Uri Geller

Uri Geller is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, and television personality whose six-decade career has produced one of the most-internationally-recognized claimed-paranormal-spoon-bending stage personalities — across his early-1970s American TV-show appearances on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show and his subsequent multiple international TV-show appearances across 50+ countries. He was born Uri Geller on December 20, 1946, in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine (modern Israel), into a Hungarian-Jewish family. His father Itzhaak Geller was a Hungarian-Jewish Israeli Defense Forces sergeant major, and his mother Margareth Freud was a Hungarian-Jewish homemaker (and a distant relative of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud). His parents emigrated separately from Budapest to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s.

His Israeli Defense Forces service across 1965–1968 — including his 1967 wounding during the Six-Day War — preceded his early-career Israeli TV-magic career. His 1970 American TV debut and his subsequent 1972 American TV exposure across multiple Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show appearances produced his early-1970s American TV-magic public profile. The August 1, 1973 The Tonight Show appearance — in which Carson (a former amateur magician) had taken steps to prevent Geller from manipulating the spoons and other props beforehand, producing Geller's notable on-camera failure to perform any of his claimed paranormal effects — shaped his subsequent biographical narrative.

His 1973 Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) experimental research on his claimed paranormal abilities — produced by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff — shaped 1970s American mass-media coverage of claimed paranormal phenomena. The August 1973 Nature journal publication of the Targ-Puthoff Geller experimental results was subsequently challenged by skeptical analyses (particularly by James Randi, whose 1975 book The Magic of Uri Geller identified the experimental design and observational deficiencies of the Targ-Puthoff Geller research).

His subsequent international career has produced multiple international TV-show appearances, multiple commercial books (particularly his 1975 autobiography My Story), and his continuous claim of paranormal abilities across the 21st century. The 1980s mineral-prospecting career — in which he served as a paranormal mineral-detection consultant to multiple international mining and oil companies — shaped his late-career biographical narrative. He has been with Israeli homemaker Hanna Shtrang since 1971, and the couple has two children. He resides in Tel Aviv and Berkshire, England.

His name Uri derives from the Hebrew Uri'el meaning "my light" or "God is my light." Uri has been a rare but enduring boys' name across Hebrew-tradition American naming.