So David Bowie.
Bowie has had an intermittent career as an actor. And, you know, he's not bad. Not bad at all. Oh, he's not brilliant. He'll never be an Olivier. But he's a solid midlist character actor with a fine command of body language and expression.
So, POD: the childhood injury that OTL damaged one of Bowie's eyes instead damages his trachea, making a singing career impossible. We'll handwave away songwriting, on the assumption that Bowie mostly wrote for himself. So, he's left with a career in acting -- movies, stage and TV.
I don't think he'd have a spectacular career. But I think he'd have a very solid one. Don't quite see him as a Bond villain, but he could pop up in one of the lesser Die Hards. Not a Dr. Who (Bowie was young when most Whos were middle aged or older; the recent crop of Young Whos comes too late) but quite possibly an incarnation of the Master. (You know he'd be an astonishingly good one.) He's not quite right for Tarantino movies, but I bet he shows up in at least one film by Wim Wenders.
You get the idea. Given his DOB (1947), where else might we plausibly expect *Bowie to turn up?
Doug M.