Chuck Norris
TV Actor — born 1940
Chuck Norris is a martial artist and actor who founded his own school of martial art, Chun Kuk Do.
Chuck Norris is an American martial artist, actor, and political commentator whose six-decade career has produced multiple defining American action-genre TV and film roles — particularly his eight-season run as Sergeant Cordell Walker on CBS's Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001). He was born Carlos Ray Norris on March 10, 1940, in Ryan, Oklahoma, into a working-class American family. His father Ray Dee Norris was a U.S. Army World War II veteran turned mechanic and his mother Wilma Eline Scarberry was a homemaker. The family lived through Norris's father's alcoholism and 1944 Oklahoma rural displacement before settling in Wilmington, Los Angeles in 1955.
His U.S. Air Force enlistment across 1958–1962 produced his 1958 South Korea Osan Air Base assignment — where he began Tang Soo Do martial-arts training under Korean instructor Jae Chul Shin. The 1962 Air Force discharge launched his American martial-arts competition career. His 1968 first World Professional Middleweight Karate Champion title at the All-American Karate Championships (which he held continuously across 1968–1974) produced his 1970s American martial-arts public profile.
His 1972 film breakthrough came as the antagonist opposite Bruce Lee in the 1972 Hong Kong film Way of the Dragon (released as Return of the Dragon in the U.S.) — the Roman-Colosseum martial-arts climax that has been continuously cited as one of the defining 20th-century film fight sequences. His 1980s martial-arts-action film peak produced multiple American films: Good Guys Wear Black (1978), The Octagon (1980), Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), Missing in Action (1984) and its 1985 and 1988 sequels, and The Delta Force (1986).
His 1993–2001 lead role as Texas Ranger Cordell Walker on CBS's Walker, Texas Ranger ran for 196 episodes across eight seasons — making it one of the longest-running CBS prime-time drama series of the 1990s. The series produced the public association of Norris with Texas-Ranger characterization that subsequently shaped his 2000s late-career persona — including the 2005 viral "Chuck Norris Facts" Internet meme. He has been with American singer Gena O'Kelley since 1997, and the couple has twin children.
His name Chuck began as the English diminutive of Charles (from the Old Germanic karl meaning "free man"). Chuck was a popular American boys' name through the 1940s and 1950s.
About the name Chuck
Gender: Male · Origin: English
A Man: Variant Of Carl.