Uri Geller is a Reflector — the rarest type, designed to mirror back the energy of a room — and few public figures have made a career out of that mirroring quite so literally. Born in Tel Aviv in 1946, he served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces, was wounded in the Six-Day War, and drifted into modeling and nightclub demonstrations before a single stage routine — bending a spoon on Israeli television in the early 1970s — turned him into a global curiosity almost overnight.

His 6/2 profile — the role-model-hermit arc that unfolds in long phases — fits the shape of his life better than any résumé bullet. The chaotic early years of stage shows and televised tests gave way, in middle age, to long stretches of retreat into private writing and reflection at his home outside London, and eventually to an elder-statesman phase where younger magicians and psychologists sought him out for interviews. He has always insisted on the right to walk his own path, even as James Randi and a parade of skeptics spent decades trying to push him off it.

The Geller phenomenon really took off inside the SRI laboratory in 1972, where physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff ran him through remote-viewing protocols for what would become a CIA-funded program. Whatever one believes about the results, the episode showcased his gift for generating endless variations on a single premise and his instinct for the perfect dramatic beat — knowing exactly when to pause, when to let the spoon droop, when to invite the audience to try at home. As a Reflector waiting for the right container, he flourished precisely when invited onto Carson, Wogan, Barbara Walters — and floundered when he tried to force the moment, as in the infamous 1973 Tonight Show appearance where Carson, a former magician, had pre-screened the props.

He sued skeptics often and rarely won, but the litigation revealed a stubborn knowing-without-explanation about his own narrative. Behind the showmanship was a quieter operator: he advised mining companies on dowsing for minerals, claimed to have helped intelligence services on sensitive matters, and accumulated genuine wealth that he managed with a steward's eye for resources. He befriended Michael Jackson, Salvador Dalí, and John Lennon — drawn, it seems, to the particular intimacy of fellow outliers who also lived inside their own myths.

In the decades since, his daily life has settled into something almost monastic: the same morning swim, the same vegetarian routine, the same rituals sustained for years on end. He still bends cutlery for visitors at his Jaffa museum, but spends more time scanning the world for what needs fixing — environmental causes, missing-child searches, public commentary on threats he claims to sense. Whether the bent spoons were ever real almost stops mattering; what's harder to dispute is that, as a mirror amplifying whatever culture brought to him, Uri Geller reflected back something the 1970s very much wanted to see, and built an entire life out of holding up that mirror.