Uri Geller

Biography

One evening in 1973, in the studio of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Uri Geller sat in front of a table of objects that had been prepared without his knowledge. Carson had once been a magician himself, and the skeptic James Randi was invited to help with the preparations: Geller and his people were not allowed near the props. He showed nothing, kept saying that he “did not feel strong”, and by his own account sat there for 22 minutes. Later he said he had wanted to go back to Tel Aviv. Instead he was invited onto another show, and, as he put it, that broadcast was what made him.

Geller was born on 20 December 1946 in Tel Aviv, during the British Mandate in Palestine. His father was a soldier, and his mother came from an Austrian Jewish family; he describes himself as a distant relative of Sigmund Freud on his mother’s side. His mother moved to Cyprus, and after living with a family on a kibbutz he followed her, attended the Terra Santa College and learned English. He returned to Israel as a teenager, worked in construction, joined the army at eighteen and served in the Paratroopers Brigade. In the Six-Day War of 1967 he fought on the Jordanian front and was wounded.

In 1968 and 1969 he worked as a photographic model, and at about the same time began performing for small audiences in nightclubs. By his own account, he had been able to read minds since childhood. From 1970 came demonstrations of telepathy: guessing numbers that people had written down, reproducing hidden drawings, stopping watches. He became known across the country. Doubters appeared at the same time: the physicist Yitzhak Kalzon of Tel Aviv University called such performers mediocre conjurers and gave a simple explanation of their methods. In October 1970 the recording of a television programme with scientists in the studio collapsed, and a few days later it emerged that a photograph of Geller with Sophia Loren, which he had passed to the press, was fabricated. He later said that, for him, the scandal was “a diamond on a silver platter”.

From 1971 he was looked after by the American parapsychology researcher Andrija Puharich, who helped him move to the United States; Geller settled there in 1973. He is said to have begun bending spoons after seeing the English magician David Berglas perform. The best-known tests took place at the Stanford Research Institute, and a report on them was published in the journal Nature in 1974. The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann later pointed out that the laboratory had a hole in the wall and a two-way intercom, so the conclusions cannot be considered rigorous. Randi, in his book The Truth About Uri Geller, showed how the same effects can be produced without any special power. The physicist Richard Feynman wrote that Geller had been unable to bend a key for him.

He changed over the years. In 2008, on the German programme The Next Uri Geller, he said he had no supernatural powers and winked at the camera; later he explained that he calls himself a “mystifier”, not a magician.

To my mind, that qualification is the most honest of his public statements.

After that came a range of other activities: dowsing for oil and minerals, which he offered to companies; books (his autobiography, My Story, appeared in 1975, and he has written sixteen in all); jewellery, which he sold on the shopping channel QVC; the cover of Michael Jackson’s album Invincible. In 1983 he moved to Britain and lived in Sonning, Berkshire. In 1996 a hidden camera on Noel Edmonds’ programme Noel’s House Party filmed him gripping a spoon with both hands as he showed the bend. In 1997 he placed “energy-infused” crystals behind the goals of Exeter City before a crucial match, which the club lost 1–5. From 2002 he was for a time the club’s co-chairman.

There were many television projects. In 2002 he took part in the British show I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! and was the first to be eliminated. In 2006 and 2007 he hosted The Successor in Israel, a format that was sold to the United States (as Phenomenon, with Criss Angel), Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary and other countries. He chaired the jury of the Ukrainian version of the psychics’ contest on television. In 2013 the BBC showed the documentary The Secret Life of Uri Geller – Psychic Spy?, which spoke of his contacts with the CIA; documents published later showed only that the CIA was interested in his abilities as part of research in the 1970s.

He went to court often, with mixed results: against Randi (in Japan the court gave a token judgment), against Timex, and against Nintendo over the Pokémon Kadabra, which he considered an appropriation of his image. In 2020 he apologised and allowed cards with that Pokémon to be printed. In 2015 Geller returned to Israel. In 2021 he opened the Uri Geller Museum in Old Jaffa: at the entrance stands a steel spoon about 16 metres long, which Guinness World Records recognised as the largest in the world.