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Many actors do not like to be defined entirely by their most famous role. David Prowse, who died Saturday at age 85, didn’t care. In fact, he craved more.
“I created Darth Vader,” Prowse insisted to a London reporter after the original was released. Star Wars in 1977. “His movement, his gestures are what I and nobody else put in the character.” Hurt by what he saw as Lucasfilm’s lack of recognition for his contribution, Prowse would spend the rest of his life signing photos of fans: “David Prowse is Darth Vader.”
Without a doubt, Prowse’s towering height and commanding presence within the costume brought an additional level of threat to the most famous villain in movie history. But his insistence on ownership belied the fact that Vader was a true composite character: created by George Lucas, imagined by Ralph McQuarrie (the artist who gave us that mask), disguised in motorcycle leathers by John Mollo, mask-breathing. dive added by sound designer Ben Burtt and voice by James Earl Jones. (That last credit annoyed Prowse more than any other. He went to his grave believing he should have done the voice.)
This bone of contention, coupled with fears that he was leaking plot details, led Lucasfilm to use Prowse’s services minimally on Return of the Jedi (1983) and nothing when Darth Vader returned in Revenge of the Sith (2005). It also sadly obscured the rest of a phenomenal life, in which Prowse was a famous bodybuilder, a successful gym owner, a superhero who saved lives, and a star in not just one, but multiple celebrated sci-fi epics.
A mountain of muscle
Prowse was instrumental in bringing the “fitness trend” to Britain. London’s Harrods department store, seen here in 1978, hired him to help sell gym equipment.
Image: Colin Davey / Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Prowse was born in Bristol in 1935, part of what is known as England’s West Country, where residents have a distinctive rural accent. He never lost it, hence the crew in Star Wars calling him “Darth Farmer” for the way he read Vader’s lines.
Tragically, Prowse’s father died when Prowse was 8 years old, after what was supposed to be a routine ulcer operation. Her mother had to hire tenants to make ends meet. Prowse, already a budding athlete, dedicated himself to eating all the leftovers to meet his enormous caloric needs. At age 13, a tuberculosis attack forced him to walk on splints, which helped increase his height from 5 feet 9 inches to 6 feet 3 inches. He eventually surpassed 6 feet 7 inches, by which time he was on his way to becoming an elite bodybuilder.
It was an extraordinary story from poverty to wealth. Prowse began his first Charles Atlas training course in a coal shed and had to raise funds for supplements and weights. After a few years, he was able to lift 660 pounds. He was the British heavyweight champion from 1962 to 1964 and toured Europe, rubbing shoulders with a promising Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was hired by a bodybuilding magazine company to help start a new weightlifting sales business in London. This was harder than it sounds, at a time when gyms didn’t even exist.
“The only thing I had going for me was my physical presence”
“The only thing I had going for me was my physical presence,” Prowse wrote in his 2011 autobiography. From the mouth of force.
That was enough. Prowse signed a contract with, among others, the world famous Harrods department store. He started a magazine called Power, founded his own gym, and he signed up with a stunt agency called Tough Guys, which brought him his first acting jobs (Prowse’s first commercial was for Kit-Kats, in 1965, in which he played a Viking warrior) and, for one night, like a fake bodyguard. for the infamous London gangsters the Kray twins. Tough Guys also took him to Hammer, the production company synonymous with horror movies, where Prowse first worked with his future. Star Wars co-star Peter Cushing.
That award-winning and advantageous physical presence turned out to be perfect on the big screen, and Prowse had a sudden role succession in the early 1970s that would make any actor looking for work proud. It was Frankenstein’s monster in three separate movies. It was a minotaur in Doctor who. And when Stanley Kubrick needed a burly character for his ultraviolent adaptation of A Clockwork Orange – a bodyguard for the writer whose home is invaded by droogs: Prowse was the obvious choice.
Prowse, in his underwear, deadlifts Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’.
Image: Warner Bros / Archive Photos / Getty Images
That role would later draw the attention of a Kubrick fan named George Lucas. But by the time Prowse interviewed Lucas for the role of a then unknown Star Wars villain, he was already well known to a generation of kids, and would be for another two decades, as the Green Cross Code Man.
It’s hard to deny that Green Cross Code Man was Britain’s best-known homegrown superhero, constantly appearing in advertisements in every comic book and on every commercial TV channel. Its name comes from a list of road safety behaviors that the government was trying to drill into young minds. Before Prowse, the campaign had used a dusty character from the 1950s, a squirrel named Tufty Fluffytail. Green Cross Code Man was more fascinating, literally, as he teleported from space to prevent children from running off in the middle of the street.
Who knows how many young lives Prowse could have saved, simply by standing with his hands on his hips in green and white spandex as he implored a generation “Stop, look, listen, think”? Some 40,000 children a year were involved in traffic injuries or deaths at the start of the campaign; in the end, 14 years later, the figure was 20,000. Prowse later described the role as “the spiritual pinnacle of my career in show business.”
For Prowse, the only downside, in an omen of his Star Wars problems – was that the campaign felt the need to double its voice.
Prowse’s on-screen career continued apace after Star Wars. He appeared in the first Terry Gilliam film, Jabberwocky. He played a bodyguard, again, in the BBC television adaptation of Douglas Adams the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Given that the body he’s assigned to protect is an intergalactic rock star who is spending a year legally dead for tax purposes, it’s probably Prowse’s funniest role.
And so when director Richard Donner was casting the lead role in SupermanProwse didn’t find it unreasonable that he might get the chance to play another superhero (he’d also played Superman in a Max Factor commercial). After all, couldn’t they just put an American accent on it? Prowse was outraged to discover that Donner simply wanted him as Christopher Reeves’ personal trainer.
However, he agreed, and the result was Reeves’ impressive physique in the film, although the star was furious when Prowse had to leave for a couple of weeks for a pre-existing commitment to train the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
The late Peter Cushing, George Lucas, the late Carrie Fisher and the late David Prowse on the set of ‘Star Wars’.
Image: Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images
It was another trip scheduled for this time, a 1978 US tour to promote himself as Darth Vader, that first earned Prowse the ire of Lucasfilm. In an interview at a Berkeley comic book store, he reported in the San Francisco Examiner, Prowse said that subsequent Star Wars movies would reveal that Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Since the script of Empire Strikes Back it hadn’t been written yet, this was a lucky guess, or Lucas had been very indiscreet about his potential plans on the set of the first movie.
“Sometimes you get into trouble just for speculation,” Prowse told me in 2013, when I tracked him down at a comic book convention, determined to uncover the truth of the Berkeley interview. It was the closest he had come to explaining it. Years of bad blood with Lucasfilm had flowed since then; they had allegedly given him a fake dialogue to read on the set of Empire (“Obi-Wan is your father”), and partly replaced by his fencing coach in Return of the Jedi, about paranoid fears of leaking plot points to the newspapers.
He fueled his complaints about this, and the lack of profit sharing from Jedi, to the point where he was banned from official Lucasfilm and Disney events in 2010. It was a sad result for a literal giant of cinema.
But Prowse was still entertained by fans at unofficial conventions around the world, a source of relief as he repelled multiple episodes of severe arthritis and prostate cancer (he denied reports that he also suffered from dementia). Although he retired from conventions in 2016, his commanding presence will be remembered for years to come.
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