In memoriam: Valerie Perrine (Telegraph 23/03/26)

Valerie Perrine, who has died aged 82, was a game, sparky performer who started her career as a Las Vegas showgirl, emerged into the Hollywood of the early 1970s, and thereafter ran the gamut, winning a BAFTA and a Cannes Best Actress prize for playing Lenny Bruce’s stripper girlfriend in Lenny (1974), enjoying blockbuster success with Superman (1978) and gyrating alongside the Village People in the cult musical Can’t Stop the Music (1980).

Her transition from stage to screen was, as Perrine herself admitted, a matter of being in the right place with the right look at the right time: “I didn’t come to Hollywood to be a movie star. I was literally discovered at a small dinner party at a friend’s house. I never had an acting class. I was offered a seven-year contract with Universal after a couple of days shooting. Universal forbid me from going to acting classes. They didn’t want my natural talent to be corrupted.”

She made a high-profile screen debut as the pornstar Montana Wildhack in George Roy Hill’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), where her inexperience worked in her favour. Upon arriving for her screen test, Perrine realised she didn’t have the required headshots to hand over; when the producers learned she’d been working as a showgirl, they asked her to pose in her skimpy costume – which she did have – and subsequently landed the role.

For some while, Perrine was cast more for her voluptuous figure than her mind or talent, a situation she leant into by posing for Playboy in 1972; she earned a further measure of notoriety upon becoming the first woman to appear topless on US network television, the result of her shower scene in the PBS drama Steambath (1973).

It was Bob Fosse who saw hidden depths in Perrine, casting the actress as Honey Harlow, the showgirl who caught the eye of troubled stand-up Lenny Bruce (played by Dustin Hoffman), in his black-and-white biopic Lenny. The role entailed unlearning everything she’d picked up in Vegas: “[Fosse] choreographed the dance scenes. But I was supposed to dance badly… Here I was working with the greatest directors and choreographers in the business and I had to dance badly! The irony!”

Yet she held her own against the fractious Hoffman in the film’s dramatic scenes and found herself in demand on the awards circuit, earning an Oscar nomination, the Cannes Best Actress prize and two BAFTA nods: as at the Oscars, she lost Best Actress to Ellen Burstyn, star of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), but picked up a consolation gong in the Most Promising Newcomer category, beating out no less a figure than Robert De Niro in The Godfather Part II (1974).

At that point, it appeared as if things were beginning to turn in Perrine’s favour. She had a narrow escape when the flight carrying her to the San Sebastián festival to promote Lenny crashed shortly after take-off from a small airport in the Pyrenees; not only did the actress walk away unharmed, but she was later observed returning to the wreck to retrieve her make-up kit. Yet her subsequent career only sporadically achieved cruising altitude, a result of iffy script choices and life intervening.

She landed her most prominent role as Eve Teschmacher, PA and girlfriend to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), shot back-to-back. Yet she never quite capitalised on this newfound visibility: she picked up a slightly thankless role as Robert Redford’s ex-wife, discarded in favour of Jane Fonda, in Sydney Pollack’s rodeo romance The Electric Horseman (1979), before signing up for Can’t Stop the Music, a notorious turn-of-the-Eighties flop.

The latter, a showcase for the novelty disco outfit Village People, again drew on Perrine’s showgirl training: she splashed around topless in a tub to the strains of “YMCA”. Yet a fallout between the star and director Nancy Walker complicated the shoot; the reviews were dire; and the box-office was all but disastrous, the film taking $2m against a $20m budget. (Its campier aspects have since been embraced: the Australian network Channel 9 screens the film every New Year’s Eve.)

Compounding this setback, Perrine turned down Kathleen Turner’s career-making role in Body Heat (1981) but she found more substantial employment in Tony Richardson’s The Border (1982) as the social-climber wife spurring Jack Nicholson’s corrupt border guard on to greater misdeeds. Even critic Pauline Kael, never a fan, offered praise, albeit in a backhanded way: “Perrine, who has been giving disgraceful performances for several years, plays the dumb-tart wife to whiny perfection.”

Of the actors’ guru Stanislavsky, Perrine once said “I don’t know anything about Chavanasky [sic] or whatever you call him. I really don’t think about anything until I get on the set.” For her, acting was an enjoyable social activity: she claimed to have dropped LSD 400 times and was renowned for the wild parties she threw at her house in Sherman Oaks. Asked in a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter what made her shindigs so special, Perrine had a one-word response: “Cocaine.”

Valerie Ritchie Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas on September 3, 1943 to Kenneth Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and his wife Winifred (née McGinley), a former dancer in the provocative Broadway troupe The Earl Carroll Vanities. She spent most of her childhood in Japan, where her father was stationed at the end of World War II; aged four, she began performing ceremonial dances to friends of the family (“I wanted to show off”).

In her teens, the family relocated to a ranch in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her father, who had adapted poorly to civilian life, began drinking, prompting Perrine to run off to Vegas in the hope of becoming a showgirl: “I was almost nineteen when I got there. I had to lie about my age to work… We had fun. But you have to remember being a showgirl is very time consuming. All you do is work and sleep.”

She eventually worked her way up to appearing in the spectacular Lido de Paris revue, falling in with the showbiz crowd who commuted between the Vegas Strip and Sunset Boulevard. On the night of August 9, 1969, she was due to attend a party in the Hollywood Hills with her then-boyfriend, the celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, but after one of her fellow dancers fell ill, she was called upon to work instead. It was another narrow escape: the party was that crashed by the so-called Manson Family, and Sebring numbered among their victims.

Perrine worked more sparingly as the new millennium approached. She appeared alongside Billy Crystal and Jeff Goldblum in the Three Little Pigs episode of Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-87), had fun making the St. Lucia-shot La Frenais/Clement comedy Water (1985) with Michael Caine (“the nicest human being I’ve ever worked with”), and popped up in the Ally Sheedy teen comedy Maid to Order (1987) and the Wesley Snipes thriller Boiling Point (1993).

TV became a regular source of income, offering guest roles in Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-99), medical hit e.r. (1994-2009) and Nash Bridges (1996-2001), where she played a gangster’s moll. Her last major movie was the Mel Gibson comedy What Women Want (2000); thereafter, she returned to TV, appearing on David Spade’s Just Shoot Me (1997-2003) and sitcom Grounded for Life (2001-05), and became a favourite on the convention circuit. Her final screen credit came with the retirement home comedy Silver Skies (2016), opposite George Hamilton.

Though she enjoyed relationships with the likes of Jeff Bridges (her co-star in 1972’s The Last American Hero), Mick Jagger and Dodi Fayed, she never married; she was engaged during her showgirl years to the businessman and gun collector Bill Haarman, who died when the pistol he habitually carried fell from his waistband and discharged in a freak accident one month before the couple’s planned wedding.

In her final years, Perrine battled severe health issues: she underwent spinal surgery to correct wear-and-tear incurred during her dancing days and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s after a sound engineer spotted her dialogue was being obscured by the rattle of a saucer she was holding with tremulous hands. In the crowdfunded documentary Valerie (2019), she bemoaned her condition: “I can’t walk. I can’t write. I can’t talk right… I can’t act. I didn’t want the world to think I’d faded away.”

By the time of a 2022 interview for the Parkinson’s Europe website, however, she seemed to have come to terms with her situation: “I’ve always lived in the moment. I don’t dwell on the past or worry about the future. I try to live for today, and Parkinson’s hasn’t changed that.”

Valerie Perrine, born September 3, 1943, died March 23, 2026.

Coarse corrections: "The Good Boy/Heel"

The latest filmmaker to migrate from the arthouse fringes to the English-language commercial cinema is the Pole Jan Komasa, whose impressive Corpus Christi was Oscar-nominated back in 2020. That film was a clerical drama with a slowburning thriller element (would our fake priest hero be defrocked before completing his good works?). The new film - marketed here in the UK as The Good Boy, but credited as Good Boy on screen and being released in the US as Heel, for extra confusion - is genre up until the point it isn't. In some way, it presents as a companion piece (or corrective) to its leading man's recent TV success Adolescence: what Komasa's film wonders is what would happen if a character played by Stephen Graham took extreme measures to prevent a kid from going murderously off the rails. The kid is Tommy (Anson Boon, from streaming telly's Mobland), a swaggering young alpha - chains round his neck, wrap of blow in his Chinos - who's introduced mid-Saturday night tear-up (scrapping, shagging, pissing up the bus shelter) before being snatched off the street by persons unknown. Cut to: Chris and Kathryn (Graham and Andrea Riseborough), a pair of neatfreaks bringing up a ten-year-old (Kit Rakusen) in a remote country house. Chris is first seen interviewing a Macedonian cleaner (Monica Frajczyk), 2026's first Character Who Doesn't Know What She's Getting Into (And Who Should, Really, Be Running Off In The Exact Opposite Direction). Doubly so after Chris, giving his new employee the grand tour, reveals Tommy chained up in the basement, the couple having taken him in and on as a perverse pet project. Weird as it may sound, we're not so far removed from Corpus Christi. The central clash is again that between orthodoxy and restless youth; for a symbolic dog collar, Komasa now swaps in an actual dog collar, slipped around Tommy's neck on a chain bolted to the cellar wall.

The Good Boy is a smaller and dingier endeavour, though - it's not going to be nominated for awards - and there are things Komasa misses that a local director would surely have spotted and fixed. British viewers are likely to spend the film's opening reels marvelling (and maybe chuckling) at how much effort has been expended to remove Stephen Graham of his essential Stephen Grahamness. With his suburban accent, Dennis Nilsen specs, limp hairpiece and persistent air of prissiness, Chris is a role crying out for Reece Shearsmith, albeit in a world where Reece Shearsmith's name secured international distribution deals and sold cinema tickets. The Good Boy could easily be mistaken for a feature-length episode of Psychoville or Inside No. 9: its early exchanges (one location, low-lit sets, small knot of players) suggest a self-contained sitcom that has started to break bad. Patches of darkly funny writing follow, as when Tommy is allowed upstairs to watch Kes ("as if I weren't depressed enough, living in a basement"). Yet much as Chris and Kathryn gradually afford their captive greater roaming range, so too these characters offer the actors more wiggle room than first thought. A sly midsection, benefitting from a day or so's shooting on the Yorkshire Moors, expands the film's scope while also suggesting just how quickly Fritzl-like behaviour can become normalised. I'm less sure about the film's closing movement, which struck me as an obvious misstep: setting the thriller aspects to one side for an extended coda, Komasa finally appears to side with the conservatism Chris and Kathryn represent. Maybe the idea was to reflect the general direction of travel in a Britain busy limiting access to porn and social media (or, indeed, in a Poland that has of late taken a similar lurch rightwards), but it feels instinctively wrong for this story: I wondered whether the two separately credited writers disagreed at some stage about where exactly these characters should land. Still, overseas directors have made far less auspicious debuts on British soil, and The Good Boy might well serve as a teachable example of what a film gains from having good actors commit to silly, vaguely disreputable material: Riseborough, in particular, works spooky wonders with a depressed-ghoul character who can't have registered as all that much on the page.

The Good Boy is now playing in selected cinemas.

Muppet Armageddon: "Project Hail Mary"

The premise of Project Hail Mary is pure horror. Ryan Gosling awakes from a medically induced coma to find himself aboard a spaceship with severe memory loss and his fellow travellers dead in their cots. Matters get no less traumatic once his recall kicks in. The movie's opening flashback reveals Gosling's Dr. Ryland Grace to have been pressganged into serving on this mission with an eye to stopping so-called "space dots" (alien microbes of some description) from eating the sun and thus freezing the Earth. The project has stalled by the time we rejoin him, and not just because of the sudden shortfall of available hands: Grace, a high school teacher by trade, quickly calculates it would take fully a hundred years to turn the craft around and return to Earth, so he'd likely return as a corpse - if, indeed, there was any Earth left to which a corpse might return. (I guess they could put him on ice.) The source material is a 2021 novel by Andy Weir, also the inspiration for 2015's The Martian, and evidently a specialist in tales of intergalactic sacrifice and endurance. Hand this story to eight out of ten directors (including The Martian's Ridley Scott), and they'd likely show up on the red carpet clutching something stark and doomy, heavy on the existential dread. Yet Sony's chosen two are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the poptimists behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie and the 21 Jump Street reboots, who view this predicament as frankly a lark and a gas, if not always a hoot; the end of the world is here reframed as an opportunity to try new things and make friends, as a problem for which there will be a fix even if there isn't one already. Should Project Hail Mary prove as big a hit as I suspect it might be, it will be primarily for one reason: here's a Hollywood movie that devotes vast resources and ventures deep into the heart of the cosmos on a mission to turn our collective frown upside down.

The approach demands a new set of rhythms, lightyears away from those of a Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve: playful, unpredictable, reliant more on montages than crashing setpieces, these are deployed here with the aim of keeping the audience on their toes and rescuing us from this narrative's deadly black holes. It also requires a top-to-bottom rethink of sci-fi iconography. Lord and Miller offer us spaceship as revolving funhouse; when Grace snaps on an umbilical cord so as to perform an exploratory space walk, it's as springy as a bungee rope. The scuttling creepy-crawly that breaches the ship's defences is an alien but crucially not a monster; it's a puppet of sorts (operated very expressively from within by James Ortiz) who becomes an unlikely pal. (First contact here involves mirrored bodypopping and a remix of the Close Encounters five-note salute.) For props, Lord and Miller swap in toys. The spinning UFO our hero retrieves on that space walk is a pop-up 3D puzzle; the globe that mission controller Sandra Hüller tosses to Grace - literally and metaphorically putting the whole world in his hands - is a hackysack. This may be the cinema's first space vessel to both feature an IMAX screen and carry novelty party hats. All of which is to say you wouldn't have to stretch too far if you wanted to point to the 12A-rated Project Hail Mary as the latest frontier in the ongoing juvenilisation of the American cinema. If the movie's Amazon-bought infrastructure - all $248m of it, reportedly - aspires to the grandiose and Kubrickian, its mushy emoji heart is pure Disney: I felt I was being primed not for some mindblowing evolutionary leap, but for that new Star Wars movie with Baby Yoda in it. Gosling, bless him, gives another moviestar performance: holding all this cutesy bricolage together, he gets substantial mileage from the oldtimer's trick of peering over the top of those specs the movies stick on a hunk so as to pass him off as a nerd. Yet there's also a lot of what I feel obliged to call Sesame Street acting involved: for much of Project Hail Mary, we're watching a grown man swapping expositionary dialogue with a creature on a stick.

Obviously, much of this is 2026 (and, indeed, post-2024) pertinent. Underpinning the film's out-of-this-world bromance is a vision of different species overcoming their initial fear and distrust to work together and ensure one another's survival. (Some context: Hail Mary's biggest box-office rival this weekend is liable to be the Dhurandhar sequel. Its biggest real-world rival is whatever the hell is currently going on in the Middle East.) Such childlike simplicity has its virtues and appeal in a modern blockbuster context. Early on, we see Dr. Ryland gazing at a pictogram of the Seven Ages of Man, a progression Drew Goddard's script allows Gosling to enact: first seen crawling out of cryogenic deep freeze like a worm, the good doctor will soon come to stand for solitude, self-interest and self-pity, then curiosity, companionship, compassion and courage, and finally the selflessness required to avert disaster and propagate a species. It's rare to see a modern American studio movie - particularly one as expensive as this - which comes at us from a place of innocence rather than cynicism. And yet Project Hail Mary never quite evolves as its protagonist does: it starts as a goofy Eighties throwback, and it ends there, too. Along the way, it succeeds in being very genial, sometimes funny, occasionally charming, yet it most often feels dramatically underdeveloped: there was a greater sense of catastrophic, world-ending stakes in these filmmakers' U and PG-rated animations, Lord and Miller now appearing much more invested in their man-and-puppet business than they are in the looming prospect of Armageddon. Their project here looks to have been to take a big paycheque and have fun with it, and while there are worse ways to occasion and launch a putative blockbuster - like, say, taking a big paycheque and having no fun with it - that also runs the risk of indulgence. At some point amid the film's 157 minutes, I found my sympathies aligning decisively with Hüller, the one grown-up in the vicinity of this project, swaddled in mourning clothes on an increasingly lightless and heatless Earth. Indirectly, she gives Project Hail Mary - and all its childish things - the one piece of direction it needed, cutting short her stab at morale-boosting karaoke with four thin-lipped, no-nonsense, frostily Teutonic words: "And that is enough."

Project Hail Mary is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

The kid who fell to Earth: "Arco"

The last of this year's Oscar-nominated animated shorts to reach these shorts may be the most classically animated of the lot: Arco sees French artisans doing a hand-drawn approximation of the Japanese comic-book style, with a dash of Seventies album cover Roger Dean visible in their futuristic cityscapes. The storytelling, meanwhile, is taking a note or two from a hall-of-fame family film in Spielberg's E.T. - not a bad template for co-writer/director Ugo Bienvenu to start from, but also a perilously high bar for a creative team to be setting themselves. At the film's centre is the formative - timeline-shifting, indeed - friendship between Iris (voiced in the original subtitled version by Margot Ringard Oldra, and by Romy Fay in the dub), a young inhabitant of a near-future Earth beset by the consequences of climate change, and the titular Arco (Oscar Tresanini in French, Juliano Krue Valdun in English), an accidental time traveller in a rainbow-hued cape who falls to Earth one day, oblivious to our destructive ways. Iris's task, in between looking after a younger sibling, is to figure out how to return this warning from the future to sender, ideally before the end of the world as we know it. One possible reason for the film's late arrival in UK cinemas: it's quite a tough sell once you know where it's heading, and one suspects no-one really knew what to do with it. (The illustrious redub is an optimistic shot in the dark, and that might be the only truly optimistic thing about Arco.)

For one thing, Bienvenu's film proceeds in a mishmash of styles and tones that recalls Japanese animation's more confounding extremes: Iris and Arco's heartfelt connection gets intercut, more than a little clumsily, with the blundering misadventures of three supremely annoying stooges sent out in pursuit of our hero. (In the English dub, the trio have been revoiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and Flea off of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and not even these three can do much between them to stave off an air of the more forgettable Saturday morning cartoons.) Gradually, this story reveals itself to be simultaneously a) for kids, primarily and b) too despairing for most kids to bear: what's being refracted to create Arco's lovely multicoloured vapour trail is, to all intents and purposes, the last light in the universe. It feels an especially morose plot point that Iris and her siblings have been left to fend for themselves: with their parents away (on business?), regulation childcare has been farmed out to faintly creepy-seeming robots, and the insinuation is that these kids won't be getting any more help from their elders when it comes to apocalypse avoidance. We're headed to a broadly punitive finale, as visitors from the future show up to save their kid while leaving Earth to burn (thanks a bunch, Mr. and Mrs. Arco), a major bummer over which Bienvenu decides to layer an appallingly drippy sadcore ballad. If you are taking your own children, it might be an idea to remove them of their belts and shoelaces beforehand.

Arco is now playing, in both subtitled and dubbed versions, in selected cinemas.

In memoriam: Chuck Norris (Telegraph 20/03/26)

Chuck Norris, who has died aged 86, was a brawny, hirsute martial artist propelled to movie stardom by a run of flagwaving action pictures – notably Missing in Action (1984), Invasion, U.S.A. (1985) and The Delta Force (1986) – which flew off the shelves in the heyday of home video rental.

 

Initially, he was positioned as a sandy-haired, all-American riposte to the short-lived Bruce Lee, with whom he trained and eventually sparred against at the climax of the Lee-directed The Way of the Dragon (1972). There, Norris had a rare villainous role, but in his subsequent American vehicles, he was invariably the good guy who resorts to fists and feet only after all other options had been exhausted. As the actor insisted: “I don’t initiate violence, I retaliate.”

 

Norris first found his way to martial arts – and, more specifically, the karate derivative tang soo do – while serving with the Air Force in South Korea in the late 1950s. Discharged as an airman first class in 1962, he returned home and opened the first of several martial arts academies, where he trained and taught. (Celebrity pupils included the actor Michael Landon, Priscilla Presley and several Osmonds.)

 

As a fighter, he was virtually unstoppable: his career fight record was 65 wins and five losses, the bulk of the latter incurred during his first years on the mat. Norris won the National Karate Championships in 1966, and the world middleweight title the following year, the first of six consecutive world titles. He retired undefeated as full-contact middleweight champion in 1974; he became one of only a handful of Americans to have ever achieved eighth-degree black belt status in taekwondo, while adding further black belts in karate, jiujitsu and judo.

 

Having made a fleeting screen debut as a heavy wrestling with Dean Martin in the spy romp The Wrecking Crew (1968), Norris was encouraged by another of his illustrious students, Steve McQueen, who drolly advised “if you can’t do anything else, there’s always acting”. This new form of training encompassed acting classes at MGM studios, and elocution lessons from Jonathan Harris, better known as the scheming Dr. Smith on TV’s Lost in Space (1965-68).

 

In both The Way of the Dragon and Yellow-Faced Tiger (later retitled Slaughter in San Francisco, 1974), Norris played the heavy bested in combat by a lithe Asian co-star, but he was promoted to lead for the trucker B-movie Breaker! Breaker! (1977), a semi-forgotten waypoint between Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Convoy (1978) that enjoyed success on the drive-in circuit.

 

He became a certified star with Good Guys Wear Black (1978), where he played a former CIA assassin targeted by his former employers; tapping pulp from prevailing fears about state overreach, it became a surprise box-office hit, earning $18m against its $1m budget. When A Force of One (1979) hit $20m at the box office, it was clear: Norris was now a force to be reckoned with.

 

In his subsequent vehicles, the action invariably rose some measure above the rote plotting and hackneyed characterisation; faced with a list of Norris’s 1980s titles, even fans would be hard-pressed to distinguish whether the star was playing a cop, a colonel or a commando. Critics could barely conceal their fatigue, with the New York Times’ Janet Maslin writing of An Eye for an Eye (1981): “As martial-arts movies go, it’s pretty tame. As movies of any other sort go, tame is putting it nicely.”

 

Yet certain titles had a longer rental shelf life than others. Lone Wolf McQuade (1982) benefitted from an uncredited script polish by John Milius, a long-time Norris friend. Code of Silence (1985), which started life as a planned Dirty Harry sequel, was praised by Roger Ebert as “a slick, energetic movie with good performances and a lot of genuine human interest”. The Delta Force (1986) paired Norris with Lee Marvin, making what would be his final screen appearance, although devotees lamented that martial arts were now secondary to the waving of machine guns.

 

By 1990, Norris films had grossed $500m worldwide – and their star, now fifty, had gained some awareness of his strengths and limitations as a performer: “When you talk about actors, Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier are actors. They can do anything. Then you have your personalities, Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, and me. When they deviate too much from what audiences expect, they don’t do very well, do they?"

 

He was born Carlos Ray Norris in Ryan, Oklahoma on March 10, 1940, the oldest of three sons to Army vet Ray Dee Norris, a bus driver and mechanic, and his waitress wife Wilma (née Scarberry). One brother, Aaron, became a producer-director; the other, Wieland, once predicted that he wouldn’t survive to see his 27th birthday, a morbid prophesy born out when he was killed while serving in Vietnam.

 

The family relocated twice, first to Texas, where the young Carlos attended Hamilton Junior High, and then to California, where Norris attended North Torrance High. He was a withdrawn child, troubled by his father’s lengthy drinking binges. His parents divorced during his teens, and Norris felt a heavy responsibility to help his mother raise his siblings; cinema trips to see his favourite actor John Wayne provided a small measure of relief. He signed up for the Air Force after graduating, whereupon the nickname Chuck was bestowed on him by his fellow airmen.

 

At the height of his movie fame, Reader’s Digest reported how Norris was sat at a bar when a customer walked in and bluntly told him, “You’re in my seat. Move.” Norris complied, and as the customer sat down, he recognised his fellow drinker. “Chuck,” the man gasped, “you could’ve kicked my butt if you wanted to. Instead of moving, why didn’t you just attack me?” Norris’s response was a shrugging “What would that have accomplished?”

 

In the 1990s, Norris pivoted towards less violent, family-friendly fare. In the sappy Karate Kid knockoff Sidekicks (1992), he played himself, guiding a bullied child towards martial-arts glory. Top Dog (1995) unhappily paired Norris with a police canine, while in Forest Warrior (1996), he played the ghost of a mountain man – beneath a ludicrous wig – assisting youngsters in staving off the lumberjacks threatening their woodland playground. (All three were directed by brother Aaron.)

 

By then, he’d landed his defining TV role. Co-created by Paul Haggis, later an Oscar winner for the movie Crash (2005), Walker – Texas Ranger (1993-2001) spliced together elements of prime-time procedural, the TV westerns of yore and the character Norris had played back in Lone Wolf McQuade. Here, the star played Sgt. Cordell Walker, a Vietnam War vet raised as a Native American (the surname was short for “Firewalker”) and subsequently installed as a latter-day Texas Ranger. (The star also drawled the show’s theme song, “Eyes of a Ranger”.)

 

Joe Queenan typified the critical response, declaring the show “so corny and predictable that it appears to be in slow-motion even when it’s not”. Yet it proved an enduring hit, running for eight years and in syndication for many more; as Norris countered, “we must be doing something right, because every week about a billion people around the world are watching Walker”. He was installed as an honorary Texas Ranger in 2010.

 

The series’ moralistic tone was a sign of the influence Norris yearned to wield over American life. His empire had long since expanded beyond his Chuck Norris System (or Chuk Kun Do), a mishmash of multiple martial arts he’d mastered since his time in Korea, and Kickstart Kids, the non-profit he’d started in 1990 to counter drugs and violence in schools. Two self-help books (1988’s The Secret of Inner Strength and 1996’s The Secret Power Within – Zen Solutions to Real Problems) followed, along with a nutrients line promoted in late-night infomercials.

 

In 2004, the same year as his jokey cameo in sports comedy Dodgeball, Norris returned to US bestseller lists with Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America, a manifesto for a return to founding American values that the author promised was “strong, resolute and to the point – like a roundhouse kick”. Two years later, Norris signed on as a columnist for the far-right Internet portal World Net Daily, using his dispatches to call for a ban on gay marriage and for Texas to secede from the wider United States.

 

He told one interviewer: “I’m not a liberal actor from Hollywood. I’m not politically correct, in my opinions or my practice. And though I’m concerned with what people think, I will not compromise the truth in any form to cater to others, even with religion and politics. Those who would merely brand me on the Right are oversimplifying and running from the real issue.” Nevertheless, he backed Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election, and drew flak in 2019, amid another surge in school shootings, for signing an endorsement deal with the gun manufacturer Glock.

 

By then, however, Norris the man and Norris the actor had been superseded by Norris the cultural phenomenon. In 2012, Slovakian authorities had to overturn the verdict of a public vote to name a new bridge spanning the Morava, the river that demarcates the country’s Austrian border; the overwhelming popular favourite – “the Chuck Norris bridge” – was rejected in favour of the more sober Die Freiheitsbrücke, or Freedom Bridge.

 

Online, Norris became the subject of an especially sticky Internet meme, predicated on the actor’s superhuman strength. Norris embraced the joke, citing as his personal favourites “before the Boogeyman goes to sleep, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris” and “they wanted to add Chuck Norris’s face to Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn’t hard enough for his beard”. While cameoing in The Expendables 2 (2012), his final big-screen appearance, Norris traded another such quip with co-star Sylvester Stallone. Asked if he’d once been bitten by a king cobra, Norris replied, “Yeah, I was. But after five days of agonising pain, the cobra died.”

 

He is survived by his second wife, the former model Gena O’Kelly, and five children, two by O’Kelly, two by his first wife Dianne Holechek, and a fifth conceived out of wedlock.

 

Chuck Norris, born March 10, 1940, died March 19, 2026.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 13-15, 2026):

1 (1) Hoppers (U) ****

2 (new) Reminders of Him (PG)

3 (new) How to Make a Killing (12A)

4 (5) Mother's Pride (12A) **

5 (3) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

6 (2) Scream 7 (18)

7 (6) GOAT (PG)

8 (7) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12A) ****

9 (4) The Bride! (15)

10 (11) The Secret Agent (15) *****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Killer [above]

2. Hoppers

3. Crimson Gold

4. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

5. Moulin Rouge!

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) Wicked: For Good (PG)

2 (3) Zootropolis 2 (PG) ***

3 (new) Shelter (15)

4 (13) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

5 (5) Sinners (15) ****

6 (6) Anaconda (12)

7 (new) Wicked: Double Bill (PG)

8 (1) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

9 (7) Predator: Badlands (12) **

10 (4) The Running Man (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. Zootropolis 2

4. The Ugly Stepsister

5. Keeper

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Third Man (Saturday, BBC Two, 1pm)

2. Toy Story (Sunday, Channel 4, 6.05pm)

3. Sleepless in Seattle (Saturday, Channel 4, 4.25pm)

4. Licorice Pizza (Thursday, BBC Two, 12midnight)

5. Benedetta (Friday, Channel 4, 1am)

On demand: "Where to Land"

It's been over a decade since the last Hal Hartley feature, and three decades since the heyday of the New Independent Cinema in which Hartley first came to prominence, so perhaps we should recontextualise his work for the benefit of those generations who haven't yet stumbled across The Unbelievable Truth, Amateur or Flirt at their nearest rep cinema or videostore. (Those films are rarely revived, and everything's gone online: Hartley presently rents out his back catalogue via his own website, the digital equivalent of a director selling DVDs out of a van.) New Yorker Hartley was among that wave of hip young indie kids who insisted it's good to talk, although unlike Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino, Hartley was trading in crisp, clean, quality talk. It was the kind of talk a certain bookish strain of cinemagoer might have aspired to have, filled with casual, throwaway references to French philosophers; Hartley's accomplishment was to get late 20th century film characters conversing like folks in the pages of a late 19th century novel. His closest contemporary was Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco) - himself now somewhat off-radar and rarely revived - but Hartley surely owed more to a strain of European arthouse that began with Rohmer and found its way into the films of Eugène Green and Matías Piñeiro. His latest Where to Land, a characteristically droll self-portrait about a middle-aged director's sputtering attempts to write his last will and testament, addresses the unbelievable passage of time from the off: its opening scene, a reunion for the leads of Hartley's Simple Men with echoes of Hamlet, finds besuited protagonist Joe (Bill Sage) informing sceptical church groundskeeper Leonard (Robert John Burke) that he's ready to trade in his camera for a shovel and spade. He'll eventually get digging in other ways, but for the time being this prospective career change triggers panic in his loved ones, who witness Joe's sudden interest in legacy and assume something must be morbidly wrong. As his wide-eyed niece Veronica (Katelyn Sparks), struck by sudden revelation, observes: "He does talk a lot more about the terrible beauty of nature's disregard for the human." Sometimes, the talk is about talk itself.

Certain things have changed in Hartleyland. Diminishing budgets have only accentuated this director's habitually sparse (some have said minimalist) visual style, although Hartley has retained a supremely elegant eye for framing. In 2026, it's actually a rare pleasure to encounter frames that are this tidy and devoid of undue visual clutter; Hartley's blocking, fashioning a limber dance out of two people turning to talk to one another on the street, remains a joy, forever returning our focus to bodies, faces and voices, typically those of actors some of us grew up watching. And once again, those actors have been coached towards an utterly undemonstrative performance style that, among other benefits, represents the antithesis of whatever Jessie Buckley was doing to win her Oscar. The funniest (and most Godardian) gag here may be conceptual: Hartley has staged a farce populated by characters refusing to play ball, their minds being perpetually on far horizons and higher things. Where to Land is still a series of conversations Joe has: with the super in his apartment (Joe Perrino), who mostly enters our guy's flat just to drink his extra light beer; with the academic writing a book on him (Aida Johannes), who stands for all those academics (and journalists) who've developed mad ideas about Hartley over the years; with a historian (Kathleen Chalfant) who insists "bad times are coming, but good things do get done"; with his ex-wife (Edie Falco), who has only finite patience for Joe's hemming and hawing. What's crucial is that it's engaging conversation: ruminative, wide-ranging, sometimes serious, sometimes not, with much to say on how best to be helpful in a moment when the world is on fire. (In short: no need to dig graves just yet, but this might not be the worst time to cultivate your garden, to paraphrase Candide.) It's a project that has assumed extra value as a vision of a civilised, more orderly America: books on shelves, thoughts in heads, hope clung to in weary, battle-hardened hearts. In and of itself, though, it's also a teachable example of late style. The essence of a singular filmmaker boiled down to its 74-minute basics, Where to Land winds down with a readthrough - a fresh start - in what appears to be Hartley's own living quarters. Good things do still get done, but nowadays they're often off-radar, behind closed doors and among close friends: Where to Land is unmistakably one of them.

Where to Land is now available to rent via halhartley.com.