David Prowse, Man Behind the Darth Vader Mask, Dies at 85
The Englishman worked on the first three 'Star Wars' films, but it was James Earl Jones' voice, not his, that was heard. He could have played Chewbacca instead. David Prowse, the champion English weightlifter and bodybuilder who supplied his 6-foot-7 frame — but not the voice or the deep breathing — to portray Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, died early in the morning on Saturday following a short illness. He was 85.
Prowse's death was confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter by his agent Thomas Bowington on Saturday night. Bowington Management also shared the news on Twitter, announcing his passing with "great regret and heart-wrenching sadness for us and million of fans around the world."
Appropriately, the strapping Prowse portrayed the Frankenstein monster in three movies: the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) and, for Hammer Films, The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974), the last opposite a future Star Wars co-star, Peter Cushing.
In Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), Prowse appeared as the muscular manservant working for author Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee), and he later helped a slender Christopher Reeve bulk up for the role of the Man of Steel in the Superman films.
Prowse was well-known in the U.K. for portraying the Green Cross Code Man — a superhero-like character used in public-service advertisements to help children get across the street safely — from 1967 through 1990. For that, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2000.
"It's one of the greatest things I've ever done," he once said.
Born on July 1, 1935, in Bristol, England, Prowse was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis of the knee and forced to wear a leg splint for four years as a youngster (it turned out he actually had osteoarthritis). Yet he went on to compete for the Mr. Universe bodybuilding title in 1960 before capturing the British weightlifting championship three straight years running, from 1962-64. (At age 50, he was still able to dead-lift 700 pounds.)
Prowse's first forays into acting included gigs on The Beverly Hillbillies, The Saint and Doctor Who, and he went on to star as "The Mighty Tonka" in a toy commercial directed by Ridley Scott.
George Lucas had seen him in Clockwork Orange and offered him a part in the first Star Wars (1977).
"Lucas said to me, 'You've got a choice of two characters in the movie," Prowse recalled in a 2016 interview. "He said, 'There's a character called Chewbacca, which is like a huge teddy bear, or alternatively, there's the main villain in the piece.' Well, there's no choice, is there? Thank you very much, I'll have the villain's piece."
Prowse didn't realize that his head and face would be covered by that now-iconic Samurai-inspired helmet and mask or that his outfit, made of fiberglass and leather, would weigh 40 pounds and be extremely, uncomfortably hot.
"Once [the mask] was fitted, I became virtually blind, and the heat generated by the suit obeyed the laws of physics and traveled upward, straight into the mash," he wrote in his 2005 memoir, Straight From the Force's Mouth. "This immediately misted up the eyepieces, which was inconvenient, to say the least, but was not an insurmountable problem so long as I could look down through the triangular cut-out beneath the mask's nose molding and use it as a spyhole."
