For an artist who transformed rock and roll music to great acclaim and financial rewards, David Bowie's work as an actor never matched the notoriety and success of his recordings and concerts.
Published: Wed 13 Jan 2016, 12:03 PM
Last updated: Thu 14 Jan 2016, 8:34 AM
David Bowie's relationship to cinema and acting was characteristically complex and knotty even before he started: He famously had to change his name from Davy Jones because there was already a British actor with that name making major waves in music as part of the mega-hit TV manufactured band, the Monkees.
For an artist who transformed rock and roll music to great acclaim and financial rewards, David Bowie's work as an actor never matched the notoriety and success of his recordings and concerts. But Bowie accomplished a feat that eluded Elvis and many other pantheon rockers who attempted to crossover from rock stardom to films and starred in a movie that has endured as a legitimate work of art: Nicolas Roeg's 1976 sci-fi masterwork, The Man Who Fell To Earth. As Variety's Alex Romanelli noted upon the Criterion Collection BluRay release of Earth in 2005, the film was almost completely dismissed when originally released, but three decades later it was easy to see its astounding virtues as a groundbreaking, if unorthodox sci-fi film.
The Criterion Earth also collected an audio commentary by Bowie that had been done for a 1992 laser-disc release. In a reflection of how art imitates life, and vice versa, Roeg talked about casting the film's central character, Thomas Jerome Newton, whom he described as "someone who was inside society and yet awkward in it."
"During the making of the film," Roeg said, "David got more than into the character Mr. Newton, he put much more of himself in it than we had been able to get into the script. It was linked very much to his ideas in his music. Towards the end I realiSed a big change had happened in his life." Bowie, conversely, said that "I took some of the character of Newton away with me from The Man Who Fell to Earth. The thing that I remember objectively taking with me was the wardrobe. I literally walked off with the clothes. And I used the same clothes on the 'Station to Station' tour."
CUTTING-EDGE WORK
If Earth were Bowie's only imprint upon cinema, his film career could be deemed a lucky accident. But theatrics was an essential weapon in Bowie's awesome arsenal of creative skills. Having been a student of the legendary mime, Lindsay Kemp, Bowie utilised those lessons to inform his stage show and as the MTV era dawned, his cutting edge work in music videos often prominently featured the fruits of that collaboration. D.A. Pennebaker, who filmed the concert documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, talked about Bowie's inherent theatricality during the making of that film. "It was such an amazing display of something I couldn't imagine," he said, "and we put it together and made a film. "The camera is such an amazing invention that you can point it at something and it won't lie. And people who are performers, especially, they know when it's going to be forever; it kind of lifts them off the ground, and it's incredible what they can do to make that work."
David Mallett made good use of Bowie's time with Kemp in the Ashes to Ashes music video (1980). From the album Scary Monsters, the video featured Bowie as a bizarre clown surrounded by key figures of the London and Birmingham "New Romantics" music scene of that moment. A few years later, Bowie added another string to his acting bow by making the move into what might be called "legitimate" acting in legendary auteur Nagisa Oshima's woefully underseen WWII POW drama, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983).
Jim Henson's 1986 family fantasy film, Labyrinth, is perhaps Bowie's best known film role. And his work as a lead in films was virtually over by the time he co-starred in Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners. He did continue to take on several incredibly challenging supporting roles playing iconic characters from Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1996) to Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006). For an artist whom the term "meta" seems designed for, Bowie as Bowie also astonished and entertained. His drug woes of the time were front and center in Alan Yentob's 1975 Cracked Actor documentary, as well as Pennebaker's 1973 Ziggy Stardust stand as honest, vital documents of the era and his oeuvre. Bowie was also seen as Bowie beautifully spoofing his image as stylish, urbane pop culture icon in Ben Stiller's hit comedy, Zoolander (2001). As with so much of Bowie's body of creative work, time is the best friend to those who spend their lives running ahead of the curve. His film resume has no hits, but an astonishing track record of durable, valuable performances in an impressive number of truly first-rate, cutting-edge films.
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