About

Director Alan Yentob’s illuminating fly-on-the-wall (or as Bowie describes, ‘fly-in-the-milk’) documentary, Cracked Actor is a rare on-screen portrait of the musician as he struggles to rediscover his sense of self in the wake of the turbulent Ziggy Stardust years.

Bowie’s most famous stage persona, Ziggy Stardust, took the world by storm in the early 1970s. The runaway success of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars left Bowie exhausted and in a fragile state of mind. Desperate to get away from his behemoth alter-ego, Bowie moved to the United States in 1974 to take refuge from the demanding nature of fame.

During this time, documentarian Alan Yentob followed the musician for a brief period in Los Angeles, grabbing short interviews and sound bites in darkly lit hotel rooms and in the back of limousines, which would later form the Cracked Actor documentary. The result is a deeply vulnerable video-tapestry that captures the performer in pursuit of a new persona that would later be known as ‘The Thin White Duke’.

Ages 15+ | Contains mature themes