About

“I find that I’m a person who can take on the guises of different people that I meet…I collect, I’m a collector.” —David Bowie

Spanning early on-stage performances to major feature film appearances, this collection of David Bowie’s on-screen roles honours the star’s eclectic career in cinema. The films in the program offer a rare opportunity to see the many facets of Bowie’s on-screen persona, including an enigmatic vampire in Tony Scott’s The Hunger 1983, the mysterious inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige 2006 and the infamous alter-ego that started it all, Ziggy Stardust, explosively depicted in Brett Morgen’s psychedelically infused experimental biopic Moonage Daydream 2022.

One of the most instantly recognisable figures in contemporary pop culture, David Bowie (née David Jones, 1947–2016) was a visionary musician and performer, whose love of acting, costume and performance gave the world some of the most memorable characters of all time.

In addition to Bowie’s musical legacy, the singer’s enduring fascination with cinema lead him to take on a vast body of on-screen roles that include some of the most iconic—and underrated—performances in modern cinema.

Raised in London’s inner suburbs, Bowie’s passion for acting spawned from a love of German expressionist and surrealist cinema. His early mentorship under performer and choreographer Lynsey Kemp would further extend this curiosity with the performing arts into the realms of mime, cabaret, and kabuki theatre, which would lay the creative foundations for the now infamous stage personas of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The Thin White Duke.

Bowie’s magnetic charisma and androgenous style were symptomatic of his captivation with character and stagecraft, giving the performer an otherworldly quality that was later harnessed by renowned directors such as Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Roeg, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan. Ranging from the arthouse to the absurd, Bowie’s acting versatility across the genres of drama, science fiction, horror and fantasy, are delivered with effortless charm, uncanny physicality and intoxicating style.

QAGOMA acknowledges the generous assistance of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra; the NBC Universal Archives & Collections, Los Angeles; and the UCLA Film & TV Archive, Los Angeles in providing materials for this program. Program curated by Robert Hughes and Victoria Wareham, Australian Cinémathèque.