David Prowse

Prowse was a competitive weightlifter, bodybuilder and strongman before he was an actor, and the body is what got him hired. He played the Monster twice for Hammer, in The Horror of Frankenstein and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, was the manservant Julian in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and became genuinely famous to British children as the Green Cross Man, the caped figure of the road safety campaigns.

Then he put on the Darth Vader suit for Star Wars in 1977 and stayed in it through The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The performance is more his than the culture usually admits. Vader's stillness, the unhurried walk, the way the character fills a doorway: that is a heavyweight strongman deciding not to hurry, and it is why the costume reads as a threat rather than as a costume. His voice was replaced in post-production by James Earl Jones, so the most recognisable villain in film history is two men, only one of whom the audience can hear.

That split shaped the rest of his life. He spent decades on the convention circuit and at odds with Lucasfilm over credit and recognition, and the argument outlived the career. Two documentaries from 2015 address it directly: The Force's Mouth, in which he finally recorded Vader's lines with the studio effects applied, and I Am Your Father, about the fallout. He died in 2020 at the age of 85.