Darth Vader's light sabre from Star Wars is yours to buy
An original lightsaber used by iconic movie villain Darth Vader in the Star Wars trilogy is up for auction and is expected to cost over £1million.
Darth Vader's main weapon - described by auctioneers as his "primary dueling lightsaber prop" - was used in the 1980 hit The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of the Jedi.
It is described as one of the most prized possessions from the iconic sci-fi trilogy and a prime piece of pop culture history and is extremely rare.
Having remained in the same private collection for decades, Propstore's auction marks the first time this extraordinary artifact will be available to the public at auction in September.
The lightsaber was used during duels in the final acts of both films between Darth Vader, played by David Prowse, and Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill. It was also used by the stunt performer and British Olympic fencer, Bob Anderson.
According to the auction house, genuine lightsaber props from the original trilogy are rare with this "believed to be the only hero lightsaber prop from the original Star Wars trilogy with verifiable screen use ever to be offered at public auction".
The estimate on the prop is $1-3million(£746,000 to £2,241,000) when it is sold at auction house Propstore's "Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction: Los Angeles" event.
Brandon Alinger, chief operating officer at Propstore, said: "The lightsaber, or laser sword as it was initially called, was imagined by George Lucas as the perfect defensive weapon for a more sophisticated age.
"Nearly 50 years after the first Star Wars film, lightsabers are a universally recognised symbol of the world's most beloved film franchise and are consistently ranked as the most iconic and memorable props of all time.
"They are the 'ruby slippers' of cinema's modern era. Surviving genuine lightsaber props from the original trilogy of films are exceedingly rare, and Propstore is honoured to present this historic artefact in our September sale.
"It is a grail-level piece, worthy of the finest collections in the world. This lightsaber is simply everything you want it to be - one of the most significant Star Wars artefacts ever. One of the most significant cinema artefacts ever."
The lightsaber was made from a vintage British press camera flash handle with components such as plastic grips, calculator bubbles and cosmetic wiring.
It was modified with a wooden rod which was used as a blade during the choreographed fight scenes, making the physical on-camera duelling possible and allowing visual effects artists to add a hand-animated glow for the final shots.
Ahead of the auction, the prop will go on tour and visit London, Beverly Hills and New York throughout August before the live auction takes place in Los Angeles this September.
The tour will feature other film artefacts from Propstore's September Los Angeles Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction, including Indiana Jones's bullwhip and belt, Sauron's helmet from the Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring and the shark tooth clapperboard from the 1975 film Jaws.
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New Statesman
41 minutes ago
- New Statesman
Berlin's dark past and me
The platform was empty. It was a serene scene: the rain had stopped and the air smelled green, the trees showering droplets each time the wind blew. My mother and I carefully stepped around the puddles as we read the plaques on the very edge of the platform. 18.10.1941 / 1251 Juden / Berlin – Lodz. 29.11.1942 / 1000 Juden / Berlin – Auschwitz. 2.2.1945 / 88 Juden / Berlin – Theresienstadt. The Gleis 17 (Platform 17) memorial at Grunewald station on the western outskirts of Berlin commemorates the 50,000 Jews who were deported from the city to concentration camps by the Nazis. There are 186 steel plaques in total, in chronological order, each detailing the number of deportees and where they went. Vegetation has been left to grow around the platform and over the train tracks, 'a symbol that no train will ever leave the station at this track again', according to the official Berlin tourist website. Were we tourists? I wasn't sure. I paused at one plaque in particular: 5.9.1942 / 790 Juden / Berlin – Riga. My great-grandmother, Ryfka, was one of the 790 Jews deported to Riga on 5 September 1942. She was murdered three days later. Her husband, Max, had been arrested and taken as a labourer to the Siedlce ghetto the previous year. In 1942 he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. When I told people we were taking a family trip to Berlin, many brought up Jesse Eisenberg's 2024 film A Real Pain (released January 2025 in the UK), in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched cousins on a tour of Poland, confronting the inherited trauma of their grandmother's Holocaust survival story. But when we first started planning our trip six years ago, that wasn't the idea at all. It wasn't supposed to be about Max and Ryfka. It was about their daughter, my grandmother, Mirjam, and my grandfather, Ali, whom we called Opa. Opa's ancestry enabled us to claim German citizenship. My mother, sister and I started this process in 2017 without really thinking about it. The UK had voted to leave the EU, and Brits with relatives from all over were looking for ways to retain an EU passport. The Global Citizenship Observatory estimates that 90,000 Brits have acquired a second passport from an EU country since 2016, not counting those eligible for Irish citizenship. Article 116(2) of the German Constitution states: 'Persons who surrendered, lost or were denied German citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds are entitled to naturalisation.' The same applies to their descendants. Mirjam died in 1990, before I was born, and Opa in 2003 – both British and only British citizens. But we had his voided German passport, his birth certificate, the notice of statelessness he'd received when he came to England in 1936. It took two years, but on 3 June 2019, the three of us attended the embassy in Belgravia and were solemnly dubbed citizens of Germany. We received our passports a few weeks later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe My mother wanted to celebrate with a trip to Berlin – the city where her parents grew up, and which my sister and I had never visited. Five years later than planned, thanks to Covid travel bans, we made it, honouring Opa by sweeping through immigration on the passports he had posthumously gifted us. I was prepared for the attempts at schoolgirl German, the arguments over bus timetables, itineraries and whether or not it was acceptable to fare-dodge on the U-Bahn. What I wasn't prepared for was being struck down by tears on a suburban street, faced with the reality of how exactly I had come to be there and what my presence meant. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Photo by Jon Arnold Images Ltd My grandfather's family made it out of Nazi Germany. So did my grandmother and her siblings. Her parents did not. Max and Ryfka were typical middle-class Berliners, owners of a profitable cigarette factory. They had three children: Fanny, Mirjam and Harry. The family lived in a five-storey apartment block with a dramatic art nouveau facade – an open-mouthed deity staring down as residents came and went – on Thomasiusstrasse, on the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Around the corner, in the same affluent neighbourhood, lived the boy who would become my grandfather, Ali. They used to play together as children. Two decades, multiple emigrations and an internment in Canada later, Ali married Mirjam. My mother was born two years later. I know all this thanks to her, her sister and their cousins. A few years before the Brexit vote, they had set out to consolidate everything we know about the family – sifting through documents, photos and letters, sharing recollections of their parents, writing down everything so the story would not be forgotten. I know, for example, that the basement of the house in Thomasiusstrasse was used for meetings of their Zionist youth movement long before emigration became an urgent issue. I know when and how the siblings fled Berlin to what was then British-occupied Palestine: Fanny going first to Denmark in July 1937, then to Palestine in February 1939, where she worked at the first haute couture fashion house in Israel. Mirjam left in April 1936 via a boat from Italy. She studied horticulture before eventually marrying Ali in 1951 and moving to England. Harry arrived in Palestine on 1 September 1937, his 16th birthday. And I know, from the letters we have, how often and how seriously all three urged their parents to sell the cigarette factory and leave Berlin, before it was too late. On the pavement outside the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, set into the cobblestones, gleamed the Stolpersteine. Any visitor to Berlin will find the streets scattered with these 'stumbling stones', small brass plates, each one a memorial to a victim of the Nazis who lived at that address: their name, year of birth, where and when they were killed. The commemorative art project, begun in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig, has spread across Europe: there now are more than 116,000 stones, in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine for Max and Ryfka were laid in August 2014. My mother and her family attended; a clarinettist played klezmer music. There are eight stones for that single apartment block. The day before we visited, my mother had booked us on a tour of the Jewish quarter. Our guide told us that the aim of the Stolpersteine initiative was to compel confrontation and reflection, causing passers-by to stumble, both figuratively and physically, over this dark period of European history. Berlin is forthright about confronting its past – using art and architecture in innovative ways to do so. At the Holocaust memorial by the Brandenburg Gate, visitors get lost in an unnerving maze of concrete slabs. At the entrance to the Jewish Museum, the floors slope and the walls are set at odd angles, making the space difficult to navigate with confidence. The 'Garden of Exile' just outside the museum, designed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind to capture the disorientation of the refugee experience, is similarly slanted and boxed in by columns. The day we visited, it was raining again, the uneven cobbles slick and treacherous. The garden was empty. I slipped – and through my perhaps disproportionate tears realised there was a lot more to my new German passport than I had imagined. Everyone knows about the Holocaust. Six million Jews, more than a quarter of a million Gypsies, millions more Poles, Soviets, homosexuals and people with disabilities, systematically exterminated at death camps. I had always known that my family was in some way linked to it all, that the Holocaust was why we were in Britain in the first place, that I wouldn't be here were it not for my maternal grandparents being 'denied German citizenship… due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds'. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the Nazis. Every Jewish family I know has a story: of how their ancestors escaped, and what happened to the ones who didn't. I knew long before I visited Berlin that there is nothing special about my family's history. But I had always seen it as just that: history. The Jewish Museum's core exhibition charts the history of Jews in Germany from medieval times to the present day. The final section looks at descendants of Holocaust victims and refugees who chose to restore their German citizenship – and why they made that decision. Why had I done it? To get an EU passport after Brexit. To make it easier to work abroad one day. To give my future children the option to live anywhere in Europe. To skip the queues at immigration. All valid reasons. And all, suddenly, entirely inconsequential Staring at the memorial plaques on Platform 17, sitting on the steps of the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, losing my footing in the Garden of Exile, I felt myself slot into the narrative, the next chapter of a story that is both unfathomable and at the same time utterly unexceptional. Opa died when I was 12. He was so proud of being British. I never asked him how he would feel about us using the trauma of his past to become German for the sake of convenience. I'd always thought he'd like the idea of us reclaiming his rightful heritage, but in Berlin it seemed less clear. But I do think he would have liked the fact that we were all there in Berlin, on the streets where he and his wife grew up, laughing and crying together, realising our mother-and-daughters getaway had ended up a lot like Eisenberg's A Real Pain after all. The three of us lost in reverie outside the apartment block, picturing my grandmother coming and going. A sign by the door was engraved in looping gothic script. It looked like a memorial plaque. We struggled to decipher first the letters, then the German. Eventually we resorted to Google Translate, and discovered in lieu of the profound message we had expected, a polite request for guests to please wipe their feet. [See also: Rachel Reeves' 'impossible trilemma'] Related
Scottish Sun
2 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Rock superstar back with ex girlfriend five months after dramatically splitting as pair look at properties together
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They were looking at properties in an estate agent's window that had the words 'heart and soul' written on it. A pal confirmed they have rekindled their romance and said: 'Dom and Jesse are super-happy together. 'They had been dating for a long time when they chose to slow things down. 'A lot was happening in Dom's life and he wanted to get his head straight so he could give his all to Jesse. 'So happy' 'They started getting more serious again a few weeks ago and they're doing really well. 'Dom and Jesse went off on a short holiday together too, which was much needed, especially for Dom. Losing Ozzy Osbourne, who was a great friend to Dom, has been really difficult. 'If anything, it's taught him to grasp each day with both hands. 'Their friends are thrilled to see them together again and so happy.' YUNGBLUD - teresa Chatting about their split in May, Patience singer Dom, who has three No1 albums under his belt, said: 'It was a 'me' problem. Everything is a 'me' problem. 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And I love her as if I'd love water. I need it, you know. I think I'd never experience love like it — when you could be that honest with another human being, even in times when we're not technically together.' Anne dances with Devil 8 Anne Hathaway channels Gene Kelly as she dances around a lamppost while filming in New York Credit: Getty Forget The Devil Wears Prada – Anne Hathaway looks more primed for a reboot of 1952 classic Singing In The Rain. The American actress was seen dancing around a lamppost, just like Gene Kelly did 73 years ago, as she filmed scenes for the upcoming sequel of the fashion film in New York. Anne, alongside co-stars including Meryl Streep and Patrick Brammall, has been spotted working on the new movie in the Big Apple for the past few weeks. The sequel is out on May 1 next year and promises more bitchiness than ever, as fearsome Miranda Priestly struggles with new rival and former assistant Emily Charlton, played by Emily Blunt. I can't wait. So, rest for the Wicked 8 Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo will scale back the promo for their Wicked sequel - with no London premiere planned Credit: Getty Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were practically unavoidable last autumn as they promoted the first Wicked film – from chat shows to viral interviews and appearances at no less than five premieres. But some of you will be breathing a sigh of relief, as I can reveal they have drastically scaled down the promotion for the second and final instalment of the movie musical, Wicked: For Good. I've been told there are no plans for a premiere in London. Instead, a single launch event will take place in New York ahead of its release on November 21. On top of that, leading ladies Ariana and Cynthia, who play Glinda and Elphaba, will only do a fraction of the interviews they did for the original. A movie insider said: 'The reaction to the first movie was incredible and studio bosses feel like people are locked in now, so are bound to buy tickets to see the second film. 'The marketing spend on the first movie was astronomical, so they think they can save a fortune by cutting back this time and just riding on the momentum from part one. 'And hopefully people won't get as tired of Cynthia and Ari this time.' I've heard it's been a long road to complete the second film and despite the fact filming officially wrapped more than 18 months ago, the movie is yet to be completed. I've no doubt this one will still be Popular. Kesha knows how to get a head 8 Kesha posing with a life-like model of her own head Credit: Instagram Kesha gave a very literal meaning to 'losing your head' in her latest social media post. The American singer shared a rather odd video dancing and posing with a life-like model of her own bonce. Kesha captioned the Instagram video: 'What's your red flag?' I think it's safe to say mine is this. Danny's a salad tosser 8 Danny Dyer has teamed up with Deliveroo to inspire Brits with creative barbecue side dishes Credit: Mike Buck / Deliveroo Danny Dyer has confirmed what his critics have long thought, declaring: 'I'm proud to be a tosser.' But his declaration of being a bit of d**k isn't all as it seems. The ex-EastEnders and Rivals actor has teamed up with Deliveroo to create a load of fancy barbecue side dishes. It is in a bid to get Brits to be more creative this summer. He promotes the delivery app's new 'Freshness Promise', which means customers get their money back if groceries aren't brought fresh to their door. Danny, below, who filmed a hilarious video with Deliveroo to announce the launch, said: 'Salads and sides have been mugged off at barbecues, left in the shadows while the main event gets all the glory. 'I'm here to tell you it's time to embrace your inner tosser . . . ' I'll try my best, Danny. Radio 1's Mollie King has revealed she was away from her DJ role to have surgery. The ex-Saturdays singer wrote on Instagram: 'I had to take some time off in July for an operation but everything went well and I'm doing much better now. 'I'll be back on air in September and can't wait.' A taste of the fame game If you love all things showbiz and celebrity, then we have discovered the perfect event for you. A new theatre show called Fame*Factory is launching at Immerse LDN this October. The show in East London is created by Done + Dusted, the team behind the Oscars, MTV's VMAs and the Brits. It gives people the chance to live their very own A-lister dream. As well as spending the night emulating your favourite celebrity, you have your own publicist on hand to help as you embark on making your big-screen debut. Plus, guests will be taught how to pose for the paparazzi, to give an Oscar-worthy speech and be told what not to do in a crisis. Talking of which, the Bizarre team can think of a couple of bona fide stars who could do with a refresher . . . Grease is the word as park hosts Rydell High 8 For just six weeks, Evolution in London's Battersea Park has been transformed into a real-life Rydell High School Credit: Alamy Most people I know have watched Grease ten times over. But I'm willing to bet they haven't seen a version as amazing as Secret Cinema's. For just six weeks, Evolution in London's Battersea Park has been transformed into a real-life Rydell High School. Rather than simply watching the show, you are transported into the story itself, with the scenes between Danny and Sandy, right, playing out around them. From the school canteen to the car mechanics, every key moment is recreated throughout the venue. Blurring the lines between what is part of the performance or not, guests are also encouraged to come in fancy dress. Having never been to a Secret Cinema show before, I was on the fence as to whether it would do film justice. But no expense has been spared on the sets, which include a working fairground. If you're looking for fun on these summer nights, this is the one that you want.
Economist
2 hours ago
- Economist
Stella Rimington battled communists, terrorists and literary critics
Watch her closely and—or so the upper echelons of British espionage felt—you could see the signs. There was the cut of her hair, for one thing: that close, spiked crop. Something, too, in the way she held herself. And she was a woman. There was, everyone agreed, little doubt. Dame Judi Dench's 'M' in the 1995 film 'GoldenEye' was based on Dame Stella Rimington, the first female head of MI5, Britain's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. Dame Stella agreed: she 'holds her hands in the same way as me'.
