Fans of Star Wars they are in mourning. Darth Vader died. Strictly speaking, Dave Prowse, the 85-year-old English actor who put the body of the character in the movies that can be seen on Disney +, has died. Why was her face never seen and why was her voice not that of the character either?
His representative agency released the news. “With great regret and heartbreaking sadness for us and for millions of fans around the world, we must report that Dave Prowse has passed away at the age of 85,” Bowington Management wrote on Twitter on Sunday, November 29. In March 2009, the actor revealed that he had prostate cancer.
Dave Prowse acted as Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies filmed between 1976 and 1982: Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), all available on Disney +.
The character’s voice was not his, but George Lucas decided to hire actor James Earl Jones to add “darkness” to the character.
His career began in 1967 in the film Casino Royale, a spoof on spy movies, starring David Niven as Sir James Bond. He even participated in A Clockwork Orange.
In 2000, he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth as a member of the Order of the British Empire for leading a public road safety campaign. He walked the streets with a green X on his chest. It became an icon and was called the Green Cross in the UK. For 19 years he taught children to cross the street.
The spoiler that ruined his career
Prowse didn’t know that Lucas was going to replace his voice with Jones’s because his English accent didn’t convince him. That was the first disappointment for the actor, who grew up when, in Return of the Jedi, his colleague Sebastián Shaw played a Vader without a mask.
In the documentary I am your father, Prowse said that his relationship with George Lucas was ruined because, in a report, Prowse leaked the information that, in the event of new films, it would be revealed that Vader was the father of Luke Skywalker. The creator and director of the saga never forgave him that spoiler.
In fact, the filming of the last film in the original series was an ordeal for Prowse: Lucas did not speak to him and his stunt double did all the lightsaber scenes because he was an accomplished swordsman.
In the documentary, Prowse confessed: “My great frustration has been playing the greatest villain in movie history and that no one knew it was me. They never told me that they would substitute my voice, nor that in the third film, Shaw’s would appear instead of my face. I wouldn’t have been bothered if they had explained it to me, but no one bothered to tell me. “
For all this, Prowse was marginalized from the official events circuit of the saga and, despite having a long acting career, died as a stranger to the general public.
(The chronicler)
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