Chuck Norris

He was a world karate champion before he was an actor, and an internet punchline long before he was a legend. Chuck Norris died on 19 March 2026, aged 86, nine days after his birthday. His family said the death was sudden, that he had been in Hawaii and that he was surrounded by them and at peace.

The obituaries all led with the jokes. He would probably have been fine with that.

Ryan, Oklahoma, and an air base in Korea

He was born Carlos Ray Norris on 10 March 1940 in Ryan, a tiny town in Oklahoma. His father was a Second World War veteran who moved between jobs; his mother raised three boys. When he was sixteen his parents divorced and the family ended up in California.

By his own account he was a painfully shy child, bad at sport and short of confidence. In 1958 he joined the US Air Force as an air policeman and was posted to Osan Air Base in South Korea. He started training in tang soo do there, and that is also where he picked up the nickname he kept for the rest of his life.

He came home in 1962 with a black belt and no trade. He opened a martial arts studio in Torrance, south of Los Angeles, then another, then a chain of them.

Six years without losing a fight

What he did first, and better than anyone of his generation, was compete. He won the national karate championship at Madison Square Garden in 1967, took the world professional middleweight title the following year and defended it for six consecutive years.

He retired from competition without ever losing that title. 'Black Belt' magazine named him fighter of the year, and from then on his name carried weight in martial arts regardless of what happened on screen. He founded his own system, chun kuk do, renamed simply the Chuck Norris System in 2015, and a federation that has certified more than three thousand black belts.

His studios attracted famous pupils. One of them was Steve McQueen, who told him that with that face and that way of moving he ought to try acting. He took the advice.

The Colosseum, Cannon Films and twenty action pictures

The part that opened the door was a villain's. In 'Way of the Dragon' (1972) he was the hired fighter Bruce Lee faces in the Colosseum in Rome, in a seven-minute bout that remains one of the most watched fight scenes ever filmed. He loses, and he loses well.

His first screen appearance had come earlier, in 1968, in a Matt Helm spy comedy starring Dean Martin. It was a part with no lines, the sort handed to a man who can actually fight.

Leading roles took a while. He got there with 'Good Guys Wear Black' (1978), made for a million dollars and taking eighteen, and confirmed it with 'The Octagon' (1980) and especially 'Lone Wolf McQuade' (1983), a modern western with him as a Texas Ranger that Roger Ebert went out of his way to praise.

Then came Cannon Films, the outfit run by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and the stretch he is best remembered for. He made the 'Missing in Action' trilogy (1984-1988), 'Code of Silence' (1985), 'Invasion U.S.A.' (1985), 'The Delta Force' (1986) and 'Firewalker' (1986), at a rate of one or two films a year.

They were cheap, patriotic and enormously profitable, with him doing roughly the same thing each time: a quiet man you would be unwise to provoke. Critics dismissed them almost as a bloc. Home video turned them into a global phenomenon, and in Britain they were a staple of late-night television and rental shelves for two decades.

Years later the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) told the story of that industrial madness from the inside, with Norris among those looking back on the years when he never stopped shooting.

Walker, Texas Ranger

In 1993 he switched medium and got it right again. 'Walker, Texas Ranger' ran on CBS for eight seasons, until 2001, across more than two hundred episodes and on a formula that never varied: his character solved the week's case and finished it with a roundhouse kick.

It was a big hit in America and a bigger one abroad. It was dubbed into dozens of languages and repeated for years across European and Latin American television, making his face familiar to people who had never seen one of his films.

Texas made him an honorary Ranger, a symbolic gesture that clearly pleased him. He produced the series and directed some episodes, and cast members of his own family in it, something he had been doing since the eighties: his brother Aaron worked as a director and producer across much of his filmography.

In 2021, twenty years after it ended, The CW launched a reboot called Walker, with Jared Padalecki in the role he had made famous. Norris had no involvement in it. The new version lasted four seasons and never came close to the original's reach.

Across the whole run he appeared in more than twenty films, almost all of them built around the same promise, and for a stretch in the mid-eighties he was one of the most reliable box-office draws in the action business, almost entirely without the critics' help.

The joke that became a monument

Around 2005 the "Chuck Norris facts" started circulating online, absurd one-liners about his superhuman toughness. That he didn't sleep, he waited. That he had counted to infinity, twice. That his tears cure cancer, a shame he never cries.

He could have taken offence. He did the opposite: he said he found plenty of them funny, published a book collecting them and put the money towards his martial arts programmes for teenagers. At sixty-five he found himself with a new kind of fame, bigger than anything his box office years had given him.

His last significant role played on it. In The Expendables 2 (2012) he appeared alongside Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and got to deliver one of the jokes about himself out loud. The same year he talked about Lee in the documentary I Am Bruce Lee.

Away from the screen he had other things going. In 1990 he set up Kickstart Kids, which puts karate into Texas state schools to work with children at risk and which he launched with the backing of President George H. W. Bush. From 1997 he sold exercise machines on television with a persistence that became another part of the character.

He was never coy about politics. He was an avowed Republican, a practising Baptist and a conservative opinion columnist, and he publicly backed Ronald Reagan, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz. It cost him some of the audience that enjoyed the memes.

The reason he stopped making films was not boredom. In 2013 his wife had three MRI scans within eight days and afterwards developed a series of conditions that both of them blamed on the contrast agent used in the tests. Norris stopped taking roles to look after her.

In 2017 the couple sued eleven medical companies for ten million dollars, part of it for the work he had turned down, and said they had spent close to two million on her treatment. The case was eventually dropped with no settlement and no damages, and he never headlined anything again.

He married twice. He was with Dianne Holechek from 1958 to 1989 and had two sons, Mike and Eric; in 2004 he publicly acknowledged a daughter, Dina, from another relationship. In November 1998 he married the model Gena O'Kelley and they had twins in 2001. Five children in all.

He spent his last years out of the business, on his Texas ranch, with the foundation and his family. He still taught karate to kids when his body allowed it and still put his name to memoirs and self-help books.

When he died, obituaries around the world reached for the jokes before the films, which is an odd ending for a man who spent thirty years trying to be taken seriously as an actor. He never seemed to mind: he was the first to laugh at them and the one who made best use of them, which is not bad going for a boy with no confidence from a small town in Oklahoma.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Chuck Norris is I Am Bruce Lee (2012); in all, 3 films over 2 years. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is The Expendables 2 (2012), with 88 votes. The person they have worked with most is Jean-Claude Van Damme, on 2 films, among them The Expendables 2 and Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.