Joseph Merrick, probably the most severely deformed people recorded in medical historical past, would hardly seem to be the function David Bowie was born to play. The latter seemed and acted as if destined for nineteen-seventies rock stardom; the previous so horrified his fellow Victorians that he was exhibited beneath the title “The Elephant Man.” However no matter their outward variations, these Englishmen did each know fame, a situation Bowie rued alongside John Lennon in 1975. But within the following years he continued to develop his public profile, not least by turning to performing, and even got here off as a viable film star in Nicolas Roeg‘s The Man Who Fell to Earth — not that taking part in a fragile however magnetic customer from one other world would have been a lot of a stretch.

In truth, it was The Man Who Fell to Earth that satisfied theater director Jack Hofsiss to supply Bowie the lead in The Elephant Man, Bernard Pomerance’s play in regards to the lifetime of Joseph Merrick (referred to, within the script, as John Merrick). Hofsiss suspected that Bowie “would perceive Merrick’s sense of otherness and alienation,” writes Louder’s Invoice DeMain; he could or could not have recognized that Bowie’s expertise learning mime, of which he made loads of use in his live shows, would place him effectively to evoke the character’s misshapen physique.

The Elephant Man explicitly requires no prosthetic make-up; starting with David Schofield, who starred in its first productions, all of the actors taking part in Joseph Merrick have needed to embody him with their performing abilities alone.

You’ll be able to see how Bowie did it in clips above. “I bought a name inside two weeks of getting to go over and begin rehearsal,” his website quotes him as saying. “So I went to the London Hospital and went to the museum there. Discovered the plaster casts of the bits of Merrick’s physique that had been attention-grabbing to the medical career and the little church that he’d made, and his cap and his cloak.” These artifacts gave him sufficient enough sense of “the final environment” of Merrick’s life and occasions to make the function his personal by the point of his first performances in Denver and Chicago in the summertime of 1980. “Advance phrase on Bowie’s efficiency was encouraging, with field workplace data damaged on the theaters in each cities,” writes DeMain; The Elephant Man quickly made it to Broadway, opening on the Sales space Theatre within the fall.

It was there, in December of 1980, that Mark David Chapman noticed Bowie play Merrick, simply two nights earlier than he assassinated Lennon — and he additionally had one other ticket, within the entrance row, for the very subsequent evening’s present. “John and Yoko had been supposed to take a seat front-row for that present too,” mentioned Bowie, “so the evening after John was killed there have been three empty seats within the entrance row. I can’t inform you how troublesome it was to go on. I nearly didn’t make it by way of the efficiency.” Having been quantity two on Chapman’s hit listing absolutely did its half to encourage Bowie’s determination to recuse himself from reside efficiency — to cease displaying himself for a dwelling, because the character of Joseph Merrick would have put it — for the subsequent few years. Nevertheless it was solely the early eighties, and Bowie may hardly have recognized that his actual heights of fame, for higher or worse, had been but to return.

Associated content material:

Watch David Bowie Star in His First Movie Function, a Quick Horror Flick Known as The Picture (1967)

David Bowie’s Mystical Appearances in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

The Skinny White Duke: A Shut Examine of David Bowie’s Darkest Character

How Nicolas Roeg (RIP) Used David Bowie, Mick Jagger & Artwork Garfunkel in His Thoughts-Bending Movies

David Bowie Performs “Life on Mars?” and “Ashes to Ashes” on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Present” (1980)

Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embrace the Substack publication Books on Cities, the ebook The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.