Cracked Actor

A must-watch for all Bowie-freaks: Alan Yentob's famous 1975 BBC doco capturing post-Ziggy Bowie in America during the '74 Diamond Dogs tour - chem-raddled and alarmingly emaciated, yet lucid and surprisingly open in interviews and in fine voice on stage. Author Peter Doggett notes that the documentary's glimpses of Bowie's American stage performance are actually fantastically rare:

David Bowie undertook two lengthy excursions across the United States and Canada in 1974: the first, designed to promote Diamond Dogs, was recorded for the album David Live, but only a few fragments of concert footage have survived; the second, for which he abandoned the scenery and iconography of Diamond Dogs and set out to prove himself a soul singer, was glimpsed briefly in the 1975 BBC TV documentary Cracked Actor, but otherwise exists only in memory and on illicit tapes made by audience members.
- Peter Doggett, The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie and the 1970s, London, 2011, p.217.

Cracked Actor was also seen by Nicolas Roeg and led to Bowie being cast as the lead in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and who better to play a creepy multimillionaire alien in human form?