David Goldrake was eight years old when he found the thing that decided his life: a trick with a thimble, tucked between the comics in a German children's magazine that came by mail once a month. Make it vanish. Make it come back. He was growing up in Luxembourg, where, as he has told QVegas, the magic scene amounted to zero. He would not see a live magician until he was fourteen. At eleven, having never watched a professional work, he informed his parents that was what he intended to become.

The International Magicians Society has now named him its Magician of the Year, presenting him the Merlin Award for the second time in his career.

The Merlin dates to the 1960s, its statue designed in 1964 by a New York University art student named Carol Michaud, and the society weighs recipients on talent, showmanship, originality, and the harder to define ability to command a room under any conditions. The IMS bills it as magic's equivalent of the Oscar. Goldrake's first came in 2015, for Best European Illusionist. This one is broader — a body of work rather than a season.

"It is a tremendous honor to receive this recognition from my peers," Goldrake said. "Growing up in Luxembourg, I could never have imagined that magic would one day allow me to travel the world, adapt to every audience, and share the impossible, whether with thousands of people in a theater or in the intimacy of a small room."

What is easy to miss in that sentence is how much of it he had to invent. Most magicians of his stature came up around mentors, magic shops, a visible circuit of working performers. Goldrake never copied a blueprint because he was never shown one.

He turned professional in 1999 and has since performed in more than 50 countries, for royalty, corporate clients, and television audiences across Europe and beyond. He speaks seven languages fluently and spends them as courtesy rather than credential — greeting a guest from Iraq in Arabic, switching to Tagalog for a visitor from the Philippines, once learning an entire script phonetically in Japanese for a corporate date in Hawaii. He has been a regular at the Magic Castle in Hollywood since 2002.

The signature piece is the water escape: sealed in a tank, two to three minutes under, the only Water Torture Cell escape presented on the Las Vegas Strip. But what makes this a career honor rather than a trophy for one stunt is the range around it. He has staged the same show for a full theater with pyro and projection mapping and for a room twenty feet across where the front row can watch his face — scaling the material rather than shrinking it, because playing big in a small room, he has said, simply felt wrong.

Las Vegas has had him three times. He arrived in 2017 with Imaginarium at the Tropicana, a stage that had held the Folies Bergère, Siegfried & Roy, and Lance Burton, and that is now an empty lot in the middle of the Strip. Inside six months, Review-Journal readers had voted it bronze for Best Magic Show in the Best of Las Vegas. Siegfried and Burton both warned him when he moved here that the city was a golden cage: once you are in, you will not want to leave. He has since conceded they were right.

Then the city went dark. Goldrake was among the first performers to turn a light back on — M Is for Magic at Notoriety Live in Neonopolis, playing downtown four nights a week while the Strip's marquees stayed cold and nobody could say with confidence that live entertainment in this town had a future. MGM would not reopen its own shows until that November. He extended the run into 2022. In 2023 the same ballot gave him double gold: Best Magic Show and Best Family Show.

He returned to the Strip in October 2025 with An Evening of Grand Illusion at The Magicians Room on The LINQ Promenade, a speakeasy concealed behind a wall of crane machines and reached by a hidden staircase. That run closes August 23, though he has been working around it rather than winding down: Mystique Dining in West Jordan, Utah, this month, its Folsom, California room from August 24, and a holiday run at The Loft in South Lake Tahoe from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day. The Magic Castle has him listed as well, dates to be announced — and since the Castle admits guests by invitation only, that one is going to stay half-secret by design.

Which accounts for the rest of it. There is a major new theatrical production already in motion, and he will not say a word about what it is, where it opens, or when it arrives. The International Man of Mystery, it turns out, was never only a stage name. 

But the thimble taught him both halves of the trick. The vanish was only the setup.

He always comes back.