David Copperfield

Copperfield was born David Seth Kotkin in Metuchen, New Jersey, the son of Jewish parents Rebecca Kotkin (née Gispan; 1924–2008), an insurance adjuster, and Hyman Kotkin (1922–2006), who owned and operated Korby's, a men's haberdashery in Warren, New Jersey. His mother was born in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine, while his paternal grandparents were Jewish emigrants from the Ukrainian SSR. In 1974 he graduated from Metuchen High School. Copperfield started his career as a ventriloquist at age eight with his own Jerry Mahoney puppet. When he was 10, he began practicing magic as "Davino the Boy Magician" in his neighborhood, and at 12, he became the youngest person admitted to the Society of American Magicians. A shy loner, the young Copperfield saw magic as a way to fit in and, later, to meet women. As a child, he attended Camp Harmony, a day camp in nearby Warren, New Jersey, where he began practicing magic and ventriloquism, an experience he credits with the origins of his creative style. As he described it, "At Camp Harmony, we spent two weeks searching for a guide who'd been kidnapped by Indians. It was just a game, but I was living it. My whole life goes back to that camp experience when I was three or four." As a teenager, he became fascinated with Broadway and frequently sneaked into shows, especially musicals by Stephen Sondheim or Bob Fosse. By age 16, he was teaching a course in magic at New York University.At 18, Copperfield enrolled at New York City's Jesuit-based Fordham University, but, three weeks into his freshman year, he left to play the lead role in the musical The Magic Man in Chicago. At that time, he adopted the stage name David Copperfield, taken from the Charles Dickens novel, because he liked its sound. He sang, danced, and created most of the original illusions in the show. The Magic Man became the longest-running musical in Chicago history. At age 19, he created and headlined for several months the first "Magic of David Copperfield" show at the Pagoda Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, with the help of sound and lighting designer Willy Martin. Copperfield's career in television began in earnest when he was discovered by Joseph Cates, a producer of Broadway shows and television specials. Cates produced a magic special in 1977 for ABC called The Magic of ABC, hosted by Copperfield, as well as several The Magic of David Copperfield specials on CBS between 1978 and 2001. There have been 18 Copperfield TV specials and 2 documentaries between September 7, 1977, and April 3, 2001. Copperfield also played the character The Magician in the 1980 horror film Terror Train and had an uncredited appearance in the 1994 film Prêt-à-Porter. Most of his media appearances have been through television specials and guest spots on television programs. One of his most famous illusions occurred on television on April 8, 1983: A live audience of 20 tourists was seated in front of a giant curtain attached to two lateral scaffoldings built on Liberty Island in an enclosed viewing area. Copperfield, with help from Jim Steinmeyer and Don Wayne, raised the curtain before lowering it again a few seconds later to reveal that the space where the Statue of Liberty once stood was empty. A helicopter hovered overhead to give an aerial view of the illusion and the statue appeared to have vanished, with only the circle of lights surrounding it still present and visible. Before making the statue reappear, Copperfield explained in front of the camera why he wanted to perform this illusion. He wanted people to imagine what it would be like if there were no liberty or freedom in the world today and what the world would be like without the freedoms and rights we enjoy. Copperfield then brought the statue back, ending the illusion by saying that "our ancestors couldn't (enjoy rights and freedoms), we can and our children will". Both the disappearance and the reappearance of the statue were filmed in long take to demonstrate the absence of camera tricks. This illusion was featured in season four of The Americans, in an episode entitled “The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears,” and in the 2019 HBO documentary Liberty: Mother of Exiles. In 1986, Copperfield debuted a new variation on the classic sawing a woman in half illusion. Copperfield’s Death Saw illusion was presented as an escape gone wrong, sawing himself, rather than an assistant, in half with a large rotary saw blade which descended from above. Copperfield’s Death Saw has become one of his most well-known illusions. In 1996, in collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola, David Ives, and Eiko Ishioka, Copperfield's Broadway show Dreams & Nightmares broke box office records in New York at the Martin Beck Theatre. Reviewer Greg Evans described the sold-out show in Variety magazine: "With a likable, self-effacing demeanor that rarely comes across in his TV specials, Copperfield leads the audience through nearly two hours of truly mind-boggling illusions. He disappears and reappears, gets cut in half, makes audience members vanish and others levitate. Copperfield climaxes his show with a flying routine, seven years in the making, that defies both logic and visual evidence, he could probably retire just by selling his secrets to future productions of Peter Pan". Also in 1996, Copperfield joined forces with Dean Koontz, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury and others for David Copperfield's Tales of the Impossible, an anthology of original fiction set in the world of magic and illusion. A second volume, David Copperfield's Beyond Imagination, was published in 1997. In addition to the two books, Copperfield wrote an essay as part of NPR's "This I Believe" series and This I Believe, Inc. In May 2001, Copperfield entertained guests at a White House benefit for UNICEF by performing a new illusion in which he sawed singer and actress Jennifer Lopez into six pieces while standing up. This illusion was an update of one he performed in one of his early TV specials on actress Catherine Bach, and has never been performed publicly in any of his stage or TV appearances. In 2002, he was the subject of an hour-long biographical special on A&E's "Biography" channel. On April 5, 2009, Copperfield made his first live TV appearance for some time when he entertained the audience at the 44th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards with two illusions. First, he made singer Taylor Swift appear inside an apparently empty translucent-sided elevator as it was lowered from the ceiling; he then sawed her in half in his Clearly Impossible illusion. On May 7, 2009, Copperfield was dropped by Michael Jackson from Jackson's residency at the O2 Arena after a disagreement over money. Copperfield wanted $1 million (£666,000) per show. Copperfield denied the reports of a falling-out, saying "don't believe everything you read." News of Copperfield's collaboration with Jackson first surfaced on April 1, 2009, and has since been described as a possible April Fool's prank. In July 2009, he filmed a number of scenes for a cameo appearance in episode 8 of the short-lived TV drama The Beautiful Life. In these scenes, he worked alongside actresses Mischa Barton and Sara Paxton performing a number of illusions including a sawing in half of Barton's character Sonja Stone in a specially-developed box-less version of the illusion. Due to the show's cancellation after just two episodes had been aired, episode 8 was never completed and the footage of Copperfield's performances remains unseen. In August 2009, Copperfield took his show to Australia. In January 2011 Copperfield joined the cast of the feature film Burt Wonderstone with Steve Carell, Jim Carrey, James Gandolfini and Olivia Wilde. Copperfield and his team developed illusions used in the film. He also coached Carell and Wilde on how to perform the 'Impossible Sawing' illusion, in which Wilde's character is sawed in half and her halves separated without the use of any covering or camera tricks. Copperfield has served as technical advisor on several other films, including The Prestige and Now You See Me. He also served as a co-producer of the film Now You See Me 2. In July 2012, OWN-TV network aired a one-hour special and interview with Copperfield as part of the network's Oprah's Next Chapter series. The show featured many aspects of Copperfield's personal life and family—with tours of his island home and Las Vegas conjuring museum—and a sampling of his illusions and magic effects. During the interview, he and his girlfriend Chloé Gosselin, a French fashion model, announced their engagement and appeared together briefly with their young daughter, strolling down the beach on the island. In 2018, the New York Historical Society hosted “Summer of Magic: Treasures from the David Copperfield Collection.” The exhibit recounted the history of magic in New York and displayed some of Copperfield’s most popular illusions, like the Death Saw, and historical magical ephemera, including some of Copperfield’s collection of Houdini memorabilia. Copperfield made the missing star from the original Star-Spangled Banner flag reappear in an illusion on Flag Day 2019, in partnership with Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The missing star, which is believed to have been removed in the nineteenth century, reappeared inside a box that seemed to levitate. Copperfield notes that his role models were not magicians, that "My idols were Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Orson Welles and Walt Disney ... they took their individual art forms and they moved people with them... I wanted to do the same thing with magic. I wanted to take magic and make it romantic and make it sexy and make it funny and make it goofy ... all the different things that a songwriter gets to express or a filmmaker gets to express". This approach, despite its obvious popularity with audiences, has its share of detractors within the profession. One magician has described Copperfield's stage presentations as "resembling entertainment the way Velveeta resembles cheese".