David Copperfield (born September 16, 1956, Metuchen, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American entertainer, one of the best-known stage illusionists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Copperfield is the first to admit that he entered show business to overcome his shyness with the opposite sex; he started out at age 10 as a ventriloquist. Switching to magic, he billed himself as Davino before adopting his more familiar Dickensian stage name (ironically, he claimed that he was never able to read Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield all the way through, finding the work “too dark” for his tastes). Copperfield was the youngest performer ever to be accepted into the Society of American Magicians. He taught a course on magic at New York University while still a teenager and starred in the Chicago-based stage musical The Magic Man before turning 20. He gained national television exposure when he was hired to promote the 1977–78 season of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network, and he was subsequently engaged by network rival Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) to headline a long-running series of lavish TV specials.
(Read Harry Houdini’s 1926 Britannica essay on magic.)
As his popularity grew, Copperfield became increasingly ambitious in his staging of spectacular illusions, many of which were created to promote his TV appearances. On one occasion, he “flew” across the Grand Canyon; on another, he appeared to walk through the Great Wall of China; and in his most famous stunt, he seemingly caused the Statue of Liberty to vanish from sight. These astonishing one-shot feats had a spillover effect on his “standard” stage act, which evolved into a dazzling, sometimes overwhelming blend of music, choreography, and complex story lines. Gradually cutting back on his TV work in the 1990s, he made his Broadway debut in the 1996 production Dreams and Nightmares and three years later launched an elaborate touring show, You! Copperfield’s long-running Las Vegas show has been one of the most popular in the city since its debut in 1996.
One of the highest-paid American entertainers, Copperfield used a significant portion of his personal fortune to purchase some of the world’s most valuable collections of magic literature and memorabilia, beginning with his 1991 acquisition of the celebrated John Mulholland Collection. The items were housed in Copperfield’s International Museum and Library of Conjuring Arts in Las Vegas; the facility was not open to the general public. He also donated a generous percentage of his earnings to Project Magic, a charitable organization that utilized the learning of sleight-of-hand magic as a therapeutic tool.