David prowes

Born in Bristol on July 1, 1935, David Charles Prowse –his full name– was 1.98 meters tall. “When I think about my childhood, I think it was ordinary, except that my father died when I was two years old,” he commented in an interview with Decine21 . “My mother was left in a bad financial situation. So she turned our house into a boarding house, where the young trainees, who today would be called interns, stayed from the airlines that were quite close. So I grew up in a place where I always there were new people, with different ideas”.

From a very young age he expressed an interest in bodybuilding, winning the British heavyweight weightlifting championship in 1962, and for the next two years. He represented England in the weightlifting event at the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth, Western Australia. In 1963 he married Norma E. Scammell, who was with him until his death. The marriage had three children. 

David Prowse began acting with a small role in the 1978 series The Edge of Night . He then played Frankenstein’s monster in Casino Royale , where he did not appear in the credits. He would reprise this character in The Frankenstein Horror , directed in 1970 by Jimmy Sangster , and in Terence Fisher ‘s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) . He also played Julian, bodyguard for writer Frank Alexander ( Patrick Magee ), in Stanley Kubrick ‘s A Clockwork Orange .

In 1971 he starred in the government’s educational campaign “The Green Man”, where he gave life to a superhero who taught children to cross the street safely, which made him quite famous in the United Kingdom. In addition, he helped train Christopher Reeve for the filming of Superman in 1978. 

He is remembered above all for wearing the costume of Darth Vader, villain of Star Wars . George Lucas had given him a choice between this character or Chewbacca. “What actually happened is my agent called me and said, ‘There’s a gentleman in town named George Lucas .that I would be very interested in seeing you.’ So I went out to see him and met him,” the actor recalled. “He took me into a room and showed me all these concept drawings. He told me, ‘I’d like to offer you one of two roles in this movie that I’m doing. The first of these is a character named Chewbacca’. I replied, ‘What the hell is Chebacca?’ ‘He’s on the good side of the movie, you know?’ I heard that and I said, three months in a gorilla costume? No thank you very much!. ‘The other one is called Darth Vader. He’s the big villain of the movie.’ I said, ‘Say no more, George, I’ll take the part of the villain.’ He asked me why. He thinks of all the movies you’ve seen where there are good guys and bad guys. You always remember the bad guy!”

He was right, Darth Vader became a movie icon. He reprized him in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi , although the character was voiced by another actor, James Earl Jones , and in the third, when he removed his helmet, he had the face of Sebastian Shaw .

In 2000 David Prowse was awarded an MBE for his road safety advertisements. His autobiography, “Straight from the Force’s Mouth,” was published in 2011.