David Bowie on film
Jane Giles surveys the late David Bowie's screen roles across four decades.
Bowie’s music graced more than 450 film and television soundtracks, including Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015). His own music videos led the evolution of the format and continued with his last two albums, The Next Day (2013) and Blackstar (2016), even after Bowie’s other screen appearances had long-since stopped.
Like so many of our great artists, Bowie was also a great fan – of music, film and television – and a known collector of the BFI’s own Flipside DVDs, for example. Even as a global superstar he continued to speak to the outsider in all of us. He made us feel cool, unashamed of our sexuality, imperfections and contradictions and showed us that it was okay to laugh at ourselves and, weirdly, to fail. Because Bowie wasn’t one of the all-time great actors. But he always went for it.