“The only thing I’ve been told is I’ve burned too many bridges between Lucasfilm and myself.” “ People ask what went wrong with George Lucas but to be honest, I still don’t really know,” he said. Still he lobbied at every opportunity to be considered for any future Star Wars films, and continued to mourn what he regarded as his slapdash treatment on the earlier instalments.īy 2005, he told Empire magazine that he was doing “nothing else” except being paid to fly all over the world attending Star Wars conventions, which made it all the more galling for him when in 2010 he alleged that he had been banned from any future events. In 2000, he contracted a blood disease that caused temporary paralysis in his arms. He performed the same function for Cary Elwes in preparation for The Princess Bride (1987).Ī hip injury in 1989, as well as arthritis and various health issues relating to his ankle and spine, put Prowse out of action. He was turned down for the lead in Superman The Movie (1978), but gave the successful candidate, Christopher Reeve, physical training “I spent six weeks trying to make him look like me,” Prowse said. Photograph: Barry Breckon/Rex/ShutterstockĪfter playing Vader, Prowse’s acting roles were few and far between. As part of his contract with the Department of Transport, he toured schools as the Green Cross Man.ĭavid Prowse in the 1970s. The Sunday Times reported in 1978 that the first two years of Prowse’s tenure helped bring about a 5% reduction in road safety accidents in the 4-11 age group. His voice was dubbed by another actor for the first two advertisements, but reinstated thereafter. Shortly before Lucas’s movie started shooting in 1976, Prowse began his 14-year stint as the superhero-like Green Cross Man in a popular series of road safety commercials. He starred in comedies including Carry On Henry (also 1971) and Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky (1977), and appeared with his future Star Wars co-star Carrie Fisher in her mother Debbie Reynolds’s show at the London Palladium in 1974. His most notable pre-Star Wars credit was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, in which he was the bodyguard to the writer played by Patrick Magee. He also became a fitness consultant at Harrod’s while keeping his hand in with acting. He opened his first gymnasium in south London in 1969 his clients included Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath. He made an uncredited appearance in the star-studded James Bond comedy Casino Royale (1967), as Frankenstein’s monster, later reprising the role in a more orthodox context in The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). From there, he moved on to commercials, television series and eventually films. While selling equipment in a gym in the early 1960s, he was approached by an acting agent who invited him to play the part of Death in Don’t Let Summer Come at the Mermaid theatre in London. He switched to competitive weightlifting and went on to be British heavyweight champion for three consecutive years from 1962. Photograph: ANL/Rex/ShutterstockĪt 16 he dedicated himself to bodybuilding and at the age of 25, having worked as a lifeguard and a bouncer, he entered the Mr Universe contest, during which a judge told him he would never win because of his “ugly feet”. He was educated at Bristol grammar school and from the age of 12 spent three years wearing a leg-iron because of suspected tuberculosis of the knee, a diagnosis that later proved to be unfounded.ĭavid Prowse as the Green Cross Man, the superhero of road safety. Prowse was born in Bristol and was raised by his mother after his father died when he was five. “Sometimes in the cinema, I want to yell out: ‘Hey, that’s me up there, that’s me you’re all watching.’” “As Darth Vader, you always feel as if fame and fortune’s coming towards you, but, just as it’s going to hit, it passes you by,” he lamented. Such slights were in keeping with his general frustrations about the role. To add insult to anonymity, this death scene was concealed from Prowse, who claimed not to have been shown script pages during shooting. When Vader was unmasked in the latter film, moments before his death, it was the actor Sebastian Shaw, rather than Prowse, whose face was shown, and who got to speak the character’s final words. And though he performed his share of the light-sabre duels in the first picture, they were mostly handed over to the stunt department for the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). Nor did he get to supply Vader’s menacing heavy breathing (that was the sound designer Ben Burtt, using scuba-diving apparatus). David Prowse as Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, 1980.
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