chang Caine, a half-Chinese, half-American Shaolin monk who had fled China after he killed a man in defense of his master and was on the lam in the 19th-century American West.

The character, a martial arts master and mystical peacenik, was portrayed by Mr. Carradine with a preternatural calm and, in moments of heroic violence — deployed only as a last resort — an explosive grace, a reluctant hero more comfortable spouting vaguely Confucian aphorisms than wreaking physical vengeance on even the most evil foes. The show caught on, especially with young viewers, plugging into the battle-weary spirit of the waning years of the Vietnam War and, in its depiction of the ill treatment of Chinese immigrants, the indignant anguish of the civil rights movement as well (though some Asian-Americans were irked that the role was not given to an Asian actor).

“Kung Fu” made its debut as an ABC movie of the week in 1972, then ran as a series until 1975. And though Mr. Carradine was not proficient in the martial arts himself — he studied them later — the show was influential in the rise of American interest in them and in Eastern philosophy.

In an interview with The New York Times after “Kung Fu” became a hit, Mr. Carradine said that no one was more surprised than he.

“Man, I read that pilot script and flipped!” he said. “But I never believed it would get on TV. I mean, a Chinese western, about a half-Chinese half-American Buddhist monk who wanders the gold rush country but doesn’t care about gold, and defends the oppressed but won’t carry a gun, and won’t even step on an ant because he values all life, and hardly ever speaks? No way!”

The NYT did hint at Carradine's wild-child ways:

As a young actor, Mr. Carradine had a reputation for being headstrong and difficult. He was also an admittedly freewheeling child of the 1960s, a partaker of psychedelic drugs who had occasional run-ins with the police. He lived with the actress Barbara Hershey during the time when she had changed her name to Barbara Seagull, and they had a son they named Free.

I would say the Beeb and the NYT probably got the balance right, but I wonder which story readers would click on if those two were up simultaneously on a monitor with the ABC News potboiler (that headline? Police: Carradine's Death Likely Sex Accident).