William Durks

William "Bill" Durks (April 13, 1913 – May 7, 1975) was an American sideshow performer best known as "The Man With Three Eyes", a stage persona based on his congenital craniofacial differences. He later performed with his wife, Mildred Durks, billed together as "The World's Strangest Married Couple". His facial differences included a deeply cleft lip and palate, a bifid (split) nose consisting of two side-by-side nasal structures, each with a single nostril, and eyelids that were fused at birth. During childhood, his eyelids were surgically opened, and most published accounts state that he was blind in one eye.

Career

William Durks (second from top left) among other sideshow performers on James E. Strates Shows.

Durks entered the sideshow business at the age of fourteen, beginning with a Single-O show, a type of travelling sideshow, where he was billed as "The Man with Two Noses and Three Eyes".

Over the following decades, he became a regular attraction with a number of American carnival and museum shows, including Ripley's Believe It or Not!, James E. Strates Shows, Hubert's Museum in New York City, and the Charles Hodges Side Show. They married and performed together as "The World's Strangest Married Couple" until Mildred’s death in 1968.

In 2024, 49 years after his death, Durks was inducted into the Coney Island Sideshow Hall of Fame.