Chuck Norris, karate master who roundhouse-kicked his way across screens, dies at 86

He made his film debut as an uncredited extra in the 1968 Jerry Lewis comedy The Wrecking Crew. The fight choreographer on the film, charged with training Sharon Tate, was someone Norris met in competition: Bruce Lee. Already the star of Green Hornet and an international sensation, Lee invited Norris to play the villain in 1972’s The Way Of The Dragon. The film was a box office smash, and led to a series of starring roles for Norris in America, including Breaker! Breaker!, Good Guys Wear Black, and Lone Wolf McQuade, which would later inspire his long-running television series, Walker, Texas Ranger.

After a string of low-budget movies that overperformed, Norris joined the ranks of ’80s action stars with the POW-rescue movie Missing In Action. His first for the era’s iconic low-budget action label, Cannon Films, Missing In Action was a huge success and made Norris a key player in the period’s action movie boom. He’d continue with a string of hits, including The Delta Force, Firewalker, and two more Missing In Action films. 

“The Blonde Bruce Lee,” as he came to be known, moved to television in 1993, with Walker, Texas Ranger. As Sergeant Cordell Walker, Norris kicked his way through eight seasons of villains of the week on what was one of television’s hottest shows, attracting tens of millions of viewers. However, numerous attempts at spinning off or rebooting the show consistently failed, likely because there wasn’t enough Norris. 

Walker was also immortalized on late-night television, when Conan O’Brien revolutionized his show with the “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever.” O’Brien launched the bit in 2004, believing he could use Walker following a merger between NBC and Universal. It became one of the show’s most popular segments, with O’Brien pulling the lever and showing that clip of, say, Haley Joel Osment saying, “Walker told me I have aids,” whenever the show needed a jolt of energy. O’Brien later pulled the segment after stars began demanding residuals. 

O’Brien probably doesn’t get the credit he deserves for turning Walker into an internet meme, but within a year of the Chuck Norris Lever, “Chuck Norris Facts” went viral on the Something Awful forums. A successor to the “Vin Diesel Fact,” the “Chuck Norris Facts” meme broke web containment and became a legitimate pop-culture phenomenon. In 2006, Chuck Norris declared his favorite fact, “They once tried to carve Chuck Norris’ face into Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn’t hard enough for his beard.”

In the late 2000s, Norris fell into reactionary politics and conspiracy theories. A long-time conservative, he became an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, a Sarah Palin booster, and called on President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate. And much like his fellow ’80s action star Steven Seagal, Norris spent the 2010s cozying up to international authoritarians, particularly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Norris married twice. His first marriage to Dianne Holechak lasted 30 years. He is survived by his second wife, Gena O’Kelley, his two sons, three daughters, and more than a dozen grandchildren.