The Bonkers 'Black Widow And Daredevil' Show We Almost Got

Long before Scarlett Johansson or Florence Pugh, the first person to express a serious interest in playing Marvel's Black Widow, with Stan Lee's blessing and all, was ... uh, David Bowie's ex-wife, Angie. Who is very much not an actress. She's most famous for starring in half a season of Celebrity Big Brother and talking about her ex-husband's nude nap with Mick Jagger on every talk show that would have her.

In the mid-'70s, when it looked like her career as "that lady hanging around Ziggy Stardust" was on its last legs, Angie started looking for a new way to stay in the spotlight and apparently settled on "playing a superhero on TV." She initially auditioned for the bizarre 1974 TV movie where a powerless, track suit-wearing Wonder Woman battles donkey smugglers, but they turned her down -- according to Newsweek, due to "her refusal to wear a bra." Disappointed, she looked for other female superheroes to play and somehow landed on Natasha "Black Widow" Romanova, possibly figuring that it was harder for braless nipples to show through a thick leather outfit (decades later, George Clooney would prove this wrong).  

This time, Angie went straight to Stan Lee to personally secure the rights to the Widow and some other superguy she happened to be dating in the comics at the time: Daredevil. According to her, the show was going to be completely faithful to the comics, and Marvel was "totally involved," which we're taking to mean that she was planning to include the classic scene in which Daredevil slaps Natasha in the butt.

To play the part of Natasha's blind lover/crimefighting partner, Angie recruited actor Ben Carruthers, best known as one of the 12 leads in The Dirty Dozen. She also hired the woman responsible for designing her ex-husband's glamorous Ziggy Stardust costumes to do the superhero suits, which probably explains why Daredevil is wearing red face paint in the promotional photos instead of a mask.

Angie organized a photo shoot to get the networks interested in the show and offered a sample of the type of dialogue you could expect from her character: "You would do well to watch your tone. The Black Widow does not take orders from anyone." Sadly, the comic book press was unimpressed, and apparently, so was every single network. Angie has claimed that the show never happened because the special effects and such would have been too expensive for this era, but we're guessing "Who the hell is Black Widow?" and "Who the hell is Angie Bowie?" were also important factors in the network executives' minds.

So, basically, the wife of a famous rock star paid Stan Lee a bunch of money for a single cosplay session. At least she got some nice photos to occasionally drop on her social media -- sometimes even in a viewable resolution! 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Marvel Comics