Carlos Ray Norris Jr., known as Chuck Norris, (born March 10, 1940), is a martial artist, an American action movie actor and Hollywood star. A native of Ryan, Oklahoma, Norris has two younger brothers, Wieland and Aaron Norris, who is a Hollywood producer. Norris was born to an alcoholic Cherokee Indian father and Irish mother.[1] When Norris was ten, his parents divorced [2] and he later relocated to Torrance, California with his mother and brothers.[3] Norris describes his childhood as downbeat. He was unathletic, shy, and scholastically mediocre. Kids would taunt his mixed ethnicity — wistfully he wanted to beat up his tormenters.[4] He finished high school and soon married his girlfriend, Diane Holechek. In 1958 Norris joined the United States Air Force as a Military Policeman and was sent to Osan Air Base South Korea. It was in South Korea that Norris acquired the nickname Chuck and began his training in Tang Soo Do. When he returned to the states he continued to act as an MP at March Air Force Base California. Norris was discharged in August of 1962 without seeing combat. He worked for the Northrop corporation and opened a chain of karate schools, which the son of Steve McQueen attended.[5] In 1963, his son Mike was born; a second son, Eric, followed in 1965. In 1970, his younger brother Weiland was killed in Vietnam. Norris later dedicated his Missing in Action films to his brother's memory. At a martial arts demonstration in Long Beach, Norris met the soon to be famous Bruce Lee, who would ingrain Norris in martial arts history forever with his portrayal as Bruce Lee's nemesis in the Way of the Dragon. [6] In 1988, after 30 years of marriage, Norris and Holechek divorced. He married again in 1998, this time to former model Gena O'Kelley, and she delivered twins in 2001: Dakota Alan Norris, a boy, and Danilee Kelly Norris, a girl. By the close of the 1980s, Cannon Films had faded from prominence, and Norris' star appeal seemed to go with it. He reprised his Delta Force role for MGM, who had acquired the Cannon library after the latter's Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Norris went on to make several more largely ignored films before making a transition to television. In 1993, he began shooting the series Walker, Texas Ranger, which lasted eight years on CBS and continued in heavy syndication on other channels. Late Night with Conan O'Brien's parent company, NBC, aquired Universal in early 2004, giving O'Brien permission to show footage of Walker, Texas Ranger without paying royalties. O'Brien and his writers subsequently created a new segment in which O'Brien shows short, out of context clips for comedic purposes. The "Walker, Texas Ranger Lever" quickly became one of the most popular segments on Late Night, with Norris himself showing up to parody his show and used his martial arts on O'Brien.