Hi Everyone! :)
I remember watching a TV show paying tribute to movie stars, and in it, someone said that John Carradine was an orphan, and that he got some of the inspiration for his characters from his experience in an orphanage. Is this just a rumor?
I'm sorry if this is an old question, but since I didn't read anything on this site or board about it, I was curious.
i dunno, i don't have my "John carradine" book on hand at the moment. but he didn't know his dad THAT much i DO know. i don't think much has really been told about his life growing up to be honest.
shareI know this is several years old, but his biological father died when John was 2. Just fyi...
shareJohn Carradine's father (William Reed Carradine) died from tuberculosis on April 10, 1909 - John was born February 5, 1906, so he was 3 when his father died rather than 2. (Wikipedia says 2, but they sometimes get things wrong.) No point in quibbling about that, though, he was still very young when it happened. His mother Genevieve remarried in 1916 and died in 1967. So for a number of years, he only had one parent - however, he should not have been destitute since his mother was a surgeon.
If you define an orphan as a child who has lost both parents then, no, he wasn't an orphan.