Angela Bowie is an American model, actress and journalist who, along with her ex-husband David Bowie, influenced the glam rock culture and fashion of the 1970s. She was married to English singer David Bowie from 1970 until their divorce in 1980. The couple had one child, film director Duncan Jones.
Early life and education
Angie Bowie was born as Mary Angela Barnett, an American citizen, on September 25, 1949, in Cyprus to Col. George M. Barnett, a United States Army veteran, and his wife, Helena Maria Galas Barnett, a naturalized Canadian. Her father was a mining engineer and ran a mill for Cyprus Mines Corporation. She has one brother, who is 16 years older than herself. Both her parents died in 1984. She is of English and Polish descent, and she was brought up as a Roman Catholic. However, she has identified as a Cypriot, writing in 2000, "I am a Cypriot by disposition. I don't have a passport or Cypriot nationality but my heart is Cypriot, not Greek or Turkish Cypriot, just Cypriot." Educated in Cyprus, Switzerland, and the UK, she briefly attended Connecticut College until she was expelled after an affair with someone of the same sex, an event mentioned in her 1981 autobiography, Free Spirit.
Career
Film and television
During the 1970s, Angie Bowie occasionally appeared as a guest on television talk shows. She appeared on The Tonight Show, hosted by Johnny Carson on November 16, 1973. She also performed on The Mike Douglas Show in early 1975. She auditioned for the leading role in what dates show to have been the ABC-TVtelevision filmWonder Woman which aired on March 12, 1974, and starred Cathy Lee Crosby. Newsweek hypothesised in their February 11, 1974, issue that she lost the part because of her refusal to wear a bra. Later in 1975, Bowie bought the television rights to Marvel Comics' characters Black Widow and Daredevil, hoping to develop and sell a series featuring the two heroes. She planned to play Black Widow, with actor Ben Carruthers as Daredevil. The series failed to secure a studio deal and it never went beyond the development stage. In March 1982, Bowie appeared on the television program The Old Grey Whistle Test, reciting poetry, while Mick Karn, from the band Japan, played bass. Her performance was lambasted by the British media. Bowie appeared as herself in the D.A. Pennebaker concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Glitter Goddess of Sunset Strip. She also has had credited acting roles in at least four films: Eat the Rich, Demented, Deadrockstar and La Funcionaria Asesina. On January 5, 2016, Bowie appeared on the seventeenth series of Celebrity Big Brother. On January 10, she was informed off screen of the death of her former husband David Bowie. Although she initially chose to stay in the house, on January 19 she voluntarily decided to leave, in part on medical grounds.
Writing
Bowie has written two autobiographies, Free Spirit, as well as the bestseller, Backstage Passes: Life On the Wild Side with David Bowie, published in 1993 and updated in 2000. It detailed her alleged drug-fueled and openly bisexual lifestyle with her former husband and many other well-known musicians. In 2014, she produced a large book about sex entitled Pop Sex, as well as a book about cats entitled Cat-Astrophe. In 2015, she released the book Fancy Footwork: Poetry Collection.
Music
A CD maxi-single, "The World Is Changing", with six mixes, including prominent vocal support by Dabonda Simmons, was credited to Bowie with co-composers David Padilla, Morgan Lekcirt, Tom Reich, Jim Durban and D.J. Trance. It appeared in 1996 on New York label Warlock Records. The cover featured a logo of the Bowie name clearly modeled on the one seen on her former husband's Let's Dance releases. An album, Moon Goddess, was released in 2002 on Subterraneans' record label The Electric Label. She sang with Subterraneans vocalist Jude Rawlins on a version of the Rolling Stones song "The Last Time", subsequently included on the 2003 Subterraneans album Orly Flight.
Journalism
Bowie has reinvented herself as a journalist specializing in gender issues. She served as a "roving reporter" for the transgender and drag monthly, Frock Magazine.) In 2002, she wrote a Pocket Essentials book titled Bisexuality.
Personal life
Relationships
She met musician David Bowie in London in 1969, at the age of 19. According to her, they met through their mutual friendship with record executive Calvin Mark Lee. The couple married one year later, on March 19, 1970, at BromleyRegister Office in Beckenham Lane, Kent. They had an open marriage. She stated that they were not in love and the union was a marriage of convenience. She told the Evening Standard, "We got married so that I could work . I didn't think it would last and David said, before we got married, 'I'm not really in love with you' and I thought that's probably a good thing." Their son Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones was born on May 30, 1971. He later preferred to be known as Joe or Joey, but has since reverted to the name Duncan Jones. After nine years of marriage, Angie and David Bowie separated, and finally divorced on February 8, 1980, in Switzerland. In the divorce settlement she received £500,000 paid in instalments and a ten-year gagging clause. Not wanting to fight over custody, she left their son with David. She stated that David's drug habit had become so out of control that she believed giving him the responsibility of raising their son would stabilize him. During her marriage, she often accompanied her husband on his international concert tours. He wrote the song "The Prettiest Star", about her.. After the divorce, Bowie said she was blackballed from the entertainment industry and was so depressed that she considered suicide. Following her divorce, Angela Barnett had a long-term relationship with punk musician Drew Blood ; they had a daughter, Stacia Larranna Celeste Lipka. She later lived in Tucson, Arizona. Since 1993, she has been in a relationship with Michael Gassett, an electrical engineer nearly 20 years her junior. They live in Acworth, Georgia.
Estrangement from Duncan Jones
Bowie is estranged from her son Duncan Jones, saying in a 2010 interview that a reconciliation was unlikely. She also mentioned the estrangement during her 2016 appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. She previously said that although she has not seen her son since he was 13, he had had brief contact with her daughter Stasha in the early 2000s. "He emailed me and I didn't know what to say. So I put them together. They corresponded for a bit and then that stopped. He is cold, like his father. David cut me off. Zowie, or Duncan, cut me and Stasha off," she said. When asked by The Times in 2017 whether she had been in touch with her son since David Bowie's death the year before, she responded, "My son? No, why should I be? I'm not interested. It stopped when my father changed his will to not include an educational trust fund for Zowie because David divorced me. When my father did that I followed precedent. It's over. Nothing. Nothing to do with me." In a 2018 interview for Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Jones reiterated that they had never reconciled saying she was a "corrosive person."
Angie Bowie has long claimed to have inspired The Rolling Stones' hit song "Angie" from their 1973 album Goats Head Soup. However, the songwriters Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have consistently denied this. In 1993, in the liner notes to the Rolling Stones' compilation album , Richards said that the title was inspired by his newborn daughter, Dandelion Angela. Later, in his 2010 memoir Life, he said that he had chosen the name at random when writing the song and that "t was not about any particular person." According to NME, the lyrics of the song were inspired by Jagger's breakup with Marianne Faithfull.
Fictional portrayals
The fictional character of Mandy, portrayed by Toni Collette in the film Velvet Goldmine, was based upon Bowie.
