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David Bowie, one of the most influential musicians of all time, has died of cancer, it has been announced. He had just turned 69 on Friday, also the release date of his final album Black Star for which he had recorded a memorably strange video. But he was always as much interested in the visuals as he was in the sound of his art, starting out making an experimental short film in the nineteen-sixties, but embracing film come the mid-seventies with The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg's tale of a space alien who finds nothing but ruin on a mission here.
As far as acting went, it may have been secondary to his era-defining music, but he did appear almost exclusively in cult movies, following up the sci-fi with Marlene Dietrich's last Just a Gigolo, slick vampire tale The Hunger, wartime drama Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, as a hitman in Into the Night, childhood puppet favourite Labyrinth, as Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, one of the agents in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, as himself in Zoolander, as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, and as himself again in his last film, Bandslam. He also recorded songs for soundtracks such as Cat People and When the Wind Blows, as well as the ones he appeared in. But you can't sum up his career in brief, he was so hugely important in pop culture and you can see that everywhere. |
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