Memorial Page for Paul Walker (née Paul William Walker IV)

Paul Walker (born 12 September 1973 in Glendale, California; died 30 November 2013 in Valencia near Santa Clarita) was an American actor. Audiences around the world knew him as Brian O'Conner in The Fast and the Furious films. Those who knew him well, however, rarely described him as an actor first. Walker had studied marine biology, worked aboard research vessels, earned an emergency medical technician certification, and founded a disaster relief organisation that still deploys today. His own short profile online listed him in this order: outdoorsman, ocean addict, adrenaline junkie - and then, last and almost in passing, someone who did some acting on the side.

A boy from the inland valley

Paul William Walker IV was the eldest of five children and carried the name of his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather. He was born in Glendale and grew up largely in Sunland-Tujunga, a district in the north of Los Angeles, some forty kilometres inland. It is a detail that matters later: the man associated with the ocean grew up in a dry valley basin.

His father worked in sewer and pipeline construction, a business the grandfather had founded. His mother Cheryl had worked as a model. Both gave up their careers when they married - Walker recounted that arrangement himself in an interview years later. The family belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Walker described his upbringing as a mixture of evangelical high school and a traditional home in which structure and going without were taken for granted.

In front of a camera before he could choose

That Walker ended up in front of a camera at all was an accident. His mother's former agent wanted to bring her back into modelling; when Cheryl Walker mentioned her baby, the agent told her to bring him along. At around two years old, Walker faced a camera for the first time. His mother became his manager and drove him to commercial shoots into his primary school years. Nobody saw a career in it - the money was meant to be a fund for his education.

At thirteen he landed his first leading role in the sitcom Throb, only to be replaced after the first season. In the early nineties he spent a little over a year on the series The Young and the Restless. Then things went downhill. Walker used up his savings and fell into debt. He later described that period with characteristic harshness towards himself, saying that ten years earlier he had been living out of a garage. It was not a director who brought him back, but a casting director who remembered the former child actor, sought him out and placed him in an episode of Touched by an Angel in 1996. Everything after that, Walker said, had been on-the-job training.

One single film

There is a sentence of his that sums up his entire relationship with Hollywood. He had thought, Walker said, that he would make one film, pay off his student loans with it, and then go back to university to finish his degree. It simply never stopped.

After Pleasantville (1998) the offers came so quickly that he never returned. Varsity Blues, She's All That, The Skulls and Joy Ride followed in rapid succession. The role that changed everything came out of a conversation: after filming The Skulls, director Rob Cohen and producer Neal H. Moritz asked him what he wanted to do next. Walker replied that his dream project would be a blend of Days of Thunder and Donnie Brasco - he wanted to be an undercover officer and a racing driver at once. The filmmakers handed him a magazine article about illegal street racing. He signed on immediately.

Brian O'Conner

The Fast and the Furious reached cinemas in 2001 and made Walker known worldwide. He played Brian O'Conner in six films of a series that became one of the most successful in cinema history. On 17 March 2009 he walked the red carpet for the fourth instalment at the UCI cinema at Ruhr Park in Bochum, Germany, alongside Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster and director Justin Lin - two days before the London screening. Across all six films his German voice was David Nathan, the same voice that dubs Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.

Walker was openly uneasy with fame itself. He was well aware, he said in 2003, that he had first been cast largely as a good-looking face - a bitter thing to know, but true. Director James Wan recalled that Walker often hated talking about Hollywood and wanted as little to do with it as possible.

The ocean that was always there

The passion that actually shaped his life was older than any film. The family could not afford a house by the water - so the boy watched Jacques Cousteau on television and built elaborate aquariums at home. He later studied marine biology at colleges in southern California. He never completed a degree; the films got in the way.

So he found another route to the sea. In 2006 he joined the board of the Billfish Foundation. In 2010 he spent eleven days off the Mexican island of Guadalupe for a National Geographic series, where a research team caught, tagged and released great white sharks. What is striking is how he was credited there: in the channel's press release, the line beneath his quote does not read "actor" but deckhand. He scrubbed the deck and helped haul the animals onto the lift platform. Of that work he said, as quoted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, that he would walk away from acting to do it full time.

He preferred to describe himself differently in any case: a science guy, a nerd, in charge of geology, botany and marine science. In his final years he gave up hunting and photographed wildlife instead. Shortly before his death he had taken up birdwatching and botany.

Reach Out Worldwide

In January 2010 an earthquake struck Haiti. Walker gathered a handful of doctors and firefighters and flew out; five days after the quake the team landed in Port-au-Prince and, by its own account, was working at an orphanage outside the city three quarters of an hour later. That journey gave rise to Reach Out Worldwide, an organisation that brings first responders, doctors, nurses, firefighters and tradespeople into disaster areas. Walker did not want to be merely a donor: he earned an emergency medical technician certification and considered going back to school to train as a paramedic.

He did not talk about his own deployments. Two days after Walker's death, the organisation's operations manager said it was in fact the first time they had spoken about how closely involved he had been - because he had never allowed it.

What that reticence looked like is shown by an episode in a jewellery shop in Santa Barbara. A soldier home from Iraq and his wife looked at a ring there that was beyond their budget, and left. Shortly afterwards a saleswoman rang them: the ring had been paid for. Walker had called the manager over and said that the ring those people had been looking at should go on his account - on condition that his name never came up. The couple only learned who the stranger had been after his death.

The father

His daughter Meadow Rain Walker was born on 4 November 1998. She grew up with her mother in Hawaii and moved to her father in California in 2011, at thirteen. In November 2013 he said of her that she was the best thing he had going. Meadow Walker later described what remained of him for her: the first thing you forget about a person is their voice - and she was fortunate enough to have her father's voice in many films.

30 November 2013

That Saturday, a fundraising event for his relief organisation took place at the Always Evolving workshop in Valencia, in aid of the victims of Typhoon Haiyan, which had struck the Philippines three weeks earlier. Admission cost an unwrapped toy worth ten dollars, or a donation of the same amount. More than three hundred people came. Those present described Walker as visibly overwhelmed by the turnout; he spent the afternoon talking with visitors and staff. In the early afternoon he got into the passenger seat of a car belonging to his friend and business partner Roger Rodas. A few hundred metres away, the vehicle crashed. Both men died; Walker was 40 years old.

Two weeks later a film reached cinemas whose release date had long been fixed: Hours, a chamber piece carried almost single-handedly by Walker. He plays a father who stays behind in evacuated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and keeps his newborn child alive by cranking a generator by hand.

What followed

Filming on Furious 7 was not complete at that point. The studio decided to finish the film. The work in Walker's place was divided among three people: his brother Caleb chiefly provided build and gesture, his brother Cody the eyes, and the actor John Brotherton the performance. Weta Digital created some 350 shots; around 260 of them with a computer-generated face, about 90 from existing footage that was relit and repurposed. There had never been a three-dimensional scan of the actor. The supervisor in charge described the aim of that work as self-erasure: if it succeeded, nobody in the cinema would think about the technique, but would say goodbye to Paul Walker.

For the closing credits came See You Again. Charlie Puth, who had never met Walker, wrote the lyrics out of a loss of his own - his best friend had died in a motorcycle accident a year earlier. The song became the world's best-selling single of 2015. In Germany it leapt from number 39 straight to the top and stayed there three weeks; in Austria and Switzerland it held number one for six weeks each. On 10 July 2017 the accompanying video became the most-watched on YouTube with almost 2.9 billion views, ending the 1,689-day reign of Gangnam Style. It now stands at more than seven billion views - the second most-watched music video in the world. Its comment section has served for years as a kind of open memorial page.

Legacy

Reach Out Worldwide still exists. His brother Cody Walker runs the organisation today as chief executive; since its founding it has completed some 93 deployments in more than thirteen countries, most recently flood relief in Ohio in the summer of 2026. In the year after Walker's death its income quadrupled.

On his 42nd birthday, 12 September 2015, his then sixteen-year-old daughter Meadow founded the Paul Walker Foundation. Every year since, it has awarded a scholarship to young people committed to ocean conservation, environmental protection and sustainability - to precisely the thing, in other words, for which her father would have given up acting. The Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the most important marine research institutions in the United States, took its leave of him at the time with a single sentence: the ocean had lost a friend. It later established an award in his name for commitment to protecting the seas.

And off the Mexican island of Guadalupe, where he had been aboard as a deckhand, swims a great white shark that a research institute named a few days after his death. It carries that name to this day in the catalogue of individually identified animals there: Paul Walker.