David Berglas, who has died aged 97, became a variety star of the 1950s in Britain as a magician, illusionist and “mentalist” – one displaying extraordinary memory skills – and later took his stage act to Las Vegas.
He was one of the first conjurors to establish himself on British television and was particularly admired for his take on the classic ACAAN (any card at any number) trick. An audience member would be invited to name a card, perhaps the nine of clubs, while another chose a number between one and 52, maybe 31. Then, Berglas would deal the cards face up, one by one, revealing the 31st card to be the nine of clubs.
With sleeves rolled up, and no pockets, he was also adept at producing cigarettes and silk handkerchiefs from his empty fist and he claimed he could identify when a photograph was taken simply by handling it. He referred to his tricks as “psychological experiments” and described himself as a “man of mystery”.
The illusion that made his name came in 1953 when he was blindfolded and hooded while being driven around London in an attempt to locate a hidden slipper. He directed the driver to Battersea Park, switched to a boat on the lake there and found the slipper on an island in the middle.
A year later, Berglas – who once completed the Cresta toboggan run at St Moritz, Switerland, while blindfolded – made a piano disappear from a stage at the Park Lane hotel, London, during the Toboggan Club of Great Britain’s annual gala dinner. He described how the pianist “fell flat on his face, a bizarre, surreal figure in a dinner jacket, flat on the parquet floor, not moving, and the piano had gone”.
The audience – who searched for the instrument – were astonished, but it was one of the few mystery stunts that Berglas later explained. While one musician played a hidden piano off stage, the pianist in view mimed on a hollowed out concert piano with its inner workings removed. Its outer casing, painted black and cut into four pieces, collapsed and was removed by “waiters” while the audience was distracted by flickering chandeliers.
Many of Berglas’s tricks confounded even other magicians. A levitation spectacle had four men and four women placing their fingers on a table, which then rose under their hands, moved around the stage in time with the music playing, then spun around as the eight participating audience members struggled to keep up with it.
Berglas broke into radio and television alongside variety artists including Jimmy Clitheroe, Terry-Thomas, Charlie Chester, Cardew Robinson and Cyril Fletcher.
On TV, he was in programmes such as The Services Show (in 1953) and Garrison Theatre (1954-55), and had his own 1955 BBC show, You Are Invited to Watch David Berglas, and, later that year, presented the series Focus on Hocus on the newly launched ITV. He later experienced a revival on British television with The Mind of David Berglas (1985-86) on Channel 4.
Some of his stunts were truly terrifying. In 1966, blindfolded, he drove a car around the streets of London, with the racing driver Graham Hill, terrified, in the passenger seat. Six years earlier, he had done the same in Nairobi, Kenya.
“Nothing is impossible,” he told the Stage newspaper in 1987. “And I can assure you I lay no claim to supernatural powers. But shall we say ... I have a special way of doing things.”
He was born in Berlin, to Jewish parents, Emmy (nee Esther Kaplan), of Lithuanian descent, and Alfred Berglas, a German from a family of industrialists with a textile mill in France. They fled the Nazis in 1937.
David was sent to Britain while his mother and younger sister, Gaby, went to the Netherlands and older sister, Ellen, to Switzerland. The whole family was reunited in London the following year.
Berglas attended Frensham Heights school, near Farnham, Surrey, then, after the end of the second world war, worked for US intelligence in Germany.
He settled in Bradford in 1947 and started studying textiles at the city’s technical college with a view to joining a textile mill established by his family in Wyke, nearby.
After meeting the conjuror Ken Brooke, he made magic his hobby for the next five years. During that time, he changed his career plans, trained at the Tavistock Clinic, London, worked as a psychotherapist and gave demonstrations of hypnosis.
But in 1952 he turned professional as a magician and illusionist, taking his show to the Windmill theatre, London, performing six times a day for six weeks, and sharing a dressing room with the comedian – and later actor – Bill Maynard.
He followed it with performances up and down the country on bills that included stars such as Morecambe and Wise, Harry Worth, Des O’Connor and Ruby Murray. His stage show, Meet David Berglas, was seen across the world and he had television series in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden.
Berglas was also a consultant on feature films. He taught card tricks to Orson Welles for the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), to Ryan O’Neal and Patrick Magee for Barry Lyndon (1970), and to Jack Nicholson (as the Joker) for Batman (1989). For the Bond film Octopussy (1983), he taught an actor the art of pickpocketing and advised Roger Moore for a scene in which he switched an authentic Fabergé egg for a fake one.
From 1989 to 1998, Berglas was president of the Magic Circle. He was appointed MBE in 2019.
Berglas is survived by his wife, the former actor Ruth Shiell, whom he married in 1956, and their son Marvin, current president of the Magic Circle, and daughter, Irena. Their elder son, Peter, died in 2013.
• David Berglas, magician and illusionist, born 30 July 1926; died 3 November 2023
