Uri Geller
Childhood Of Celebrities : Uri Geller
Born to Jewish parents from Hungary and Austria, Geller was named after a cousin who had been killed in a bus accident. According to Geller, he first became aware of his paranormal abilities when he was four, claiming that after a light from the sky knocked him to the ground, his spoon bent and broke.
Geller is a distant relative of Sigmund Freud on his mother’s side.
He served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Army, and was wounded in action during the 1967 Six-Day War. He worked as a photographic model in 1968 and 1969, and in the same year, he began to perform for small audiences as a nightclub entertainer, becoming well-known in Israel. Geller also became popular in the early 1970s in the United States. He also received attention from the scientific community who were interested in examining his claims of psychic abilities. At the peak of his career in the 1970s he worked full-time, performing for television audiences worldwide.
He claims that he has accumulated wealth in part by performing dowsing services to find commodities such as oil, gold, and minerals, but that the companies he has worked for are reluctant to admit it. In recent years, he has performed demonstrations such as spoon-bending much less frequently in public.
Geller currently lives in Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire, England. He makes various personal appearances, is involved with art and design projects, and contributes articles to newspapers, magazines, and an Internet web column. He is a vegan and speaks four languages: English, Hebrew, Hungarian and German.
He owns a 1976 Cadillac adorned with thousands of pieces of bent tableware given to him by celebrities or otherwise having historical or other significance. It includes spoons from celebrities such as John Lennon and the Spice Girls, and those with which Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy ate. Geller designed the logo for popular music group N*SYNC and contributed artwork to Michael Jackson’s CD, “Invincible.”
Jackson was best man when Geller renewed his wedding vows in 2001. He also negotiated the famous TV interview between Jackson with the journalist Martin Bashir: “Living with Michael Jackson”. In BBC television interviews, Geller has since admitted that he has not been in contact with Jackson since this time. Geller says that he has split with Jackson because of anti-Semitic statements he had purportedly made.
In an appearance on Esther Rantzen’s 1996 television talk show Esther, Geller claimed to have suffered from Anorexia nervosa for several years.
Geller is the president of International Friends of Magen David Adom, a group that lobbied the International Committee of the Red Cross to recognise Magen David Adom (”Red Star of David”) as a humanitarian relief organisation.
In 2002, he became honorary co-chairman of the English Nationwide Conference football club Exeter City, who were relegated to the Nationwide Conference in May 2003. He has since severed formal ties with the club. The same year, he appeared as a contestant on the first series of the British reality TV show, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here!.
In 2007 Geller hosted a reality show in Israel called “The Successor” (”היורש”), where the contestants performed magic tricks and Geller was accused of “trickery”.
He has also written sixteen fiction and nonfiction books.
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