Chuck Norris, a martial arts grandmaster whose TV and movie action roles propelled jokes about his legendary manliness into the zeitgeist, has died at age 86.
Norris lived for years on a ranch near the Lone Star State town of Navasota and starred in the TV series Walker, Texas Ranger, which ran for nine seasons. Although he was born in Ryan, Oklahoma, the Texas Senate in 2017 bestowed him with the title of “Honorary Texan.”
Norris’ family described his death as a “sudden passing.” He was hospitalized after being struck with an illness on a visit to Hawaii, according to a TMZ report.
“While we would like to keep the circumstances private, please know that he was surrounded by his family and was at peace,” the family said in a social media statement.
Norris joined the Air Force after high school and began pursuing martial arts training while stationed in Korea. After his discharge in 1962, he founded his own martial arts school in California and racked up accolades for his skills, including being named a six-time undefeated World Professional Middleweight Karate champion.
As an actor, he leveraged early film roles — including a fight scene in Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon — into a career of that spanned more than 20 movies. These included Missing in Action, The Delta Force and Lone Wolf McQuade, the latter of which cast him as an ass-kicking Texas Ranger.
Despite his wooden delivery and the frequent derision of critics, audiences loved Norris’ on-screen persona, which pop-culture site Collider once described as a “mustached storm of punches and one-liners, dispatching enemies with a stoic glare and roundhouse kicks that defied physics.”
In 1993, nearly a decade after the smash hit of Lone Wolf McQuade, Norris portrayed a nearly identical karate-chopping lawman in Walker, Texas Ranger. The show became a TV institution thanks to both action die-hards and fans attracted to its campy storylines and heavy-handed sermonizing.
By the early 2000s, Norris’ tough-guy persona had become so imbedded into American culture that the Internet exploded with jokes extolling the actor with superhuman powers.
“Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried,” one widely shared joke stated.
“At night, the Boogeyman checks for Chuck Norris under his bed,” went another.
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