On This Day

RichardTheBruce

April 4th

1921: Peter Burton is born--Bromley, Kent, England. (He dies 27 November 1989--Chelsea, London, England.)

Filmography, incomplete:
They Were Not Divided (1950) – Minor Role (uncredited)
What the Butler Saw (1950) – Bill Fenton
The Wooden Horse (1950) – Nigel
Tall Headlines (1952) – Graham Moore
The Stolen Plans (1952) – Dr. Foster
The Red Beret (1953) – Minor Role (uncredited)
The Heart of the Matter (1953) – Perrot (uncredited)
They Who Dare (1954) – Marine Barrett
The Green Scarf (1954) – Purser
Three Cases of Murder (1955) – Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs (segment "Lord Mountdrago")
Value for Money (1955) – Hotel Receptionist (uncredited)
Johnny, You're Wanted (1956)
Soho Incident (1956) – Inspector Collis
The Long Arm (1956) – Creasy
Reach for the Sky (1956) – Peter / Coltishall Officer (uncredited)
Child in the Horse (1956) – Howard Forbes (uncredited)
The Betrayal (1957) – Tony Adams
Five on a Treasure Island (1957)
A Night to Remember (1958) – 1st Class Steward (uncredited)
The Night We Dropped a Clanger (1959) – 2nd Pilot
Sink the Bismarck! (1960) – Captain (First Destroyer)
Raising the Wind (1961) – 1st Viola
Dr. No (1962) – Major Boothroyd
The Iron Maiden (1962) – Thompson's Salesman
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) – Sheik in Arab Council (uncredited)
That Kind of Girl (1963) – Elliot Collier
Thunderball (1965) – RAF Office in Car (uncredited)
Berserk! (1967) – Gustavo
Casino Royale (1967) – Agent (uncredited)
Amsterdam Affair (1968) – Herman Ketelboer
Doppelgänger (1969) – Medical Technician (uncredited)
Hell Boats (1970) – Admiral's Aide
All the Right Noises (1971) – Stage Manager
Carry on at Your Convenience (1971) – Hotel Manager
A Clockwork Orange (1971) – Junior Minister – Minister Frederick's Aid
The Love Box (1972) – Charles Lambert (Charles and Margery)
Leopard in the Snow (1978) – Mr. Framley
The Bitch (1979) – Hotel Night Manager
Richard's Things (1980) – Colonel
Inchon (1981) – Adm. Sherman
The Jigsaw Man (1984) – Douglas Ransom
The Doctor and the Devils (1985) – Customer
Number One Gun (1990) – Merlin (final film role)

1928: Monty Norman (Monty Noserovitch) is born--London, England.
1958: The Spectator prints an article by Ian Fleming called "Automobilia" about his Ford Thunderbird, friend Noël Coward, and driving around Jamaica.

Automobilia
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/4th-april-1958/8/automobilia

By IAN FLEMING

DIG that T-bird!' I had cut it a bit fine round Queen Victoria's skirts and my wing mirror had almost dashed the Leica from the GI's hand. If the tourists don't snap the Queen, at about 10 a.m. on most mornings they can at least get a picture of me and my Ford Thunderbird with Buckingham Palace in the background.

I suspect that all motorists are vain about their cars. I certainly am, and have been ever since the khaki Standard with the enamelled Union Jack on its nose which founded my &uric in the Twenties. Today the chorus of `Smashing!; 'Cor !' and 'Rraauu !' which greets my passage is the perfume of Araby.

One man who is even more childishly vain than myself is Noel Coward. Last year, in Jamaica, he took delivery of a sky-blue Chevrolet Belair Convertible which he immediately drove round to show off to me. We went for a long ride to Outer la bourgeoisie. Our passage along the coast road was as triumphal as, a year before, Princess Margaret's had been. As , we swept through a tiny village, a Negro lounger, galvanised by the glorious vision, threw his hands up to heaven and cried, `Cheesus-Kerist!'

'How did he know?' said Coward.

Our pride was to have a fall. We stopped for petrol.

'Fill her up,' said Coward.

There was a prolonged pause, followed by some quiet tinkering and jabbering from behind the car. 'What's going on, Coley?'

`They can't find the hole,' said Leslie Cole from the rear seat.

Coley got out. There was more and louder argumentation. A crowd gathered. I got out and, while Coward stared loftily, patiently at the sky, went over the car front and back with a tooth- comb. There was no hole. I told Coward so.

`Don't be silly, dear boy. The Americans are very clever at making motor-cars. They wouldn't forget a thing like that. In fact, they probably started with the hole and then built the car round it.'

`Come and look for yourself.'

`I wouldn't think of demeaning myself before the natives.'

'Well, have you got an instruction book?'

'How should I know? Don't ask silly questions.' The crowd gazed earnestly at us, trying to fathom whether we were ignorant or playing some white man's game. I found the trick catch of the glove compartment and took out the instruction book. The secret was on the last page. You had to unscrew the stop-light. The filler cap was behind it.

`Anyone could have told you that,' commented Coward airily.

I looked at him coldly. 'It's interesting,' I said. `When you sweat with embarrassment the sweat runs down your face and drops off your first chin on to your second.'

'Don't be childish.'

I am not only vain about my Thunderbird, but proud of it. It is by far the best car I have ever possessed, although, on looking back through my motley stud book, I admit that there is no string of Bentleys and Jaguars and Aston Martins with which to compare it.

After the khaki Standard, I went to a khaki Morris Oxford which was demolished between Munich and Kufstein. I had passed a notice saying 'Achtung Rollbahn!' and was keeping my eyes peeled for a steamroller when, just before I crossed a small bridge over a stream, I heard a yell in my ear and had time to see a terrified peasant leap off a gravity-propelled trolley laden with cement blocks when it hit broadside and hurled the car, with me in it, upside down into the stream.

I changed to the worst car I have ever had, a 16/80 open Lagonda. I fell in love with the whine of its gears and its outside brake. But it would barely do seventy, which made me ashamed of its sporty appearance.

I transferred to a supercharged Graham Paige Convertible Coupe, an excellent car which I stupidly gave to the ambulance service when war broke out.

Half-way through the war I had, for a time, a battered but handy little Opel. One night at the height of the blitz I was dining with Sefton Delmer in his, top-floor flat in Lincoln's Inn. A direct hit blew out the lower three floors and left us swilling champagne and waiting for the top floor to fall into the chasm. The fireman who finally hauled us out and down his ladder was so indignant at our tipsy insouciance that I made him a present of the crumpled remains of the Opel.

After the war I had an umpteenth-hand beetle-shaped Renault and a pre-war Hillman Minx before buying my first expensive car—a 21-litre Riley, which ran well for a year before developing really expensive troubles for which I only obtained some compensation through a personal appeal to Lord Nuffield.

I transferred to one of the first of the Sapphires, a fast, comfortable car, but one which made me feel too elderly when it was going slowly and too nervous when it was going fast. I decided to revert to an open car and, on the advice of a friend, bought a Daimler Convertible. Very soon I couldn't stand the ugliness of its rump and, when the winter came and I found the engine ran so coolly that the heater wouldn't heat, I got fed up with post-war English cars.

* It was then that a fairly handsome ship came home and I decided to buy myself a luxurious present. I first toyed with the idea of a Lancia Gran Turismo, a really beautiful piece of machinery, but it was small and rather' too busy—like driving an angry washing machine—and it cost over £3,000, which seemed ridiculous. I happened to see a Thunderbird in the street and fell head over heels in love. I rang up Lincoln's. Apparently there was no difficulty in buying any make of American car out of the small import quota which we accept in part exchange for our big motor-car exports to the States. The salesman brought along a fire-engine-red model with white upholstery which I drove nervously round Battersea Park.

I dickered and wavered. Why not a Mercedes? But they are still more expensive and selfish and the highly desirable SL has only room beside the driver for a diminutive blonde with a sponge bag. Moreover, when you open those bat-like doors in the rain, the rain pours straight into the car.

I paid £3,000 for a Thunderbird. Black, with conventional gear change plus overdrive, and as 'few power assists as possible. In due course it appeared. My wife was indignant. The car was hideous. There was no room for taking people to the station (a point I found greatly in its favour) and, anyway, why hadn't I bought her a mink coat? To this day she hasn't relented. She has invented a new disease called 'Thunderbird neck' which she complains she gets in the passenger seat. The truth is that she has a prejudice against all American artefacts and, indeed, against artefacts of any kind. She herself drives like Evelyn Waugh's Lady Metroland, using the pavement as if it were part of the road. Like many women, she prides herself on her 'quick reactions' and is constantly twitting Me with my sluggish consideration for others in traffic. She is unmoved when I remind her that in her previous car, a grey and heavily scarred Sunbeam Talbot whose interior always looked as it it had just been used as dustcart for the circus at Olympia, she had been guilty of misdemeanours which would have landed any man in jail. She once hit an old man in a motorised bathchair so hard in the rear that he was propelled right across Oxford Street against the traffic lights. Turning into Dover Street, she had cut a milk cart so fine that she had left her onside door-handle embedded in the rump of the horse. Unfortunately, she is unmoved by these Memories, having that most valuable of all feminine attributes—the ability to see her vices as virtues.

I have now had my Thunderbird for over two Years. It has done 27,000 miles without a single Mechanical failure, without developing a squeak or a rattle. Its paintwork is immaculate and there Is not a spot of discoloration anywhere on its rather over-lavish chrome, despite the fact that it Is never garaged at night and gets a wash only twice a week. I have it serviced every quarter, but this is only a matter of the usual oil-changing, etc. The only time it ever stopped in traffic was carefully planned to give me a short, sharp reminder that, like other fine pieces of machinery, it has a temperament.

The occasion was, for the car's purposes, well chosen—exactly half-way under the Thames in the Blackwall Tunnel, with lorries howling by nose to tail a few inches away in the gloom, and with a giant petrol tanker snoring impatiently down my neck. The din was so terrific that I hadn't even noticed that the engine had stopped when the traffic in front moved on after a halt. It was only then that I noticed the rev. counter at zero. I ground feverishly at the starter with- out result. The perspiration poured down my face at the thought of the ghastly walk I would have to take through the tunnel to get the breakdown Van and pay the £5 fine. Then, having reminded Me never again to take its services for granted, the engine stuttered and fired and we got going.

The reason why I particularly like the Thunderbird, apart from the beauty of its line and the drama of its snarling mouth and the giant, flaring nostril of its air-intake, is that everything works. Absolutely nothing goes wrong. True, it isn't a precision instrument like English sports cars, but that I count a virtue. The mechanical Margin of error in its construction is wider. Everything has a solid feel. The engine—a huge adapted low-revving Mercury V-8 of 5-litre capacity—never gives the impression of stress or strain. When, on occasion, you can do a hundred Without danger of going over the edge of this small island, you have not only the knowledge that you have an extra twenty. m.p.h. in reserve, but the feel of it. As for acceleration, when the two extra barrels of the four-barrel carburetter come in, at around 3,000 revs., it is a real thump in the back. The brakes are good enough for fast driving, but would have to be better if you wanted to drive dangerously. The same applies to the suspension, where rigidity has been sacrificed slightly to give a comfortable ride. Petrol consumption, using overdrive for long runs, averages 17 m.p.g. Water and oil, practically nil.

There is a hard top for the winter which you take off and store during the summer when the soft top is resurrected from its completely disappeared position behind the seat. The soft top can be put up or down without effort and both tops have remained absolutely weatherproof, which, after two years, is miraculous.

One outstanding virtue is that all accessories seem to be infallible, though the speedometer, as with most American cars, is a maddening 10 per cent optimistic. The heater really heats; the wipers, though unfortunately suction-operated, really wipe; and not a fuse has blown nor a lamp bulb died. The engine never overheats and has never failed to start immediately from cold, even after all night outside in a frost. The solidity of the manufacture is, of course, the result of designing cars for a seller's market and for a country with great extremes of heat and cold.

Cyril Connolly once said to me that, if men were honest, they would admit that their motor-cars came next after their women and children in their list of loves. I won't go all the way with him on that, but I do enjoy well-designed and attractively wrapped bits of machinery that really work—and that's what the Thunderbird is, a first-class express carriage.

https://www.fadedpage.com/link.php?file=20160109-a5.pdf

2015: A filmed message from Daniel Craig recognizes the 10th evolution of Mine Action Day by the United Nations.

2018: Soon-tek Oh dies at age 85--Los Angeles, California. (Born 29 June 1933--Mokpo, Republic of Korea.)

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/187375/summary

Short obit from a Korean source.

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=3046619

Pioneering actor Oh Soon-tek is dead at 85
Apr 07,2018
이미지뷰

Actor Oh Soon-tek, one of the first Korean actors to be noticed in Hollywood, passed away due to a chronic disease at the age of 85 in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Oh was an ambitious college student who, after graduating with a degree in political science at Yonsei University in 1959, flew to Los Angeles to study international relations. However, after arriving in California, he changed his studies to acting and playwriting at the University of California Los Angeles, and then went on to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York.

Oh made his acting debut in the Broadway play “Rashomon” in 1964, and got his big break in 1974 as the of role Lieutenant Hip in the film “The Man with the Golden Gun,” which was part of the James Bond movie series. Soon after, the actor appeared in numerous movies including well-known films “Good Guys Wear Black” (1978), “Beverly Hills Ninja” (1997) and the hit Walt Disney animation “Mulan” (1998).

In 2001, Oh came back to Korea to work as a professor at the Korea National University of Arts as well as a jury member for the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.

By Sung Ji-eun

RichardTheBruce

April 5th

1909: Albert Romolo "Cubby" Broccoli is born--New York City, New York.
(He dies 27 June 1996--Beverly Hills, California.)

https://telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7733431/Albert-Cubby-Broccoli.html
Albert "Cubby" Broccoli

Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, the film producer, who has died in Beverly Hills aged 87, was the driving force behind the phenomenally successful James Bond films, 17 of which he either produced or co-produced.

Photo: REUTERS

A vast, unhurried man with the deeply shadowed eyes of a perpetual jet-setter, Broccoli, ensconced in the calm of his Mayfair office, could remind visitors of one of James Bond's sensual, cat-stroking adversaries.

But he was noted by the profession for his geniality, and for the fatherly interest he took in his productions. Despite the enormous riches he accumulated from putting Ian Fleming's books on screen, Broccoli was almost believed when he said: "I have always felt that Bond is bigger than all of us."

In 1960 he formed Eon (standing for "Everything or Nothing") Film Productions in London with the Canadian Harry Saltzman, who held an expiring option on the film rights to all Fleming's Bond books except Casino Royale.

Broccoli and Saltzman agreed that the film industry should be international in scope, but their working methods were contrasting. While Saltzman revelled in his tough image, Broccoli became known as one of the industry's nice guys. As Michael Caine said, "Cubby is Harry's sense of proportion. They're like two policemen: Cubby gives you a cigarette and Harry knocks it out of your mouth."

Their break came in 1962 when they persuaded United Artists to provide backing for Dr No, and made the inspired casting of Sean Connery - who, they thought, had the right walk - as Bond. An immediate hit, the film was followed by From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965).

By then the partners were pounds 4 million the richer. Their partnership, which was always combative, endured until 1975, when Saltzman sold his share and Broccoli became the undisputed chief of the Bond industry. As such he took an unusually involved approach, embroiling himself in every stage of a film's development.

"Bond is the only script written by a committee," he said. "I sit down with the writer, director and executive producer and we decide what we want in the script. The final decision," he added, "is made by me."

Albert Romolo Broccoli, always known as "Cubby", was born in New York on April 5 1909, the son of Italian immigrants. His father was a bricklayer. With no idea what he would do with his life, young Cubby helped an uncle who ran a market garden in Long Island. He would later claim that this uncle brought the first broccoli seeds to America and gave his name to the well-known vegetable. Etymologists think otherwise.

After a spell managing a coffin-factory, Broccoli was alerted by a holiday in Hollywood to his desire for a career in films and he moved out to the west. Not an immediate success, he worked as a street-corner Christmas tree hawker and as a salesman of hairdressing products in San Francisco, where he lived in one room with only a rat for company.

"I really looked forward to seeing that rat. I fed him. He became a friend. Then one day I won a few dollars at the races. That was it: I said goodbye to the rat and made for LA." He became a teaboy at 20th Century Fox studios and soon progressed to the post of assistant director.

During the Second World War, Broccoli served in the navy. Afterwards he worked in Hollywood as an agent and then settled in London. In 1951 he formed Warwick Film Productions with Irving Allen and produced a large number of competent pictures with tough characters and lots of action. These include The Red Beret (1953), Safari (1956) and The Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959).

Although generally jovial and given to dishing up spaghetti for cast and crew, Broccoli could be stern. In 1970 he explained why the contract of George Lazenby, who played Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), had not been renewed. "Our parting was not by mutual desire," he said, "but by our desire. I wouldn't use him again. He's a pain in the arse."

Broccoli returned to Hollywood in 1977, for tax reasons. In 1982 he was honoured at the Oscar ceremony with the prestigious Irving G Thalberg award. He was appointed OBE in 1987.

Extremely skilful at negotiating a fair share for himself from the Bond films, Broccoli amassed an estimated pounds 100 million.

He married, in 1959, Dana Wilson; Cary Grant was best man. They had two daughters.
[/quote]

1954: Jonathan Cape publishes Ian Fleming's second Bond novel Live and Let Die.

LIVE AND LET DIE

In the higher ranges of Secret Service
work the actual acts in many cases were in
every respect equal to the most fantastic
inventions of romance and melodrama.
Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot,
ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross,
true agent, false agent, double agent, gold
and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the
firing party, were interwoven in many a
texture so intricate as to be incredible and
yet true. The Chief and the High Officers
of the Secret Service revelled in these subter-
ranean labyrinths, and pursued their task with
cold and silent passion. SIR WINSTON
CHURCHILL in Thoughts and Adventures.

It is in these higher rangers of Secret
Service work that James Bond operates on
the very outside edge of danger, and, in
this story, among hazards no reader will
easily forget.

Ian Fleming's first book, Casino Royale,
an account of the gambling assignment
that nearly cost Bond his life, was described
as 'the best thriller since the war'.

Live and Let Die, a breath-taking hunt
for secret treasure that takes Bond to
Harlem, Florida and Jamaica, is still better.

1955: Jonathan Cape publishes Ian Fleming's third Bond novel Moonraker.

MOONRAKER
by the author of Casino Royale,
Live and Let Die

It was Monday and a routine day for
James Bond in the quiet office at the
headquarters of the Secret Service.
Idly he ticked off his number--007--on the
charge sheets of the Top Secret files that
had come in over the weekend. He was
bored. Mondays were hell.

Then, suddenly, the red telephone
screamed in the quiet room. 'M. wants
you.' And Bond walked out of his office
and into the assignment that was to put
even his adventures in France (Casino
Royale) and Harlem and Jamaica (Live
and Let Die) in the shade.

And yet what was to happen to him was
to happen out of the clear blue skies of
early summer, here, in England. As it
might have been yesterday. Or, as it
might be, some dreadful tomorrow.

1955: Anthony Horowitz is born--Stanmore, London, England.
1958: Ian Fleming semi-defends the Bond character in a letter to the Manchester Guardian.

Ian Fleming defends James Bond - from
the archive

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2012/oct/01/ian-fleming-james-bond-1958-archive
The James Bond author writes to the Manchester Guardian in defence of his hero
Lauren Niland | Mon 1 Oct 2012 05.30 EDT
First published on Mon 1 Oct 2012 05.30 EDT


Ian Fleming smoking a cigarette. James Bond had his cigarettes custom made by Morland's, a habit Fleming claimed was 'less expensive than countless other heroes' Photograph: Express Newspapers/Getty Images

Fifty years of the James Bond film franchise - the first in the series, Dr No, was released in October 1962 - has meant 50 years of Bond habits ingrained in the public imagination, from how Bond dresses to what he drinks (although his new tipple of Heineken lager in Skyfall, the 23rd installment of the series which is released this year, has caused comment in some corners).

Yet critics of Bond's lifestyle - not least those who see it as an advertising agency's world - have existed for far longer than the life of the films. In 1958 - the year Dr No was published as a novel - Bernard Bergonzi, writing in The Twentieth Century magazine, attacked Ian Fleming's novels for what the Observer called "a diet of unrestricted sadism and satyriasis."

Guardian Bond leader 1958
Published in the Manchester Guardian on 31 March 1958. Click on the article to read in full

The Manchester Guardian published a defence - of sorts - of Fleming's Bond, but their conclusion that "what is more sinister is the cult of luxury for its own sake...these works are symptomatic of a decline in taste" led to the author himself writing to the paper to set the record straight on where Bond's tastes derive from.

In the letter to the Manchester Guardian, (below) published on 5 April 1958, Fleming admits that "to create an illusion of depth I had to fit Bond out with some theatrical props...with distinctive cigarettes...I proceeded to invent a cocktail for Bond (which I sampled some months later and found unpalatable)."

Ian Fleming writes to the Manchester Guardian in defence of Bond. Click on the article to read in full.

However, he also argues that the exotic and ostentatious parts of Bond's lifestyle - "the cult of luxury" - proved so popular with his readers, still used to war-time rationing, that he included them for their sake. His own favourite food is scrambled eggs and he claims to smoke "your own, Mancunian, brand of Virginia tobacco." (He has no argument, however, against the case that "sex plays an important part in James Bond's life.")

1963: Agent 007 - mission: drab (Agent 007 - Mission: Killing) released in Denmark.

1965: Norman Wanstall receives the Best Sound Effects Oscar for Goldfinger, presented by Angie Dickenson.

1983: The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. includes George Lazenby as "J.B."

2017: Dynamite Entertainment publishes James Bond: Black Box (2017) #2 (of 6).

https://www.comixology.eu/James-Bond-Black-Box-2017-2-of-6/digital-comic/487884

RichardTheBruce

April 6th

1940: Pedro Armendáriz Jr. is born--Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico.
(He dies 26 December 2011 at age 71--New York City, New York.)

Pedro Armendariz Jr. dies at 71

https://variety.com/2011/film/news/pedro-armendariz-jr-dies-at-71-1118047888/
Character actor, son of Mexican star, appeared in 'Zorro'
By James Young

Mexican character actor Pedro Armendariz Jr., a near constant presence on screens big and small for more than four decades, died Monday of eye cancer in New York City. He was 71.

Armendariz, the son of Mexico “golden age” movie star Pedro Armendariz and actress Carmelita Pardo, appeared in some 140 films and dozens of Televisa skeins, mostly sudsers. The actor played Gov. Riley in the 2005 movie “The Legend of Zorro”; the president of Mexico in Robert Rodriguez’s “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”; and the corrupt cop who stole the gun from Brad Pitt in “The Mexican.” He also appeared in 1989’s “Old Gringo” and in some of the top-grossing Mexican films in recent history, including all-time domestic B.O. champ “The Crime of Father Amaro” as well as action hit “Matando Cabos” and acclaimed political satire “Herod’s Law.”

Armendariz also played a key role in expanding the voice of a new generation of filmmakers and actors as president of the Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences (AMACC) from 2006-10.

The sturdily framed thesp was instantly recognizable for bristly beards and mustaches that framed passionate, often wildly sparkling eyes, forming a countenance that could transform alarmingly from menacing to tender in the blink of an eye.

At risk of living his life in the shadow of his father, who was known as Mexico’s Clark Gable, Armendariz Jr. followed in his footsteps, taking his first film role on locations in Mexico for Westerns like “El cachorro” in 1965 and appearing in an episode of “Daniel Boone” in 1966.

Coming into his own during a dark period for the Mexican box office, when local production slowed to a trickle in the 1970s and ’80s, the actor worked with local auteurs like Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, while bringing home a steady paycheck with roles in telenovelas and character-actor bits in numerous Stateside pics, in which he was often cast as a Mexican tough guys, graying statesmen and Latin military types.

He, like his father, landed a role in a James Bond film — he played the arch President Hector Lopez in “License to Kill” [sic]; his father had played Bond ally Kerim Bey in “From Russia With Love.” They both played revolutionary General Pancho Villa onscreen.

Aside from some nods and wins at AMACC’s Ariel awards, Armendariz really only began to win widespread respect in the last decade or so, as he worked on multiple projects every year, even through most of 2011, and the industry began to look back at his sizable body of work.

Hitting the boards, Armendariz won further kudos for recent work in leading stage roles for Mexican productions of “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Producers.”

In 2010, reacting to harsh industry criticism, Armendariz Jr., as president of the academy, led the transformation of the AMACC, opening voting privileges that previously belonged to an aging 25-person body that only evolved through attrition to more than 625 industry members, including producers, who until that time were barred from official voting status.

He also became a vocal political agent, fighting for industry support from Congress in heated budget battles over the last few years.

Armendariz will appear in several films posthumously, including Spanish-language Will Ferrell laffer “Casa de mi padre,” which opens March 16 and stars Mexican thesps Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal.

Luna, speaking on Twitter, said of the actor, “Just seeing him made you smile. He had time for everyone.”

As news of the death spread Monday afternoon, condolences to the family mounted, even coming from Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Televisa’s CEO Emilio Azcarraga Jean, among other officials and members of Mexico’s media elite.

Armendariz was married and divorced twice, from former Televisa spokesmodel Lucia Gomez de Parada and actress-turned-activist Ofelia Medina. He is survived by several children.

1966: Operación Trueno (Operation Thunder) released in Argentina.

1967: Operación Trueno (Operation Thunder) released in Mexico.

1977: Live and Let Die released in Iceland.
2011: Sam Mendes and Barbara Broccoli scout South African locations for Bond 23.
2016: James Bond #6 Vargr is set for release this date (delayed to 20 April).

https://dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C72513024181806011

Thunderfinger

Iceland had to wait four years for LALD?

RichardTheBruce

That's what sources say. Because of the provocative content of the film? There's really no similar delay for other countries, especially European countries. About a one year delay for Turkey, to December 1974.

RichardTheBruce

April 7th

1966: Doktor No released in Turkey.

1966: Thunderball released in the Netherlands.
2007: Barry Nelson (Haakon Robert Nielsen) dies at age 89--Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
(Born 16 April 1917--San Francisco, California.)

Barry Nelson, Broadway and Film Actor, Dies at 86
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/obituaries/14nelson.html
By STUART LAVIETES | APRIL 14, 2007

Barry Nelson, an actor who had a long career in film and television, starred in some of the more durable Broadway comedies of the 1950s and ’60s, and achieved a permanent place in the minds of trivia buffs as the first actor to portray James Bond, died last Saturday, his wife said yesterday. He was 86.

The cause was not immediately known. His wife, Nansi Nelson, said he died while traveling in Bucks County, Pa., The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Nelson became familiar to many moviegoers in his middle years, appearing in films like “Airport” and “The Shining.” But it was onstage more than half a century ago that he made perhaps a more enduring mark. Though not a matinee idol, he was blond and handsome and excelled in light romantic comedies, often playing the somewhat overmatched partner of an irrepressible leading lady.

He was a likable young architect who picked up a chirpy Barbara Bel Geddes in one of the most popular Broadway shows of the early 1950s, “The Moon Is Blue.”

He and Ms. Bel Geddes teamed again from 1961 through 1964, this time as a divorcing couple in Jean Kerr’s “Mary, Mary.” Soon after that show closed, he embarked on another long run opposite Lauren Bacall in “Cactus Flower.”

Mr. Nelson maintained his popularity in the 1970s, even as Broadway comedies began to take a darker view of relationships and marriage.

He starred with Deborah Kerr in Edward Albee’s “Seascape” and played a leading role in Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, “The Norman Conquests.”

He continued to perform in pure entertainments as well, earning a Tony nomination in 1978 for best actor in a musical for his role in the Liza Minnelli showcase “The Act.”

Born Robert Haakon Nielsen in San Francisco on April 16, 1920, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941. Spotted by a talent scout, he was soon signed to an MGM contract and appeared in studio films like “Shadow of the Thin Man” (1941) and “Johnny Eager” and “Dr. Kildare’s Victory,” both in 1942. He landed a lead role the same year in “A Yank on the Burma Road,” playing a cabdriver who winds up leading a convoy of trucks for the Chinese government.

Joining the Army and assigned to an entertainment unit, he made his Broadway debut in 1943, billed as Pvt. Barry Nelson, in Moss Hart’s wartime morale builder, “Winged Victory.” He also appeared in the 1944 film version of the play.

Mr. Nelson starred in a number of television series in the 1950s, including a cold war spy adventure, “The Hunter”; a domestic comedy, “My Favorite Husband”; and a Canadian fur-trapping saga, “Hudson’s Bay.”

But it was in an unremarkable one-hour television production in 1954 that he left a lasting mark, or asterisk. That was when he played Jimmy Bond, an Americanized version of Ian Fleming’s ladykilling international spy, in an adaptation of “Casino Royale” for the CBS anthology series “Climax!”

Sean Connery’s Bond followed Mr. Nelson’s eight years later, in “Dr. No.”

In 1964 he starred in one of the most memorable episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” in which a stranded couple wake up in a typical small town to find that it is completely deserted and deathly quiet except for the sound of a child’s laughter.

He appeared in another creepy classic, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film, “The Shining,” playing the manager of the haunted and virtually empty hotel.

Mr. Nelson’s movie credits also include the 1963 adaptation of “Mary, Mary,” with Debbie Reynolds in the Barbara Bel Geddes role, and the 1970 disaster film “Airport,” in which he played an airline captain. He was a familiar face to television viewers throughout the 1970s and 1980s, appearing in cameo roles on many popular shows, including “Cannon,” “Taxi,” “Dallas” and “The Love Boat.”

Mr. Nelson’s first marriage, to the actress Teresa Celli, ended in divorce in 1951. He and his wife, Nansi, were married in 1992. He had no children from either marriage.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C10 of the New York edition with the headline: Barry Nelson, Broadway and Film Actor, Dies at 86.

2009: A plaque unveiling renames the Cloisters building as the Broccoli Cloisters, Wokingham.

Benovolent Bond
http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2009/04/07/albert_broccoli_cloisters_wing_feature.shtml
By Linda Serck


Some of the most important people from the James Bond film franchise were in Wokingham on Monday 7 April 2009 to unveil a special plaque. We chat to late Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli's family to find out more.

James Bond locations are famously exotic and outlandish, be it Casino de Monte-Carlo or crystal-clear waters containing one Ursula Andress.

But on Monday 7 April 2009 the family of Bond producer Albert R. 'Cubby' Broccoli visited an altogether more serene location in leafy Wokingham.


Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson

Daughter Barbara Broccoli, herself a producer, and her half-brother Michael G Wilson unveiled a special plaque outside Glebelands, the film and TV industry retirement and care home.

Glebelands received a £1 million cash injection from the Albert R. Broccoli and Dana Broccoli Foundation, and the plaque officially marked the renaming of the Cloisters building at Glebelands as the Broccoli Cloisters.

As well as the inaugeration the Broccoli clan met up with residents and walked round the facilities.

Barbara Broccoli, who received an OBE for her services to the film industry, tells BBC Berkshire: "The Bond films were made in Great Britain, they were started by my father Albert Broccoli, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1952 and felt England was home.

"He felt that he was very lucky and had a wonderful professional career here and always wanted to support the people in the industry that helped make him a successful producer."


James Bond creator Ian Fleming with co-producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. 'Cubby' Broccoli.

She was joined by Samantha Bond, who played Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan, but also by Glebelands resident Lewis Gilbert, who directed You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.

"And what fantastic films they turned out to be," he says, "and not because I directed them, but because Albert Broccoli produced them."

He adds: "I directed 40 films, but why is it that the three Bond films that I worked on - they live in my memory so much.

"It's because of something very unique in the film industry and that was Broccoli himself.
The plaque


The plaque

"I've made many films with every kind of producer that there was but Broccoli had something that was a very rare commodity as a film producer - he cared, he cared for the unit, he was unique in the way he behaved with the unit and the way the unit loved him.

"Units don't love the producer, he's there to bully them and make them work harder, but Broccoli had this unique way of talking to people, you knew he cared whether you were happy or unhappy."

Michael G Wilson, step-son of Cubby Broccoli and producer/ screenwriter of James Bond films, says that his step-father was actively involved in the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund (CTBF), which runs Glebelands:

"I think it's been fantastic to come out here and see this place, we met the residents, we looked in the rooms, this is something that Cubby and his wife Dana would've loved to have seen,


Fiona Fullerton, Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli, Tanya Roberts and Roger Moore, during the making of A View to a Kill at Pinewood Studios.

"They were always interested in the welfare of the people in the industry, they were always lending a helping hand.

"Cubby was a governor of the CTBF and this is something that he would have been very proud of."

Barbara adds: "I'm feeling very proud, today were are kicking off the Albert R Broccoli centenary year and I feel this is an appropriate way of doing it, and if he were here, this is what he'd be doing."

Broccoli's late wife Dana founded launched the foundation with Barbara and Michael. It supports the arts, children's services, medicine, and higher education.

2010: Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson with David Pope engage in an international phone conversation to discuss whether the next Bond film production can go forward considering the state of MGM.

THR Cover: How the Bond Franchise Almost Died
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bond-franchise-daniel-craigs-skyfall-387238
After MGM's collapse
threatened to derail 007 for
good, "Skyfall's" $17 million
star Daniel Craig lined up
director Sam Mendes and
villain Javier Bardem -- over
drinks — and delivered the
biggest Bond yet.

This story first appeared in the Nov. 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.


On April 19, 2010, James Bond effectively died. After almost a year and a half of trying to get a new 007 film made while its parent studio, MGM, was spiraling toward bankruptcy, producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson finally pulled the plug.

PHOTOS: The Making of 'Skyfall': Bond is Back, Better Than Ever

That's when the London-based half-siblings issued a statement: "Due to the continuing uncertainty surrounding the future of MGM and the failure to close a sale of the studio, we have suspended development of Bond 23 indefinitely. We do not know when development will resume."

Today, the 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, has opened to record numbers at the European box office and is drawing rave reviews from critics. It earned $287 million in its first 10 days, boding well for the picture's Nov. 9 debut in the U.S. Its success will add significantly not only to the franchise's value (which some estimate as high as $1.2 billion), but also to that of MGM, which co-owns Bond with Broccoli and Wilson and is expected to launch an initial public offering in 2013.

That is great news for MGM and Sony, which jointly financed the roughly $210 million film (less than $200 million after tax breaks) and for Daniel Craig, 44, who earned $17 million for his third outing as Ian Fleming's spy.

All this seemed a distant dream, however, back in 2010.

"We were gutted," says Broccoli, who took over the series from her late father, Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli. "But the physical studio, Pinewood, was on hold, and so were people all around the world, and we had no choice. It was a horrible thing to do, and we'd already been through all this before." She had vivid memories of the years Bond spent in the wilderness, between Timothy Dalton's final 007 venture, 1989's Licence to Kill [sic], and Pierce Brosnan's first, 1995's GoldenEye: "We thought, 'Here we go again.' "[/qutoe]
Skyfall first really kicked into life in 2009, when American Beauty's Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes, ran into Craig at a birthday party for their mutual friend Hugh Jackman in New York City.

"It was in the evening, and Sam turned up late," Craig recalls of the man who previously had directed him in 2002's Road to Perdition. "I hadn't seen him for a long time and he apologized for saying to Entertainment Weekly that I wouldn't be a good Bond! He was also complimentary about Casino Royale. And, very selfishly, I started picking his brains."

As their conversation escalated, Craig discussed how he wanted to restore a sense of humor to Bond, one that he had initially felt uncomfortable with and was mostly absent from 2006's Casino Royale and 2008's Quantum of Solace. The actor confided his desire for the new film to be very much a contemporary thriller. In turn, "Sam's ideas started coming out, and I'd had a few too many drinks and I completely overstepped the line and said, 'Why don't you do it?' And Sam said, 'Why not?' "

The next day, Craig sheepishly called Broccoli and Wilson to mention the conversation, and discovered they were thrilled. The producers had been wrestling with a treatment written by Peter Morgan (The Queen) and regular Bond scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, but they were dissatisfied with the storyline and hadn't even approached a director. Martin Campbell, who'd already rebooted Bond twice -- with Casino Royale and GoldenEye -- had made it clear he wanted to move on to other challenges, while Marc Forster's Quantum had been met with widespread critical indifference, even though it earned $586 million around the world.

So, two weeks after the Craig call, Broccoli, 52, and Wilson, 69, flew to New York and had lunch with Mendes at Cookshop restaurant in Chelsea, close to his then-home.

"I was very honest about Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and where I thought it might be possible to take this movie, in the most general of terms," Mendes recalls. "Michael did say at one point, 'Why would an auteur or somebody who has a career in serious pictures want to do a Bond movie?' I said, 'Bond is a serious movie.' And I stuck to that throughout."

He continues: "I wanted to know, would they consider killing M and bringing back Q and Moneypenny? And did they want -- as I did -- a more flamboyant, old-style villain, the sort that emerged in the Sean Connery movies? And the answer to all those things was yes. And that was in many ways our starting point for working out what the story would be."

From fall 2009 into 2010, Mendes, 47 -- whose last movie was the 2009 low-budget dramedy Away We Go -- refined the script with Purvis and Wade, and also persuaded nine-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men) to join the team.

Everything seemed headed toward a late 2010 start -- and then the continuing financial issues that had plagued MGM reached their nadir.

"They couldn't guarantee anything," Broccoli laments. "The company was going into bankruptcy, and they didn't know how it was going to emerge. But we needed to know we would have financing and distribution -- and there was no deal with Sony in place at the time." (Sony had distributed the previous two Bond films.)

Mendes admits he seriously considered pulling out. In London, following his split with wife Kate Winslet, he was developing an adaptation of Ian McEwan's 1960s-based drama On Chesil Beach but had problems casting it. Other offers came his way -- he even had brief talks about helming The Hunger Games -- and yet he resisted.

"I was tempted to go," he acknowledges. "I said to Barbara, 'Can you give me some assurance this is going to happen?' She said, 'To be honest, I can't.' But I had a feeling it would be sorted out, so I took the risk of turning down other work and just waiting." Later, Mendes says he came to regard the forced break as a gift: "While we sat around waiting, we quietly carried on with the script, and as a consequence we ended up with a much better draft."

The director then took the Purvis and Wade draft to longtime friend and screenwriter John Logan (The Aviator). "He and I spent about six weeks together just talking," Mendes says. "He came to me in London, and even joined me when I went to visit my kids in Paris [where Winslet was shooting Carnage]. He wanted answers to every single question: what the shape of the film would be, what we would retain, what we would abandon."

Logan praises the script he received as a "great machine" and saw his job "not so much about cataloguing changes as bringing a certain sensibility to the material" -- helped by his familiarity with Fleming's novels. "I'm a great fan of the books and coincidentally had listened to all of them," he notes. (He reportedly has since been hired to work on scripts for Bond 24 and Bond 25, which may, for the first time, carry a story across two movies.)

The writer and director discussed favorite films that might color various sequences, including Charles Laughton's haunting 1955 drama The Night of the Hunter. "Sam and I talked a lot about why a Bond movie is a Bond movie and not a Bourne or a John le Carre," Logan says. "It has to do with that intense seriousness and a pain that hurts and also this sense of panache and elegance."

Before the Skyfall machinery could fully be engaged, MGM's financial uncertainty had to be resolved. Broccoli and Wilson shuttled endlessly across the Atlantic.

"We had different meetings with everyone from [MGM CEO] Harry Sloan [before he was pushed out in August 2009] to Stephen Cooper, who was brought in [as MGM vice chairman] by all the equity guys to reorganize the company. We had meetings in Los Angeles, in New York, all over the place. We were meeting a lot of people, because it was a revolving door, and to try and get a handle on the situation was chaotic. It didn't look like it was going to be resolved for some time and we didn't want to be a pawn in all this. The whole situation looked very opaque."

Saddled with debt, MGM desperately sought a buyer but failed to find one willing to meet its $2 billion minimum asking price. Without that, the studio simply didn't have the cash to fund Bond.

Broccoli, Wilson and their Los Angeles-based colleague David Pope arranged a transatlantic telephone call on April 7, 2010, to discuss whether they could realistically go ahead, bearing in mind that Mendes' option had to be exercised by May 31 or they would lose him.

"Between April 7 and April 15, we had discussions with both Sony and Warners [potential MGM buyers] and realized nothing was going to happen with MGM before the summer," says Pope, a co-producer on Skyfall and CEO of Danjaq Llc., which controls many of the rights to Bond. "We were trying to work out, would MGM be stable enough for us to engage [Mendes]? It became clear that things would be up in the air for a while."

On April 17, Broccoli, Wilson and Pope had one final conversation on the subject in which "we made the decision to postpone the film -- and on April 19 we announced the delay," says Pope.

"You feel devastated," notes Wilson. "A lot of people had come to us and said, 'Should we take this other thing?' And people would hang back and not commit to those things -- and that's a terrible thing to do. At a certain point, we just had to cut the cord."

Broccoli adds: "We had suffered through a six-year hiatus and were looking at the possibility of the same thing again. We had the 747 loaded up and ready to go down the runway, and we were being told MGM was going into bankruptcy. It was a very perilous situation."

When the studio emerged from bankruptcy at the very end of 2010, however, everything changed. Its new owners brought in former Spyglass chiefs Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum as co-chairmen (Birnbaum has since departed) and, more important, they obtained a $500 million revolving credit line through JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank.

Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chair Amy Pascal was keen to move ahead, and agreed to a complex deal through which Sony funded the film with MGM, also taking a stake in Bond 24, while MGM co-financed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

The film that had variously been known as Silver Bullet, A Killing Moon and Once Upon a Spy -- as well as Bond 23 -- finally was a go.

Now the production team began to lock in the elements -- not least signing Javier Bardem to play Raoul Silva, a flamboyant and probably gay former agent whose mission is to destroy M (Judi Dench).

Mendes disputes reports that he talked to Anthony Hopkins and Kevin Spacey about joining the cast, and Bardem confirms he started conversations after being collared by Craig -- like Mendes. "I was at a fund-raiser for Haiti at [Crash director and Casino Royale writer] Paul Haggis' house," Bardem explains, "and Daniel approached me. Of course, he excused himself for bringing business into the conversation, but he asked, 'Would you be interested in doing a Bond movie?' And I said yes. Daniel is the soul of the whole thing."

The Spanish actor immersed himself in his role, having the screenplay translated into his native tongue. "I usually do that, because there is something organic to the words, and when you are speaking a language that is not your mother tongue, words can be misunderstood," he observes. "You need to have the emotional knowledge."

Even before that translation, "The first time I read the script, I knew there was something very powerful," he says. "And then I spoke to Sam, and he told me the key word for the character was uncomfortable. This was not about creating fear or menace; it was about creating an uncomfortable situation for the others."

While Bardem experimented with different looks, eventually dyeing his hair blond for the role, the production team searched for the sort of exotic locations that have long been critical to the Bond brand. At first, the film was meant to open in Mumbai, with a long chase that has Bond racing through a densely populated market, jumping on a motorbike and eventually fighting an opponent on top of a train as it hurtles into the countryside.

But Mendes' hopes of filming in Mumbai were dashed when he discovered the sheer impracticality of an Indian shoot. "It is logistically incredibly difficult to shut down the center of an enormous Indian city," he says. "We tried to make it work and to embrace the chaos, but in the end there were too many dangers -- I don't mean from people trying to sabotage production, but there are narrow streets [that are difficult to film in]. I was very disappointed."

Exploratory trips to Cape Town and Johannesburg proved equally fruitless. And then, for the first time in his life, Mendes visited Istanbul. "I found it was everything we wanted and more, and gave us so many ideas," he says. "Suddenly you are walking through the Grand Bazaar and someone says, 'You can go up on the roof,' and then you find a way of factoring that into the story," with Bond's pursuit leading him over the rooftops of the city.


Budget limitations restricted plans for filming in Shanghai and Macao to just four nights in the former; an ultra-modern stadium at England's famed Ascot racecourse stood in for Shanghai's Pudong International Airport.

Shooting began Nov. 7, 2011, in London, with a simple scene in which Bond drives into a subway tunnel, and the crew -- numbering about 400 at its peak -- subsequently moved to the "Bond stage," the vast space at Pinewood Studios just west of London, where they would work for almost a year. There, they filmed one of the most challenging sequences ever shot for a Bond feature, where a subway train crashes through a roof and into an underground hideout.

"That was real, not CGI," Mendes observes. "The head of special effects, Chris Corbould, constructed a track high above the set that was pointed down so that the train came crashing through the roof. We built two carriages and crashed them through the ceiling, and shot it with 11 cameras. We had to evacuate the stage to shoot, and when it came crashing through, it dismantled most of the 007 stage."

"It was a one-shot deal," he adds. "If it hadn't worked out, it would have been two million quid [roughly $3 million] to reshoot. That was pretty nerve-racking."

So was the opening sequence, which has Craig (strapped to a safety wire in reality) chasing that opponent on top of a moving train. It ended up being just about the last thing filmed and eventually involved three separate Turkish cities -- Istanbul, Fethiye and Adana -- where it was shot over 53 days.

"You are literally only getting one setup every four or five hours and having to work around the local train timetable, and it was 110 degrees," Mendes notes. "That's where Daniel's real heroism came in: He was on top of the train in a suit, attached by a wire." With all the takes, he needed "something like 30 different versions of the same gray suit" in different states of disrepair, Mendes laughs. "And these were very fine suits!"

British actress Naomie Harris, who plays one of the two Bond girls -- she was hired on the recommendation of director Danny Boyle, who had worked with her on 28 Days Later, and she likely will have a recurring role in future films -- remembers feeling guilty when she messed up a shot. "I was shooting and I left my safety catch on the gun, and everyone said, 'Fire!' -- and there was nothing. That was a massive wait, and I felt awful."

Throughout the 127-day shoot, which wrapped May 25, Mendes insisted on live action rather than CGI wherever possible. Indeed, there are only 500-some-odd CGI shots in the 143-minute movie (including one where MI6's London headquarters is blown up), compared to more than 2,200 effects shots in The Avengers. This meant Craig had to perform many of the stunts in difficult situations. And yet the only injury he suffered came during rehearsals, forcing two weeks of the film to be rescheduled while he healed.

"I tore a muscle in my calf doing something completely innocuous," he remembers. "I was trying to kick a stunt man, and stepped back on my foot. I heard it go snap and thought, 'Who the f-- did that!' "


The pain, both real and metaphysical, has paid off.

"Dramatically gripping while still brandishing a droll undercurrent of humor, this beautifully made film certainly will be embraced as one of the best Bonds," wrote THR's chief movie critic, Todd McCarthy, adding that it "leaves you wanting the next one to turn up sooner than four years from now."

If MGM has its way, it will. Bond's return to the screen has been crucial to the studio, whose anticipated IPO features the Bond franchise and Peter Jackson's upcoming The Hobbit trilogy as its two prized possessions, along with a library of 4,000 titles.

Analysts are reluctant to place a value on Bond, whose ticket sales to date have reached almost $5 billion -- not to mention billions more in DVD and ancillary sales -- but the combined promise of Skyfall and The Hobbit have increased MGM's value.

On Oct. 22, THR revealed that MGM Holdings had decided to delay the IPO, which insiders believe will take place in 2013 rather than before Skyfall's opening, as originally planned. That's largely based on the studio's confidence in Skyfall and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which opens Dec. 14.

"[Skyfall's success] would be incrementally positive to any proposed stock offering," says Piper Jaffray analyst James Marsh. "First, it likely increases estimates. It also likely raises the short-term growth rate, improves predictability of future cash flow. It was debatable if this franchise was getting a little long in the tooth; outperformance like this suggests it has a longer life."

If it does, MGM can thank Broccoli and Wilson, who have devoted most of their own lives to Fleming's creation. They recently signed Craig for at least two and possibly three more movies and hope to have the next Bond ready a couple of years from now. "It's been a great partnership," Broccoli says of Craig. "You couldn't ask for a better leading man."

Still, after four years on Skyfall, she admits she is too exhausted to think far ahead. "We only finished the film last Wednesday," she said on Thursday, Oct. 18, as she raced from one press conference to another. "We warned Sam how tired he'd be, but he didn't quite believe it. Right now we just want to enjoy the moment."

2017: Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith dies at age 70--Northampton, England.
(Born 13 May 1946--Rugby, Warwickshire, England.)

Tim Pigott-Smith obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/apr/09/tim-pigott-smith-obituary
Stage and screen actor best known for his role in the TV series The Jewel in the Crown
Michael Coveney | Sun 9 Apr 2017 13.34 EDT
Last modified on Tue 19 Dec 2017 15.56 EST


Tim Pigott-Smith as Ronald Merrick, with Siddharth Kak (right), in The Jewel in the Crown, Granada TV’s adaptation of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels. Photograph: ITV/Rex

The only unexpected thing about the wonderful actor Tim Pigott-Smith, who has died aged 70, was that he never played Iago or, indeed, Richard III. Having marked out a special line in sadistic villainy as Ronald Merrick in his career-defining, Bafta award-winning performance in The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Granada TV’s adaptation for ITV of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels, he built a portfolio of characters both good and bad who were invariably presented with layers of technical accomplishment and emotional complexity.


Tim Pigott-Smith in the title role of
Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III at the
Almeida theatre in 2014. Photograph:
Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

He emerged as a genuine leading actor in Shakespeare, contemporary plays by Michael Frayn – in Frayn’s Benefactors (1984) he was a malicious, Iago-like journalist undermining a neighbouring college chum’s ambitions as an architect – and Stephen Poliakoff, American classics by Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee, and as a go-to screen embodiment of high-ranking police officers and politicians, usually served with a twist of lemon and a side order of menace and sarcasm.

He played a highly respectable King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2011, but that performance was eclipsed, three years later, by his subtle, affecting and principled turn in the title role of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III (soon to be seen in a television version) at the Almeida, in the West End and on Broadway, for which he received nominations in both the Olivier and Tony awards. The play, written in Shakespearean iambics, was set in a futuristic limbo, before the coronation, when Charles refuses to grant his royal assent to a Labour prime minister’s press regulation bill.

The interregnum cliffhanger quality to the show was ideal for Pigott-Smith’s ability to simultaneously project the spine and the jelly of a character, and he brilliantly suggested an accurate portrait of the future king without cheapening his portrayal of him. Although not primarily a physical actor, like Laurence Olivier, he was aware of his attributes, once saying that the camera “does something to my eyes, particularly on my left side in profile”, something to do with the eye being quite low and “being able to see some white underneath the pupil”. It was this physical accident, not necessarily any skill, he modestly maintained, which gave him a menacing look on film and television, “as if I am thinking more than one thing”.

Tim Pigott-Smith: a man born to play kings

Born in Rugby, Tim was the only child of Harry Pigott-Smith, a journalist, and his wife Margaret (nee Goodman), a keen amateur actor, and was educated at Wyggeston boys’ school in Leicester and – when his father was appointed to the editorship of the Herald in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962 – King Edward VI grammar school, where Shakespeare was a pupil. Attending the Royal Shakespeare theatre, he was transfixed by John Barton and Peter Hall’s Wars of the Roses production, and the actors: Peggy Ashcroft, with whom he would one day appear in The Jewel in the Crown, Ian Holm and David Warner. He took a part‑time job in the RSC’s paint shop.

At Bristol University he gained a degree in English, French and drama (1967), and at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school he graduated from the training course (1969) alongside Jeremy Irons and Christopher Biggins as acting stage managers in the Bristol Old Vic company. He joined the Prospect touring company as Balthazar in Much Ado with John Neville and Sylvia Syms and then as the Player King and, later, Laertes to Ian McKellen’s febrile Hamlet. Back with the RSC he played Posthumus in Barton’s fine 1974 production of Cymbeline and Dr Watson in William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, opposite John Wood’s definitive detective, at the Aldwych and on Broadway. He further established himself in repertory at Birmingham, Cambridge and Nottingham.


Tim Pigott-Smith as the avuncular businessman Ken Lay in Lucy Prebble’s Enron at the Minerva theatre, Chichester, in 2009. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

He was busy in television from 1970, appearing in two Doctor Who sagas, The Claws of Axos (1971) and The Masque of Mandragora (1976), as well as in the first of the BBC’s adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1975, as Frederick Hale; in the second, in 2004, he played Hale’s father, Richard). His first films were Jack Gold’s Aces High (1976), adapted by Howard Barker from RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End, and Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews (1977). His first Shakespeare leads were in the BBC’s Shakespeare series – Angelo in Measure for Measure and Hotspur in Henry IV Part One (both 1979).

A long association with Hall began at the National Theatre in 1987, when he played a coruscating half-hour interrogation scene with Maggie Smith in Hall’s production of Coming in to Land by Poliakoff; he was a Dostoeyvskyan immigration officer, Smith a desperate, and despairing, Polish immigrant. In Hall’s farewell season of Shakespeare’s late romances in 1988, he led the company alongside Michael Bryant and Eileen Atkins, playing a clenched and possessed Leontes in The Winter’s Tale; an Italianate, jesting Iachimo in Cymbeline; and a gloriously drunken Trinculo in The Tempest (he played Prospero for Adrian Noble at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2012).
Tim Pigott-Smith: how Ian McKellen made me raise my acting game
Read more

The Falstaff on television when he played Hotspur was Anthony Quayle, and he succeeded this great actor, whom he much admired as director of the touring Compass Theatre in 1989, playing Brutus in Julius Caesar and Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. When the Arts Council cut funding to Compass, he extended his rogue’s gallery with a sulphurous Rochester in Fay Weldon’s adaptation of Jane Eyre, on tour and at the Playhouse, in a phantasmagorical production by Helena Kaut-Howson, with Alexandra Mathie as Jane (1993); and, back at the NT, as a magnificent, treacherous Leicester in Howard Davies’ remarkable revival of Schiller’s Mary Stuart (1996) with Isabelle Huppert as a sensual Mary and Anna Massey a bitterly prim Elizabeth.

In that same National season, he teamed with Simon Callow (as Face) and Josie Lawrence (as Doll Common) in a co-production by Bill Alexander for the Birmingham Rep of Ben Jonson’s trickstering, two-faced masterpiece The Alchemist; he was a comically pious Subtle in sackcloth and sandals. He pulled himself together as a wryly observant Larry Slade in one of the landmark productions of the past 20 years: O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida in 1998, transferring to the Old Vic, and to Broadway, with Kevin Spacey as the salesman Hickey revisiting the last chance saloon where Pigott-Smith propped up the bar with Rupert Graves, Mark Strong and Clarke Peters in Davies’ great production.

He and Davies combined again, with Helen Mirren and Eve Best, in a monumental NT revival (designed by Bob Crowley) of O’Neill’s epic Mourning Becomes Electra in 2003. Pigott-Smith recycled his ersatz “Agamemnon” role of the returning civil war hero, Ezra Mannon, as the real Agamemnon, fiercely sarcastic while measuring a dollop of decency against weasel expediency, in Euripides’ Hecuba at the Donmar Warehouse in 2004. In complete contrast, his controlled but hilarious Bishop of Lax in Douglas Hodge’s 2006 revival of Philip King’s See How They Run at the Duchess suggested he had done far too little outright comedy in his career.


Tim Pigott-Smith as King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2011. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Television roles after The Jewel in the Crown included the titular chief constable, John Stafford, in The Chief (1990-93) and the much sleazier chief inspector Frank Vickers in The Vice (2001-03). On film, he showed up in The Remains of the Day (1993); Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002), a harrowing documentary reconstruction of the protest and massacre in Derry in 1972; as Pegasus, head of MI7, in Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English (2003) and the foreign secretary in the Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008).

Tim Pigott-Smith: a life on stage and screen – in pictures

In the last decade of his life he achieved an amazing roster of stage performances, including a superb Henry Higgins, directed by Hall, in Pygmalion (2008); the avuncular, golf-loving entrepreneur Ken Lay in Lucy Prebble’s extraordinary Enron (2009), a play that proved there was no business like big business; the placatory Tobias, opposite Penelope Wilton, in Albee’s A Delicate Balance at the Almeida in 2011; and the humiliated George, opposite his Hecuba, Clare Higgins, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, at Bath.

At the start of this year he was appointed OBE. His last television appearance came as Mr Sniggs, the junior dean of Scone College, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, starring Jack Whitehall. He had been due to open as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in Northampton prior to a long tour.

Pigott-Smith was a keen sportsman, loved the countryside and wrote four short books, three of them for children.

In 1972 he married the actor Pamela Miles. She survives him, along with their son, Tom, a violinist, and two grandchildren, Imogen and Gabriel.

• Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith, actor, born 13 May 1946; died 7 April 2017

This article was amended on 10 April 2017. Tim Pigott-Smith’s early performance as Balthazar in Much Ado About Nothing was with the Prospect touring company rather than with the Bristol Old Vic.

2018: Heritage Auctions' April 7-8 Movie Poster Auction in Dallas, Texas, includes one of Bond's rarest: the Thunderball advance British quad. Plus many other Bond pieces.

https://movieposters.ha.com/c/search-results.zx?N=54+793+794+791+792+2088&Ntk=SI_Titles&Nty=1&Ntt=bond&ic4=KeywordSearch-A-K-071316

LOT #86419 |
Thunderball (United Artists, 1965).
British Quad (30" X 40") Advance Quad Crown Style, Frank McCarthy and Robert McGinnis
https://movieposters.ha.com/itm/james-bond/thunderball-united-artists-1965-british-quad-30-x-40-advance-quad-crown-style-frank-mccarthy-and-robert-mcginnis-ar/a/7178-86419.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515

RichardTheBruce

April 8th

1931: John Gavin (Juan Vincent Apablasa) is born--Los Angeles, California.
(He dies 9 February 2018 at age 86--Beverly Hills, California.)

John Gavin, Actor in ‘Psycho’
and ‘Spartacus,’ Dies at 86
https://variety.com/2018/film/news/john-gavin-dead-dies-psycho-spartacus-1202694312/
By Carmel Dagan | Staff Writer


CREDIT: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

John Gavin, who reached the pinnacle of his acting career with roles in Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and the epic “Spartacus,” later serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the early ’70s and as U.S. ambassador to Mexico under Ronald Reagan, died Friday morning in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 86.

The actor was signed to a contract and almost played James Bond in the film “Diamonds Are Forever.”

Gavin was SAG president from 1971-73 and was President Reagan’s first ambassador to Mexico from 1981-86.

His two films with German-born director Douglas Sirk in the late 1950s, “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” and “Imitation of Life,” greatly raised his profile in Hollywood and around the country.

Shot in black-and-white CinemaScope, and adapted from the novel by “All Quiet on the Western Front” author Erich Maria Remarque, “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” (1958) was the first film in which Gavin starred, and the Sirk melodrama was remarkable for its sympathetic portrait of Germans near the end of WWII — made just 13 years after that war to defeat the Nazis had ended. Gavin portrayed a weary German soldier returning from the Russian front to a Hamburg destroyed by Allied bombing. Fruitlessly searching for his family, he falls in love with fellow orphan Elisabeth (Liselotte Pulver), but both of them know he must return to the front.

Critic Daniel Green wrote: “As with any Sirk melodrama, however, ‘A Time to Love and a Time to Die’ inevitably comes to hinge upon the on-screen chemistry between its two love-struck leads. Fortunately, audiences were/will once again treated to yet another masterclass in romanticism, as Ernst and Elisabeth’s potentially blissful future is briefly glimpsed before being tragically snatched away in a cruel, almost trademark twist of fate.”

The Los Angeles Times said the film, while not as good as “All Quiet on the Western Front,” was “vivid, sometimes brutally shocking and, less often, emotionally moving,” while Gavin gave a “sensible, likeable” performance.

Sirk followed with a remake of the 1934 film “Imitation of Life” that was the biggest box office success at Universal until “Airport” in 1970 and the fourth-most successful film of 1959 overall, grossing $6.4 million. That film, dismissed by many critics at the time as a soap opera, is now generally considered a masterpiece of complex storytelling.

In a 2015 review, the Village Voice said, “Fifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s ‘Imitation of Life’ remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country.”

The success of the film was good for his career, but it did not do well because of Gavin. Though he was second billed after Lana Turner, his character was ancillary to the main storyline involving two mother-daughter pairs. Gavin’s Steve Archer loves Turner’s Lora Meredith but is rejected by her; he later becomes involved with Lora’s daughter, played by Sandra Dee, but he rejects her because he still loves Lora.

He next appeared in the Michael Curtiz-directed “A Breath of Scandal,” starring Sophia Loren and Maurice Chevalier, but far more important was the film after that: Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” in which he played Sam Loomis, the boyfriend of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, who frets that they don’t have enough money, steals some from the office where she works, drives to a secluded motel and…. Just as in “Imitation of Life,” Gavin’s role in “Psycho” was not central, but despite the initially mixed critical reception, the film was an extraordinary box office success, which benefitted all associated with it.

His next film was the Stanley Kubrick-directed “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas as the slave who leads a rebellion in Ancient Rome. Gavin played the supporting role of Julius Caesar, who is the protege of Roman Senator Gracchus (Charles Laughton), who uses this rebellion to advance the career of Caesar. The film was extraordinarily successful at the box office and won four Oscars.

Gavin next appeared in a supporting role in the mystery-thriller “Midnight Lace,” starring Doris Day and Rex Harrison, and he starred with his “Spartacus” co-star Peter Ustinov and Sandra Dee in the Ustinov-written and -directed “Romanoff and Juliet,” a satirical love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War, and again with Dee in the comedy “Tammy Tell Me True.”

Gavin also starred in the mediocre melodrama “Back Street” with Susan Hayward and Vera Miles.

At this point Gavin began transitioning to television roles, but he let out his frustrations over his film career in an interview with Hedda Hopper: “When I walked through the gate, Universal quit building actors. All of a sudden I was doing leading roles. I knew I was a tyro but they told me to shut up and act. Some of those early roles were unactable. Even Laurence Olivier couldn’t have done anything with them. The dialog ran to cardboard passages such as ‘I love you. You can rely on me darling. I’ll wait.’ It was all I could do to keep from adding, ‘with egg on my face’ … There was no studio system to let me work my way up through small roles. When I got up on my hind legs, no one would believe it.”

He starred in ABC’s single-season Western “Destry” in 1964; in NBC’s single-season WWII drama “Convoy” in 1965; and guested on shows ranging from “The Doris Day Show” to “Mannix.”

In the late ’60s he returned to film work, starring in Carlos Velo’s Spanish-language art film “Pedro Paramo,” based on the novel that Susan Sontag called “one of the masterpieces of 20th-century world literature.” Also in 1967 he had a supporting role in the Julie Andrews musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” The following year he starred in Italian-French spy thriller “OSS 117 — Double Agent,” and Gavin had a supporting role in “The Madwoman of Chaillot” (1969), starring Katharine Hepburn.

After the departure of George Lazenby, Gavin was signed to play James Bond in the 1971 film “Diamonds Are Forever,” but United Artists ultimately decided to make an offer that Sean Connery couldn’t refuse, and he returned to play 007. Gavin’s contract was nevertheless honored in full.

He continued doing TV guest appearances until 1981.

John Anthony Golenor was born in Los Angeles, a fifth-generation Angeleno on his father’s side, descended from early Spanish land owners in colonial California; his mother was a Mexican-born aristocrat. His father, however, changed the family surname to Gavin.

He graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in economics and Latin American affairs, completing senior honors work in Latin American economic history; Gavin later said that while in college he had no interest in acting whatsoever. He told the Washington Post in 1960 that despite the history of his family on both sides, he was not rich and in fact had attended Stanford on scholarship.

With the onset of the Korean War, Gavin was commissioned in the Navy, serving aboard the USS Princeton off Korea as an air intelligence officer from 1951 until the war’s end in 1953. Because of his fluency in Spanish and Portuguese, Gavin was assigned as flag lieutenant to Admiral Milton E. Miles until he completed his four-year tour of duty in 1955.

Gavin entered into an acting career in a roundabout way. Family friend Bryan Foy was making a movie about the aircraft carrier on which he’d served, and Gavin offered to serve as a technical adviser, but Foy instead arranged for Gavin to have a screen test at Universal. Gavin was reluctant, but his father urged him on. After a successful test, the studio signed Gavin to a contract; he later told the Los Angeles Times that “they offered me so much money I couldn’t resist.”

He made his debut in the 1956 Western “Raw Edge,” billed as John Gilmore; on his next film, crime drama “Behind the High Wall,” he was billed as John Golenor. The young actor was finally billed as John Gavin on this third film, “Four Girls in Town.” The Western “Quantez” was a step up, as it starred Fred MacMurray and Dorothy Malone.

With his role in Douglas Sirk’s 1958 film “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” Gavin began the period of a few years in which he had a high profile in Hollywood.

Gavin began serving on the board of the Screen Actors Guild in 1965. He served one term as third vice president, and two terms as first VP. He was president from 1971 to 1973. The SAG website says that while he was president, “He testified before the Federal Trade Commission on phony talent rackets; met with President Richard Nixon to present the problem of excessive television reruns; presented petitions to the federal government on issues of prime-time access rules, legislative assistance for American motion pictures (to combat runaway production), and film production by the government using non-professional actors.”

The Los Angeles Times characterized U.S. Ambassador Gavin as an “activist envoy to Mexico” who “won praise in many circles for his handling of such issues as trade and illegal drug dealing as well as for speaking out against anti-American sentiment. But his candor and meetings with critics of the ruling party prompted accusations by Mexicans of meddling in the country’s domestic affairs.”

In 1991, the Republican mulled a run for the Senate, but decided against it.

Gavin was twice married, the first time to Cicely Evans from 1957-65.

He is survived by his wife, actress Constance Towers, two children and two step-children.

1957: Jonathan Cape publishes Ian Fleming’s fifth Bond novel From Russia With Love.

FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE

SMERSH is the Soviet organ of vengeance
-- of interrogation, torture and death --
and James Bond is dedicated to the
destruction of its agents wherever he finds
them.

But, in its turn, the cold eye of SMERSH
focuses on James Bond and far away in
Moscow a trap is laid for him -- a death-
trap with an enticing lure.

Ian Fleming takes us into the head-
quarters of SMERSH. We watch Bond's
assassination being minutely devised. We
meet the executioner. We sit in at the
planning. We inspect the lure.

Then the lever is pulled in Moscow
and in London, Istanbul and Paris the
wheels begin to turn. . . .

Ian Fleming's other Secret Service
thrillers -- Casino Royale, Live and Let Die,
Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever -- may
have made your pulse race.

Be careful of From Russia With Love. Weak nerves
will be shredded by it.

Jacket devised by the author and executed
by Richard Chopping.

The revolver is a Smith & Wesson
Military and Police Model in .38 S. & W.
calibre. Barrel cut to 2-3/4 in., stock modified
and front trigger guard removed to
facilitate use as a close-combat holster
weapon. Also fitted with a 'quick draw'
ramp foresight and adjustable rear sight for
aimed fire. Modified by, and the property
of, Geoffrey Boothroyd.

1964: From Russia With Love has its US premiere in New York City. (That's after the London premiere 10 October 1963/UK release 11 October 1963, and prior to the US general release 27 May 1964.)
2017: Ian Fleming Publications releases a 60th anniversary image recognizing From Russia With Love.

2019: Nadja Regin (Nadja Poderegin) dies at age 87. (Born 2 December 1931--Niš, Serbia.)

Nadja Regin, Bond Girl in
‘From Russia With Love’ and
‘Goldfinger,’ Dies at 87
https://variety.com/2019/film/obituaries-people-news/obituary-nadja-regin-james-bond-movies-1203183106/
By Dave McNary | April 8, 2019 10:14AM PT


Credit: Photo by Danjaq/Eon/Ua/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock (5886267ec)Sean Connery, Nadja Regin
CREDIT: Danjaq/Eon/Ua/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Serbian actress Nadja Regin, who appeared in two early James Bond movies, has died at the age of 87.

The news was announced on the official 007 Twitter account, which said: “We are very sorry to learn that Nadja Regin has passed away at the age of 87. Nadja appeared in two Bond films, ‘From Russia with Love’ and ‘Goldfinger.’ Our thoughts are with her family and friends at this sad time.”

She was born as Nadezda Poderegin on Dec. 2, 1931, and began acting while a student. She graduated from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and also the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Philosophy.

Regin began appearing in British films in the late 1950s and early 1960s, starting with the horror film “The Man Without a Body,” followed by the comedy “Don’t Panic Chaps!,” “Edgar Wallace Mysteries,” “Solo for Sparrow” and “The Fur Collar.” TV roles included “Danger Man,” “The Saint” and “Dixon of Dock Green.”

She acted in “From Russia with Love” as the mistress of Kerim Bey, portrayed by Pedro Armendariz as the station chief of MI6 in Istanbul. Regin also appeared as Bonita, a dancer who sets a trap for James Bond in the pre-credit sequence of “Goldfinger.”

During the 1970s, Regin worked for Rank Film and horror producers Hammer, selecting film scripts for production. In 1980, she co-founded Honeyglen Publishing Ltd. She recently published her own novel, “The Victims and the Fools,” under her full name Nadja Poderegin. The book is set during World War II and is centered on a romance between a poet and a dancer.

2020: Scheduled release date for BOND 25.

RichardTheBruce

April 9th

1933: Jean-Paul Belmondo is born--Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
1963: From Russia With Love films Rosa Klebb battling Bond and Tatiana.
1974: The Man With the Golden Gun films in Thailand: the Cessna 206/Seabee; opening sequence with Scaramanga, Andrea, Nick Nack, and Rodney.
1991: Maurice Binder dies at age 72--London, England. (Born 4 December 1918--New York City, New York.)

Maurice Binder, 73, 007 Film-Title Artist
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/15/obituaries/maurice-binder-73-007-film-title-artist.html
APRIL 15, 1991

Maurice Binder, a graphic arts designer known chiefly for his dazzling title sequences in the James Bond films, died on Tuesday at the University College Hospital in London. He was 73 years old and lived in London.

He died of lung cancer, his brother, Mitchell, said.

Mr. Binder was one of the rare film-title artists to receive rave reviews for his work, which critics said was an essential part of the James Bond success story.

In a review of the 1981 film, "For Your Eyes Only," Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times: "And Maurice Binder's opening titles, always one of the fancier features of the Bond movies, are still terrific."

Mr. Binder's unusual witty designs introduced other films including "Indiscreet" in 1958; "The Mouse That Roared," 1959; "The Grass is Greener," 1960; "Repulsion," 1964, and "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," 1971.

He also produced several musicals, and in association with John Quested and Lester Goldsmith, produced the 1979 film "The Passage," starring Anthony Quinn.

Born in New York City, Mr. Binder began his career as assistant art director in Macy's art department.

A resident of London for 27 years, he was honored last year by the National Film Club.

Besides his brother, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., he is survived by two nieces.

2013: An article in NewStatesman relates Anthony Burgess' obsession with James Bond.

Anthony Burgess’s 007 obsession
Unbreakable Bond.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/03/anthony-burgesss-007-obsession
FILM - 9 April 2013
By Andrew Biswell

Ian Fleming and Anthony Burgess might seem an unlikely double act at first glance. It’s hard to imagine Fleming, the suave Old Etonian and veteran of British naval intelligence, having much time for Burgess’s defiantly northern, Catholic, working-class values. Had they met, Fleming may well have agreed with Burgess’s aristocratic pupils at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar, the “Eton of the east” (where he taught in the 1950s), one of whom later said that Burgess was “not quite a gentleman”. Although Burgess and Fleming shared an agent – the amiable Peter Janson-Smith – there is no evidence to suggest that Fleming ever took the trouble to read A Clockwork Orange or any of Burgess’s other early novels.

Yet Burgess was fascinated by Fleming and in particular by the James Bond novels, which he read with close attention after Terence Young’s film version of Dr No was released in 1962. Burgess’s book collection, now at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, includes a complete run of the Bond novels and short stories, John Pearson’s The Life of Ian Fleming, Christopher Wood’s novelisations of the films and two copies of The James Bond Bedside Companion. Like his friend Kingsley Amis (who wrote the first post-Fleming Bond novel, Colonel Sun, under the pseudonym Robert Markham), Burgess was excited by the potential of the cold war espionage novel to reach a larger readership than his upmarket literary fictions were ever likely to attract.

Writing on the occasion of Bond’s 35th anniversary in 1988, Burgess celebrated the enduring figure of the international agent known for drinking vodka Martinis and “cold lovemaking with other men’s wives”. In his general introduction to the Coronet series of James Bond reprints, Burgess identified Bond as a hero figure who seemed to defy the austerity of post-1945 Britain.

There is an element of self-identification with Fleming on Burgess’s part, since both of them had come to the writing of popular novels in their middle years. Yet Burgess was aware of the growing distance between Fleming’s novels and the series of films that threatened to displace them in the popular imagination. “Bond,” he wrote, “is often compared facially to Hoagy Carmichael, the composer of ‘Stardust’, a song hit of the 1920s, but for very young readers the name ought to be glossed in a footnote. Bond belongs to history and these are historical novels.”

Burgess’s first attempt at a spy thriller came in 1966, with the publication of Tremor of Intent, a kind of parody of the James Bond novels, featuring a British spy whose enormous appetites for food and athletic sexual intercourse cancel each other out. Having spent time with his first wife in Leningrad and having used elements of Russian vocabulary to construct an invented slang for Alex and his “droogs” in A Clockwork Orange, Burgess was well placed to write about what he had seen in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years.

It is clear from Tremor of Intent that Burgess did not share Fleming’s fathomless hatred of Soviet Russia. In From Russia, with Love, for example, Fleming presents his Soviet characters as deformed villains or sinister masturbators. Burgess’s Russians tend to be either inefficiently buffoonish or harmlessly drunk. This was a reflection of his own experience of visiting Russia for the first time in July 1961. He had expected to find an Orwellian dictatorship full of secret police. When a large fight broke out in the street outside the Metropol restaurant at 3am, no police arrived to break it up. “It is my honest opinion that there are no police in Lenin - grad,” Burgess noted shortly afterwards. When he wrote as much in the pages of the Listener, there was a complaint from the Soviet ambassador and he was officially denounced on Radio Moscow.

Tremor of Intent is also a critique of the excessive appetites to be found in Fleming’s books. One of the set pieces in Burgess’s parodic Bond novel is an eating competition between the British spy Hillier and Theodorescu, a sybaritic villain with a suspiciously perfect English accent. Burgess describes the endless courses with relish:

They got through their sweets sourly. Peach mousse with sirop framboise. Cream dessert ring Chantilly with zabaglione sauce. Poires Hélène with cold chocolate sauce. Cold Grand Marnier pudding, strawberry Marlow. Marrons panaché vicomte. “Look,” gasped Hillier, “this sort of thing isn’t my line at all . . . I think I shall be sick.”

Many critics did not notice that Burgess had written an allegory of the seven deadly sins. William Pritchard, who understood the point of Tremor of Intent, wrote in the Partisan Review: “It might be thought odd that a book whose subjects include gluttony satyriasis, covetousness, smacking self-regard and nagging self-disgust turns out to be not just human but humane.”

Determined to appeal to at least some of Fleming’s readers, Burgess told his editor at William Heinemann that he wanted a dust jacket suitable for the espionage genre. The art department duly produced an image of a spy in a white shirt and black tie, holding a gun and apparently being fellated by a naked woman. This provoked the outrage of the state censors in Malta, as Burgess discovered when he moved there and tried to import a copy.

In 1975, Burgess revived some of the characters from Tremor of Intent when he was commissioned by Albert R Broccoli to write a screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me. Fleming’s original novel was considered unsuitable for adaptation but the title was retained with the aim of building a new story around it. Burgess’s script, which is now at the University of Texas at Austin, is an outrageous medley of sadism, hypnotism, acupuncture and international terrorism.

The plot concerns a private clinic in Switzerland, where small nuclear devices are secretly inserted into the bodies of wealthy patients while they are under anaesthetic, turning them into human bombs. An organisation called Chaos (Consortium for Hastening the Annihilation of Organised Society) plans to detonate one of these devices at the Sydney Opera House while the Queen is in the audience. Bond uses his newly acquired acupuncture skills to perform an emergency operation and defuse the bomb.

Having read Burgess’s script, Broccoli and his associates decided not to put it into production. They probably suspected (quite rightly) that Burgess was not taking the assignment entirely seriously. The only element from Burgess’s script that survived into the 1977 Roger Moore film was the villain’s underwater base. The script credit went to Christopher Wood and Richard Maibaum.

That may not be the end of the story, however. When Burgess was in the early stages of negotiating with Broccoli, they agreed that the book rights would remain with Burgess and that he would be free to publish a novelisation of his script. The opportunity is still there for another novelist, with the blessing of the Burgess estate, to write an espionage novel based on the materials that Burgess left behind. Perhaps Sebastian Faulks or William Boyd, who have both written Bond novels of their own, could be persuaded to take up the gauntlet?

“Tremor of Intent” is published in paperback by Serpent’s Tail (£8.99). Andrew Biswell is the director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation

2015: In a GQ Magazine feature article Christoph Waltz categorically denies he is playing Blofeld in BOND 24.

https://i4u.com/2015/04/89998/christoph-waltz-smashes-james-bond-blofeld-rumor-new-interview

Revelator

"In From Russia, with Love, for example, Fleming presents his Soviet characters as deformed villains or sinister masturbators."

Where in FRWL are there self-abusing Soviets???

RichardTheBruce

April 10th

1929: Max von Sydow is born--Lund, Skåne län, Sweden.
1975: David Harbour is born--New York City, New York.
1992: Cec Linder dies at age 71--Toronto, Canada. (Born 10 March 1921--Galicia, Poland.)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cec Linder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cec_Linder
Born March 10, 1921, Galicia, Poland
Died April 10, 1992 (aged 71), Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Nationality Canadian
Other names Cecil Linder
Occupation Actor
Years active 1955–92


Cec Linder as paleontologist Doctor Matthew Roney in the BBC Television serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59)

Cec Linder (March 10, 1921 – April 10, 1992) was a Polish-born Canadian film and television actor. In the 1950s and 1960s, he worked extensively in the United Kingdom, often playing Canadian and American characters in various films and television programmes.

In television, he is best remembered for playing Dr. Matthew Roney in the BBC serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59). In film, he is best remembered for his role as James Bond's friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, in Goldfinger (1964). Another well-known film in which he appeared was Lolita (1962), as Doctor Keegee.

Career
Linder enjoyed an extensive and successful television career on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, probably his most prominent role was as the palaeontologist Roney in the original BBC version of Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59).

In the United States, he was a regular in the CBS soap operas The Secret Storm and The Edge of Night and in the 1980s appeared in several of the Perry Mason revival TV films as District Attorney Jack Welles.

Linder was also a regular on the popular 1980s Canadian crime series Seeing Things, playing Crown Attorney Spenser.

During his career, he also had guest roles in episodes of a variety of other popular British, American and Canadian television programmes, including: The Forest Rangers, Doomwatch, The Littlest Hobo, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Ironside, The Saint, Danger Bay, The New Avengers, The Secret Storm (as Peter Ames), and The Edge of Night as Senator Ben Travis #2.

During his early years in Canada, Linder worked as an announcer at CKGB in Timmins.

Linder appeared as Inspector Cramer in the CBC 1982 radio dramatizations of Nero Wolfe short stories.

Linder's last work was as Syd Grady in two episodes of the television series Sweating Bullets (1991).

He died the following year at home in Toronto, Ontario, of complications from emphysema.

He accumulated over 225 credits in film and television productions in a long performing career.

Selected filmography
Flaming Frontier (1958) as Capt. Dan Carver
Subway in the Sky (1959) as Carson
Jet Storm (1959) as Colonel Coe
SOS Pacific (1959) as Willy
Too Young to Love (1959) as Mr. Bill
Crack in the Mirror (1960) as Murzeau
Lolita (1962) as Dr. Keegee
Goldfinger (1964) as Felix Leiter
Tecnica di un omicidio (1966) as Gastel
Quentin Durgens, M.P. (1966) as Sherwin
Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (1967)
Explosion (1969) as Mr. Evans
Innocent Bystanders (1972) as Mankowitz
The Sloane Affair (1973) as Roy Maxwell
Super Bitch (1973) as American Ambassador
A Touch of Class (1973) as Wendell Thompson
To Kill the KIng (1974) as Stephen Van Birchard
Old God Knows (1974) as Mr. Klein
Why Rock the Boat? (1974) as Carmichael
Sunday in the Country (1974) as Ackerman
Second Wind (1976) as Graham
Point of No Return (1976) as Professor Johns
The Clown Murders (1976) as The Developer
Age of Innocence (1977) as Dr. Hogarth
Deadly Harvest (1977) as Henry the Chairman
Three Dangerous Ladies (1977) as Dr. Carstairs (segment: "The Mannikin")
The Case of Barbara Pasons (1978) as Loren Bowley
Drága kisfiam (1978) as Mr. George
Tomorrow Never Comes (1978) as Milton
High-Ballin' (1978) as Policeman
I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses (1978) as Chief Parker
Something's Rotten (1979) as Alexis Alexander
City on Fire (1979) as Councilman Paley
Lost and Found (1979) as Mr. Sanders
An American Christmas Carol (1979) as Auctioneer
Virus (1980) as Dr. Latour
Atlantic City (1980) as President of Hospital
Deadly Eyes (1982) as Dr. Louis Spenser
Heavenly Bodies (1985) as Walter Matheson
Honeymoon (1985) as Barnes

2012: Michael O'Mara Books publishes Bond On Bond by Roger Moore.

2019: Dynamite Entertainment releases James Bond: Origin #8.
Ibrahim Moustafa, artist. Jeff Parker, writer.

https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C72513027244708011

Cover C: Will Sliney

RichardTheBruce

March 11th

1925: Peter Roger Hunt is born--London, England.
(He dies 14 August 2002 at age 77--Santa Monica, California.)

Peter Hunt
The man who cut down 007
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/aug/16/guardianobituaries.filmnews
Ronald Bergan | Thu 15 Aug 2002 20.16 EDT

The film editor and director Peter Hunt, who has died aged 77, was associated with the huge success of the James Bond movies, the longest-running series in the history of the cinema. He edited the first five Bond films - generally considered the best - creating a style of sharp cutting that has been emulated by many editors and directors of action movies.

He also directed one, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), mistakenly thought of as the worst of the Bond films because of George Lazenby's forgettable 007. The inexperienced Australian model carried the can for the film's comparative box-office failure, but Hunt was praised for his pacy, and seemingly effortless, direction.

Already with a decade of editing behind him, Hunt only reluctantly agreed to edit the first Bond film, Dr No (1962). "I was really not interested in doing it at all," he recalled. "But, then I thought, well, if the director is Terence Young, and I know him well enough, and I find him rather nice, maybe it will be alright." Previously, Hunt had suggested to Harry Saltzman that, in his search for an actor to portray James Bond, the producer look at the film he had just edited, the feeble army comedy On The Fiddle (1961), in which Sean Connery played a Gypsy pedlar.

The editing style of the Bond movies was established because, "if we kept the thing moving fast enough, people won't see the plot holes," what editors call "chets", or cheated editing tricks. "On Dr No, for example, there was a great deal missing from the film when we got back from shooting in Jamaica, and I had to cut it and revoice it in such a way as to make sense."

It was from then that Hunt decided to use jump cuts and quick cutting, and very few fade-ins, fade-outs and dissolves, which "destroy the tension of the film". The fight between Connery and Robert Shaw on board the Orient Express, in From Russia With Love (1963), took a total of 59 cuts in 115 seconds of film.

Born in London, Hunt learned his craft from an uncle who made government training and educational films. His first claim to fame was, in fact, appearing on a recruiting poster for the Boy Scouts Association when he was 16, and he read the lesson at Lord Baden-Powell's funeral. At 17, he joined the army, and was almost immediately shipped off to Italy, where he took part in the battle of Cassino.

After the war, he returned to work with his uncle, before becoming assistant cutter for Alexander Korda, and a fully fledged editor with Hill In Korea (1956). He worked with both Terence Young and Lewis Gilbert on a number of films prior to editing their Bond efforts.

Besides editing, Hunt directed some second-unit work on the Bond films, as well as the title sequence for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). "I had a terrible time in the cutting room on You Only Live Twice (1967), with Donald Pleasance as Blofeld. Lewis [Gilbert] had made him into a camp, mini sort of villain. If you look at the film very carefully, Pleasance doesn't walk anywhere, because he had this mincing stride. He was so short that he looked like a little elf beside Connery. I used every bit of editing imagination I could so that he could be taken seriously as a villain."

Many purist Bond fans regret that Hunt never directed another 007 movie. His determination to be more faithful to the Ian Fleming original, even down to the death of the heroine (Diana Rigg) and the scaling down of gadgetry, puts On Her Majesty's Secret Service above many subsequent films in the series. It also happened to be the best picture he directed.

There followed two overlong adventure yarns set in Africa with Roger Moore, Gold (1974) and Shout At The Devil (1976); a couple of macho movies with Charles Bronson, Death Hunt (1981) and Assassination (1986); and the dispensable Wild Geese II (1985). But the work began to dry up, a situation that depressed the normally ebullient and energetic Hunt. In 1975, he settled in southern California with his partner Nicos Kourtis, who survives him.

Peter Roger Hunt, film editor and director, born March 11 1925; died August 14 2002

1960: Jonathan Cape publishes Ian Fleming's short story collection For Your Eyes Only.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

The destruction of a Russian hideout at
SHAPE headquarters near Paris; the
planned assassination of a Cuban thug in
America; the tracking of a heroin ring
from Rome to Venice and beyond; sudden
and ghastly death in the Seychelles islands;
and, in between, a story of love and hate
in Bermuda.

These are five episodes in a short span of
tough life--the life of James Bond, agent
number 007 in the Secret Service.

1981: Alessandra Ambrosio is born--Erechim, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
1994: From the set of Scarlett, Timothy Dalton announces his departure from Bond.
2002: BOND 20 films Jinx emerging from the sea.
2005: John Raymond Brosnan dies at age 57--South Harrow, Harrow, London, England.
(Born 7 October 1947--Perth, Australia.)

John Brosnan
Science-fiction writer and film critic
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/john-brosnan-489441.html
Saturday 16 April 2005 00:00

John Raymond Brosnan, writer and film critic: born Perth, Western Australia 7 October 1947; died London c11 April 2005.

The writer and film critic John Brosnan was a man of deep friendships, some of which had lasted half a century - the Australian writer John Baxter, with whom Brosnan collaborated on a novel, knew him that long - and he enjoyed a wide range of acquaintances throughout the science-fiction and film subcultures of London.

He wrote seven books on film. The first of these was James Bond in the Cinema[/i/ (1972). His interest in filmed science fiction culminated in Future Tense: the cinema of science fiction (1978). He wrote most of the film entries for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979), edited by Peter Nicholls and John Clute.

As a writer of science fiction and often comically exaggerated horror, Brosnan published at least 23 novels. His collaborations with Leroy Kettle were pseudonymous; the best known of these horror tales is probably Bedlam (1992), the film version of which (Beyond Bedlam) gave Liz Hurley her first main role. More ambitious science-fiction novels, under his own name, included the Sky Lords novels from 1988, and his last published novel, Mothership (2004). He had already completed a draft of the sequel at the time of his death.

Brosnan was born in 1947 in Perth, Western Australia, and became active as an SF fan in the mid 1960s. By 1970 he had moved to London, where he settled for good. Though he was convivial from the start - my own 25-year-old memories of post-launch drinks with him at the Troy Club off the Tottenham Court Road remain warm - the story of his life is essentially one of hard work.

His death was reported on 11 April. Friends had become alarmed at his absence over Easter, and gained access to his flat in South Harrow, where he was found. He had died in his sleep, possibly several days earlier. An autopsy determined that the cause of death was acute pancreatitis. This finding has scotched rumours that he had met with foul play.

It was perhaps to be expected that Brosnan died alone, as he had lived alone for many years. But he was a continual and welcome presence in many lives, a friend to some and companion to many. He was a funny and surprisingly tough-minded writer.

John Clute

2011: Angela Scoular dies at age 65--Maide Vale, London, England. (Born 8 November 1945--London, England.)

Angela Scoular obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/apr/14/angela-scoular-obituary
Wuthering Heights star, Bond girl and Leslie Phillips’s wife
Anthony Hayward | Thu 14 Apr 2011 13.12 EDT
First published on Thu 14 Apr 2011 13.12 EDT


Angela Scoular takes a bath with David Niven’s version of 007 in Casino Royale, 1966 [sic, 1967], the first of her two Bond films. Photograph: Snap/Rex Features

Angela Scoular, who has died aged 65 after reportedly taking her own life, was known as the wife of the actor Leslie Phillips, but she also had several acting roles of her own that brought her public attention.

She twice played a "Bond girl". First, she took the part of Buttercup, sharing a bath with David Niven as James Bond, in the spoof, "unofficial" release Casino Royale (1966) [sic, 1967]. Then she was the flirtatious farmer's daughter Ruby, bedded by once-only-007 George Lazenby, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), which also featured the former Avenger Diana Rigg and the future New Avenger Joanna Lumley.

Scoular later had a regular role as Lady Agatha Shawcross in You Rang, M'Lord? the "upstairs, downstairs" sitcom set in the 1920s, from the Dad's Army creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft. As the mistress of Lord Meldrum (Donald Hewlett) in the 1988 pilot and four series (1990-93), Lady Agatha is seen conducting the affair even with her third husband, Sir Ralph, in the house – she secretly gives him sleeping pills.
Advertisement

The character's raunchiness is embellished with the backstory that she was once sacked as assistant matron at Eton following an incident with students. Lady Agatha eventually breaks off the affair with Lord Meldrum after he loses his money.

Born in London, the daughter of an engineer, Scoular attended St George's school, Harpenden, and Queen's college London. After training at Rada, she made her television debut in the crime drama No Hiding Place (1963). In 1967 she landed the prized role of Cathy in a four-part BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It was a haunting scene with Scoular's Cathy at a window that inspired the singer Kate Bush to write her hit 1978 single of the same name.

Scoular made her film debut as a "society girl" in the Charlie Chaplin-directed comedy romance A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren.

Then, long before her marriage to Phillips, she was his love interest in the film comedy Doctor in Trouble (1970). As Dr Burke, he is seen following his model girlfriend Ophelia (Scoular) aboard a Mediterranean-bound cruise liner, becoming a stowaway and, to avoid detection, masquerading as a female photographer. Scoular's other films included the sex comedies Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976) and Adventures of a Private Eye (1977).

On TV, as Sue Silcock, she was another notch on Ray Langton's bedpost in Coronation Street (1972). Her roles in daytime serials included Frankie Prentiss in Harriet's Back in Town (1973) and Madeline Parsons in Rooms (1975). She also played Jill Savage in the sitcom Beryl's Lot (1974) and Maud in the family drama series Penmarric (1979).

Scoular took stage roles in Peter Shaffer's play Black Comedy (alongside Ian McKellen, at the Lyric theatre, London, 1968-69), Absurd Person Singular (Criterion, 1974) and Little Lies (Wyndham's, 1983-84).

In 2009 Phillips revealed that Scoular was being treated for bowel cancer. She had married him in 1982, a year after the death of his estranged first wife, the actor Penelope Bartley, in a house fire. Scoular is survived by Phillips and by her son, Daniel, from a previous relationship.

• Angela Margaret Scoular, actor, born 8 November 1945; died 11 April 2011

marketto007

RichardTheBruce wrote: »

March 11th
1981: Alessandra Ambrosio is born--Erechim, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

346km from my city. =D

RichardTheBruce

April 12th

1944: Society hostess Maud Russell writes about Fleming in her diary.

Spies, affairs and James Bond... The
secret diary of Ian Fleming's wartime
mistress

https://telegraph.co.uk/women/life/spies-affairs-james-bond-secret-diary-ian-flemings-wartime-mistress/

Wednesday 12 April, 1944

I. dined. Still we don’t mention Muriel. He’s just back from Scotland and looks better. I am seeing about his rations. Found Muriel used to. He was in a state and I saw he wouldn’t feel like bothering about any mortal thing connected with himself. So I said nothing but took round marmalade, sugar, butter etc. of my own and said I would look after him till he wanted someone else to.

1956: Fleming's fourth novel Diamonds Are Forever is serialized in The Daily Express. Illustrations by Robb.

https://illustrated007.blogspot.com/2014/10/diamonds-are-forever-artwork-from-daily.html

1961: A few days after appearing in court over whether Thunderball can be published, Ian Fleming has a heart attack.
1963: From Russia With Love pretitle sequence filmed at Pinewood's own main administration block.
[Some refilming is required due to the Bond imposter looking a bit too much like Connery Bond.]
2012: Late by previous standards, Skyfall on-set photos come available.

2013: Michael France dies at age 51--St. Pete Beach, Florida. (Born 4 January 1962-St. Petersburg, Florida.)

Michael France, screenwriter and
Beach Theatre owner, dies
https://www.tampabay.com/news/obituaries/michael-france-screenwriter-and-beach-theatre-owner-dies/2115065
The screenwriter was one of the region's most successful movie industry figures.
By Steve Persall | Published April 14 2013
Updated April 14 2013



ST. PETE BEACH — Hollywood screenwriter and Beach Theatre owner Michael France was discovered dead at his St. Pete Beach home Friday morning after an extended illness, his sister said. He was 51.

In recent years Mr. France struggled with diabetes that impaired his left arm and right leg. Nine months ago he was found comatose at his residence by his sister, who also discovered his body Friday.

"He didn't look that bad on Thursday night," his sister, Suzanne France said when contacted at home Saturday. "He was sick, but I didn't think he was as bad as he was the last time or I would have just called an ambulance.

"He was sitting up, he had good color, he was making jokes. Just sitting there on the couch with his dog."

Suzanne France, who lives only a few houses away, took over soup and zero-calorie soft drinks Thursday, leaving her brother around 8:30 p.m. The two swapped text messages for another couple of hours, about Mr. France's nausea and groceries she would pick up for him Friday morning.

Around 10 a.m. Mr. France hadn't responded to text messages from Suzanne or their mother. Using a key she kept as a precaution, Suzanne entered his home to check on him.

"I went in, and I thought maybe he was just unconscious so I called 911," she said, sobbing. "They had me doing chest compressions on him but by the time the ambulance got there it was too late."

Mr. France was one of Tampa Bay's most successful movie industry figures, starting with his screenplay for 1993's Cliffhanger starring Sylvester Stallone. That was followed two years later with a story credit for GoldenEye, reinvigorating the James Bond franchise with Pierce Brosnan. Mr. France also did uncredited work on the script for another 007 adventure, The World is Not Enough.

His final three produced screenplays were among the first Marvel Comics adaptations to the screen: Oscar winning director Ang Lee's 2003 version of Hulk, Fantastic Four (2005) and a co-writing credit on The Punisher (2004), filmed around Tampa Bay.

Last month at the Gasparilla International Film Festival, Mr. France presented a career achievement award to The Punisher star Thomas Jane, celebrating the movie's 10th anniversary of its local filming. Before the presentation, Mr. France and Jane met for the first time on the red carpet in Ybor City — not uncommon in a business where screenwriters generally aren't involved much when shooting begins.

In 2007, Mr. France purchased St. Pete Beach's landmark Beach Theatre for $800,000 cash, prolonging the survival of a decades-old, single-screen venue where he watched movies as a child. For five years, he presented classic, independent and foreign films generally unavailable at multiplexes, along with current hits to "pay the bills," as he often said. Eventually the bills couldn't be paid.

Beach Theatre closed its doors to business in November, 2012, after Mr. France claimed attendance had declined and efforts failed to obtain not-for-profit status that would reduce tax liabilities. Mr. France also faced the necessity to convert the theater's projection system to an expensive digital format, in order to continue showing new releases as Hollywood phases out film distribution.

Around the same time, Mr. France was sued by local small-business owner Brenton Clemons, who alleged he defaulted on a loan with the theater used as collateral. That case is still pending, as are divorce proceedings between Mr. France and his wife Elizabeth that he told the Times thwarted his bid for not-for-profit status.

"He wanted to reopen the theater, wanted to start writing again," Suzanne France said. "Obviously he didn't think he was as sick as he was. I have seen him at his sickest, and I did not see anything that indicated in any way that he would die in his sleep.

"Obviously nobody knows what's going to happen now."

Suzanne France called her brother "my best, my closest friend," especially after the death years ago of their younger brother Andrew, from hypothermia while attempting to rescue a friend from drowning.

"Mike was an extraordinary friend. He was kind. He was hilarious, and he was so good with my son," she said. "They used to watch the same kind of (television) shows because I'm such a wimp that I couldn't watch them: The Walking Dead and that one with the guy from Malcolm in the Middle, Bryan Cranston. (Breaking Bad)."

Suzanne France said her brother hadn't changed much from the boy who used to keep comic books stacked floor-to-ceiling in his room.

"If you went into his house... there's a giant Hulk toy and remember Lost in Space? He had the 'Danger, Will Robinson' robot. That's what is sitting around. Everybody else would have coffee table books; he had movie posters and the Lost in Space robot.

"Mike was a big kid. A big, intelligent kid."

Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Steve Persall can be reached at [email protected] or (727) 893-8365. Follow him @StevePersall or Twitter.

2018: James Bond in A Convenient Lie (an opera!) begins its 12-14 April run--Centrepoint Theater, Ottawa, Canada.

James Bond in A Convenient Lie
ottawaseniors.com/events/event/james-bond-in-a-convenient-lie/
A New Opera in English

Presented by Savoy Society of Ottawa in collaboration with Malfi Productions
Centrepointe Studio Theatre
8 p.m. April 12 – April 14, 2018

Lyrics by Kyle McDonald, Music by various composers

Bond, James Bond. An Opera Unlike Any Other

A new opera in pasticcio featuring the “hits of opera”, combined with an original storyline, James Bond: A Convenient Lie offers a never before seen kind of operatic spectacle blending the beautiful and demanding classical style of singing with the fast paced and exciting story of a contemporary film!

Fast, Funny, and full of Fights

Bond, with the help of Audrey, a French actress, and her tech genius brother, Pierre, must confront a bee-keeping eco-terrorist – who calls himself The Naturalist – and his henchmen, Salvatore the Sword, Tiny, and the sultry Miss Bliss, and stop his evil plan to make humanity suffer for its heedless consumption.

2019: The last day of Spy Week at Edinburgh, Scotland.

RichardTheBruce

April 13th

1937: Edward Fox is born--Chelsea, London, England.
1942: Bill Conti is born--Providence, Rhode Island.
1953: Jonathan Cape publishes Ian Fleming's first Bond novel Casino Royale.

CASINO ROYALE

The dry riffle of the cards and the soft
whirr of the roulette wheel, the sharp call
of the croupiers and the feverish mutter of
a crowded casino hide the thick voice at
Bond's ear which says, 'I will count up
to ten.'

Anyone who has ever gambled will find
this tense and sometimes horrifying story
of espionage and high gambling irresistible.
So will readers who have never entered a
casino. Connoisseurs of realistic fiction
will particularly note the careful documen-
tation of the Secret Service background,
the chilling portrait of Le Chiffre, the
authentic menace of SMERSH, and the
sensual appeal of the girl in 'soie sauvage'.

Jacket devised by the author.

1962: Ian Fleming's description of his weekend in New York City later published in the New Yorker.

The Talk of the Town
James Bond Comes to New York
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/04/21/bonds-creator
The author Ian Fleming spent a weekend in the city to see his publishers and
"assorted crooks" en route from his Jamaica hideaway to his London home.
By Geoffrey T. Hellman | April 13, 1962

Photograph by Horst Tappe / Hulton Archive / Getty

Ian Fleming, whose nine Secret Service thrillers (“Casino Royale,” “Doctor No,” “For Your Eyes Only,” “From Russia with Love,” “Live and Let Die,” “Moonraker,” “Goldfinger,” “Diamonds Are Forever,” and “Thunderball”) have had phenomenal sales in this country and abroad (more than eleven hundred thousand hardcover copies and three and a half million paperbacks), was here for a weekend recently en route from his Jamaica hideaway to his London home, and we caught him on Sunday morning at his hotel, the Pierre, where he amiably stood us a lunch. He ordered a prefatory medium-dry Martini of American vermouth and Beefeater gin, with lemon peel, and so did we.

“I’m here to see my publishers and assorted crooks,” he said. “Not other assorted crooks, mind you. By ‘crooks,’ I don’t mean crooks at all; I mean former Secret Service men. There are one or two of them here, you know.”

“Who?” we asked.

“Oh, men like the boss of James Bond, the operative who’s the chief character in all my books,” said our host. “When I wrote the first one, in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be the blunt instrument. One of the bibles of my youth was ‘Birds of the West Indies,’ by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, My God, that’s the dullest name I’ve ever heard, so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one. Mrs. Bond once wrote me a letter thanking me for using it.”

Mr. Fleming, a sunburned, tall, curly-haired, blue-eyed man of fifty-three in a dark-blue suit, blue shirt, and blue-dotted bow tie, ordered another Martini, and so did we. “I’ve spent the morning in Central Park,” he said. “I went there to see if I’d get murdered, but I didn’t. The only person who accosted me was a man who asked me how to get out. I love the Park; it was so wonderful to see the brown turning to green. I went to the Wollman skating rink and saw all those enchanting girls skating around, and then I thought, This is the place to meet a spy. What a wonderful place to meet a spy! A spy with a child. A child is the most wonderful cover for a spy, like a dog for a tart. Do tarts here have dogs? I was interested to see that in the bird reservation in the Park there was not a single bird. There are no people there—It’s fenced in, you know, with a sign—but no birds, either. Birds can’t read.”

Mr. Fleming lit a Senior Service cigarette and, in answer to some questions from us, said that he was a Scot, that he had been brought up in a hunting-and-fishing world where you shot or caught your lunch, and that he was a graduate of Eton and Sandhurst. “I shot against West Point,” he said. “When I got my commission, they were mechanizing the Army, and a lot of us decided we didn’t want to be garage hands running those bloody tanks. My poor mamma, in despair, suggested that I try for the diplomatic. My father was killed in the ‘14-‘18 war. Well, I went to the Universities of Geneva and Munich and learned extremely good French and German, but I got fed up with the exams, so in 1929 I joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent and had a hell of a time. Wonderful! I went to Moscow for Reuters. My God, it was fun! It was like a tremendous ball game.”

He ordered a dozen cherrystones and a Miller High Life, and we followed suit. “I like the name ‘High Life,’ ” he said. “That’s why I order it. And American vermouth is the best in the world.”

He added that he had been with Reuters for four years, and we asked what happened next.

“I decided I ought to make some money, and went into the banking and stock-brokerage business—first with Cull & Company and then with Rowe & Pitman,” he said. “Six years altogether, until the war came along. Those financial firms are tremendous clubs, and great fun, but I never could figure out what a sixty-fourth of a point was. We used to spend our whole time throwing telephones at each other. I’m afraid we ragged far too much.”

We inquired about the war, from which, according to the British Who’s Who, Mr. Fleming emerged a naval commander, and he said, “I was personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, so I went everywhere.”

We asked what he’d done after the war.

“I joined the editorial board of the London Times,” he said. “I still write articles for it, and I’m a stockholder. And in 1952, when I was in Jamaica, Cyril Connolly asked me to write an article about Jamaica for his magazine, Horizon. It was rather a euphoric piece, about Jamaica as an island for you and me to go to.”

We promised to go, and he said, “How about some domestic Camembert? It’s better here than the French.”

During this and the coffee, he reverted to the non-ornithological James Bond. “I think the reason for his success is that people are lacking in heroes in real life today,” he said. “Heroes are always getting knocked—Philip and Mountbatten are examples of this—and I think people absolutely long for heroes. The thing that’s wrong with the new anticolonialism is that no one has yet found a Negro hero. They’re scratching around with Tshombe, but ... Well, I don’t regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way, and in the end, after giant despair, he wins the girl or the jackpot or whatever it may be. My books have no social significance, except a deleterious one; they’re considered to have too much violence and too much sex. But all history has that. I finished the last one, my tenth James Bond story, in Jamaica the other day; it’s long and tremendously dull. It’s called ‘The Spy Who Loved Me,’ and it’s written, supposedly, by a girl. I think it’s an absolute miracle that an elderly person like me can go on turning out these books with such zest. It’s really a terrible indictment of my own character—they’re so adolescent. But they’re fun. I think people like them because they’re fun. A couple of years ago, when I was in Washington, and was driving to lunch with a friend of mine, Margaret Leiter, she spotted a young couple coming out of church, and she stopped our cab. ‘You must meet them,’ she said. ‘They’re great fans of yours.’ And she introduced me to Jack and Jackie Kennedy. ‘Not the Ian Fleming!’ they said. What could be more gratifying than that? They asked me to dinner that night, with Joe Alsop and some other characters. I think the President likes my books because he enjoys the combination of physical violence, effort, and winning in the end—like his PT-boat experiences. I think James Bond may be good for him after the dry pack of the day.”

Mr. Fleming is married to a former wife of Lord Rothermere and has a nine-year-old son, Caspar, who is away at boarding school. “He doesn’t read me, but he sells my autographs for seven shillings a time,” his father said. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 21, 1962, issue, with the headline “Bond's Creator.”

1967: Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale has its world premiere at London's Odeon Leicester Square, two months ahead of Eon's You Only Live Twice.

1988: Movieland Wax Museum unveils James Bond in Buena Park, California.

2008: Guy Hamilton receives a Cinema Retro Award at Pinewood Studios' Goldfinger reunion.

HONOR BLACKMAN PRESENTS GUY HAMILTON WITH ...
Cinema Retro
http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/1802-HONOR-BLACKMAN-PRESENTS-GUY-HAMILTON-WITH-CINEMA-RETRO-AWARD-AT-PINEWOOD-STUDIOS-GOLDFINGER-REUNION.html
HONOR BLACKMAN PRESENTS GUY HAMILTON WITH CINEMA RETRO AWARD AT PINEWOOD STUDIOS 'GOLDFINGER' REUNION

For James Bond fans, Sunday's Goldfinger reunion had the Midas Touch in every regard. Organized by Cinema Retro colmunist Gareth Owen and his partner Andy Boyle of www.bondstars.com, the event gave 120 lucky attendees from around the world the opportunity to celebrate the classic James Bond film in the ultimate fashion. With the exception of Sean Connery, John Barry and Shirley Bassey, virtually every living actor and technician from the film were reunited at London's Pinewood Studios where principal photography had taken place in 1964. Among the attendees: director Guy Hamilton, cast members Shirley Eaton, Tania Mallett, Burt Kwouk, Martin Benson, Margaret Nolan, Caron Gardner, production designer Sir Ken Adam, art director Peter Murton, Peter Lamont (who served as draughtsman on the film), Leslie Bricusse, who co-wrote the lyrics to the smash hit title song, and sound man Norman Wanstall, who won an Oscar for the film. This was literally an all-day event, as the stars arrived at 10:30 AM for autograph sessions that were followed by a tour of the studio led by Cinema Retro co-publisher Dave Worrall. A highlight was the surprise appearance of one of the original Aston Martin DB5's which was on loan for the event from The Louwman Collection in The Netherlands. In the afternoon, everyone gathered at Pinewood's Theatre 7 for a screening of the film in digital format. It was to be an historic occasion: the largest gathering of cast and crew to view the movie since its original premiere. The digital print was simply stunning and it's safe to say that no matter how many times you've seen the film, you haven't truly seen it until you've experienced the flawless digital presentation. At the conclusion of the film, Cinema Retro editor-in-chief Lee Pfeiffer conducted Q&A sessions with Shirley Eaton, Tania Mallett, Burt Kwouk, Leslie Bricusse, Margaret Nolan and Guy Hamilton. At the conclusion of the session, Honor Blackman, who made a surprise appearance at the screening, joined Pfeiffer and Dave Worrall on stage to present Guy Hamilton with the Cinema Retro Lifetime Achievement award in recognition of his remarkable body of work that includes serving as assistant director to Sir Carol Reed on The Third Man and John Huston on The African Queen and his own hit films as director that include Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, The Man With the Golden Gun, Funeral in Berlin, The Colditz Story and Battle of Britain. A clearly moved Guy Hamilton gave a gracious acceptance speech and relished reliving his memories of Goldfinger with Honor Blackman.

http://www.cinemaretro.com/uploads/goldgirlsguys.jpeg
(L to R) Shirley Eaton, Honor Blackman, Tania Mallett and Margaret Nolan with event
organizers Andy Boyle and Gareth Owen.

http://www.cinemaretro.com/uploads/goldretro.jpeg
Cinema Retro's Dave Worrall and Lee Pfeiffer (r) with Honor Blackman and Guy Hamilton

http://www.cinemaretro.com/uploads/goldcar6.jpeg

Finally, there was a memorable photo session as Cinema Retro photographer Mark Mawston posed many of the cast and crew members around the Aston Martin DB5. The event finally ended at 7:00 PM, with weary but enthusiastic attendees recognizing they had been part of a day they will not soon forget.

(Tickets for this event sold out in 24 hours. For those who were not able to attend, but who would like a souvenir of the day, there are a limited number of the illustrated collector's programs available for sale. To purchase from Bond Stars click here)

2011: Sony announces its partnership with MGM continues--they will co-release BOND 23.

Revelator

Not the most flattering wax figure of Sir Roger!

RichardTheBruce

Promoted as Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me, it was more A View to a Kill and then some.

RichardTheBruce

April 14th

1912: Joie Chitwood is born--Denison, Texas. (He dies 3 January 1988 at age 75--Tampa, Florida.)

Joie Chitwood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Joie Chitwood

Born April 14, 1912 | Denison, Texas
Died January 3, 1988 (aged 75) | Tampa Bay, Florida
Formula One World Championship career

Nationality United States American
Active years 1950
Teams Kurtis Kraft
Entries 1
Championships 0
Wins 0
Podiums 0
Career points 1
Pole positions 0
Fastest laps 0
First entry 1950 Indianapolis 500
Last entry 1950 Indianapolis 500

George Rice Chitwood (April 14, 1912 – January 3, 1988), nicknamed "Joie", was an American racecar driver and businessman. He is best known as a daredevil in the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show.

Born in Denison, Texas of Cherokee Indian ancestry, he was dubbed "Joie" by a track promoter and the name stuck.

Racing career
Chitwood started his racecar driving career in 1934 at a dirt track in Winfield, Kansas. From there, he began racing sprint cars. In 1939 and 1940 he won the AAA East Coast Sprint car championship.[1] He switched to the CSRA and won its title in 1942.[1] Between 1940 and 1950 he competed at the Indianapolis 500 seven times, finishing fifth on three different occasions.[1] He was the first man ever to wear a safety belt at the Indy 500.[1]

Joie Chitwood Thrill Show
Chitwood also operated the "Joie Chitwood Thrill Show", an exhibition of auto stunt driving that became so successful he gave up racing. Often called "Hell Drivers," he had five units that for more than forty years toured across North America thrilling audiences in large and small towns alike with their death-defying automobile stunts.

His show was so popular, that in January 1967, the performance at the Islip Speedway, New York was broadcast on ABC television's Wide World of Sports.

On May 13, 1978, Joie Chitwood Jr.(b. Aug. 31, 1943) set a world record when he drove a Chevrolet Chevette for 5.6 miles (9.0 km) on just 2 wheels. His sons, Joie Jr. and Tim both joined the auto thrill show and continued to run the "Joie Chitwood Chevy Thunder Show" after their father's retirement. The Chitwood show toured the US from 1945-98. His grandson, Joie Chitwood III, is the President of Daytona International Speedway and a former president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The show was featured during season 3 of CHiPs in an episode entitled "Thrill Show". Joie Jr. did stunts for Miami Vice on several occasions. Joie Jr. (b. 1943) also appeared as a guest challenger on the TV game show To Tell The Truth. Joie Jr. worked in over 60 feature films and national commercials.

Chitwood's show was credited by Evel Knievel as being his inspiration to become a daredevil when his show appeared in his home town of Butte, Montana.

Stuntman
Chitwood was frequently hired by Hollywood film studios to either do stunt driving for films or to act as auto-stunt coordinator. On a few occasions he appeared in a minor role, notably with Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck in the 1950 film about auto racing, To Please a Lady.

In 1973, Joie Chitwood Jr. is credited as a Stunt Coordinator for the hugely successful James Bond film Live and Let Die, where he was also the stunt driver and acted in a minor part.

Safety Consultant
Joie Chitwood Jr. also acted as a car safety consultant, intentionally crashing vehicles for subsequent investigation. He had intentionally crashed more than 3000 vehicles by the time he appeared on the game show I've Got A Secret in 1965. Joie Jr. and Joie Sr. test-crashed guardrails and breakaway Interstate signs for US Steel and aluminum light poles for ALCOA. The highways are safer today because of these tests.

Retirement
When Chitwood retired, his sons took over the business. Joie Chitwood died in 1988,[1] aged 75, in Tampa Bay, Florida.

He was inducted in the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 1993. He was inducted in the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 2010 in the Historic category.[1] Among his contributions to the sport was the supervision of the construction of Pennsylvania's Selinsgrove Speedway in 1945.

Filmography
Fireball Jungle (1968) - (uncredited)
Live and Let Die (1973) - Charlie
Mr. No Legs (1979) - (final film role)

1917: Richard Wasey Chopping is born--Colchester, Essex, England.
(He dies 17 April 2008 at age 91--Colchester, Essex, England.)

Richard Chopping: Versatile
illustrator best known for his
distinctive Bond book jackets
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/richard-chopping-versatile-illustrator-best-known-for-his-distinctive-bond-book-jackets-813974.html
Wednesday 23 April 2008 00:00

Richard Chopping is probably best known today as the creator of dust-jackets for the publisher Jonathan Cape's Ian Fleming James Bond novels. From Russia with Love (1957), with its pistol and flower design, the skull and rose for Goldfinger (1959), and the slightly eerie spyhole and Ian Fleming's name-plate artwork for For Yours Eyes Only [sic] (1960) are distinctively Chopping's work.

The creator of these confections, with their meticulous attention to detail and delicacy of colour, was, however, much more than a book-jacket designer. By the time they appeared, Chopping had established a reputation as a versatile illustrator who was noted for his depictions of natural objects such as butterflies, flowers, insects and fruit, based on close observation, as well as being a sympathetic teacher, busy exhibitor and author.

Richard Wasey Chopping was born in 1917 in Colchester, Essex – Wasey was an old family name. His father was an entrepreneurial businessman from a milling family, was himself a miller and store owner and eventually became mayor of Colchester. Chopping's twin brother died when young. He also had an older brother, a pilot killed on a Pathfinder mission over Europe in the Second World War.

Chopping began painting as a small boy, encouraged by his art master at Gresham's School, at Holt, in Norfolk. The future composer Benjamin Britten and spy Donald Maclean were his contemporaries at Gresham's, and Britten remained a friend.

In the late 1930s Chopping attended the London Theatre Studio and learned stage design under Michel St Denis. Next, and important to him, came his period as student, cook and housekeeper at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing run by Cedric Morris and Lett Haines. They had opened the school in 1937, and it was eventually based for many years at Benton End near Hadleigh, in Suffolk. Lucian Freud, who had enrolled in the early summer of 1939, was another student of this unique school.

At this rural paradise, Morris and Haines aimed to "provide an environment where students can work together with more experienced artists in a common endeavour to produce sincere painting". Morris, a great plantsman, created a wonderful garden. Chopping learned a great deal from him, as much through observation as direct instruction.

Morris painted a fine portrait of Chopping in 1941, his subject dark-haired, sloe-eyed, duffel-coated and alert. It was included in the Tate Gallery's 1984 Morris exhibition, illustrated in the catalogue.

From 1942 until 1949, Chopping was able to use his great abilities as a plant draughtsman working on Penguin Books' projected 22-volume flora of the British Isles. Chopping would draw every flower, the Bloomsbury writer Frances Partridge supplying the accompanying text. But Allen Lane had over-stretched himself on this, one of Penguin's great failures. The plug was pulled after seven years, by which time the project had only got as far as the end of the letter C.

From the early 1950s Chopping was able to pass on his knowledge of plant drawing to others as a part-time teacher at Colchester School of Art. He left in 1961 to teach at the Royal College of Art, where he was incidentally a popular feature of the end-of-term Christmas stage shows. Chopping worked under the Marquess of Queensberry in the ceramic department, where his plant-drawing skills and ability to paint butterflies and flowers on porcelain were much valued.

He eventually transferred to the general studies course teaching creative writing and continued with this until his retirement aged 65. When in 1959 he shared an exhibition at the Minories, Colchester with Denis Wirth-Miller, Chopping was already quoted as saying that he considered himself more a writer than a painter.

He was by then well established as an author and illustrator of natural history and children's books. Butterflies in Britain (1943) was followed by A Book of Birds, The Old Woman and the Pedlar, The Tailor and the Mouse and Wild Flowers (all 1944) and Mr Postlethwaite's Reindeer (1945), stories broadcast by the BBC.

When Chopping's first novel, The Fly, was completed, his friend Angus Wilson steered it towards David Farrer at Secker & Warburg for consideration who, commenting that he found it "a perfectly disgusting concoction", passed it on to his young colleague Giles Gordon as a first editing job. In his 1993 memoir Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement?, Gordon tells how he was "determined to like the novel", believing that "more, and no doubt better, books would follow. The Fly was indeed disgusting."

Chopping was invited to the newly married Gordon's tiny London flat, arriving with a crate of champagne for what turned out to be a bizarre weekend's editing. Gordon, who found Chopping "a most fastidious person", was convinced that The Fly, which appeared in 1965, "was sufficiently sordid to appeal to voyeurs, and if Chopping were to adorn it with one of his famous dust-jackets it could be a succès de scandale; and so it proved." Chopping's more mundane second novel, The Ring (1967), "sank with very little trace, even in the second-hand bookshops".

Chopping exhibited widely. He had showed a couple of works in a mixed exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1939, and others followed. In 1956, he shared a show of paintings and drawings at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery with Robin Ironside, the painter and theatre designer, and the Australian artist Kenneth Rowell. Chopping was also in "20th Century British Painting" at the influential New Art Centre in 1977.

He also received painting commissions. At the time of the Minories show, he had recently finished a still life as a 50th birthday present for Prince Ludwig of Hesse from his family and was completing a portrait of Lord Astor with a view of Cliveden. In addition, there were solo exhibitions. His distinctive trompe-l'oeil and flower watercolours were at the Hanover Gallery in 1953; later shows included the Aldeburgh Festival Gallery in 1979, which surveyed his paintings and graphic work from 1940 onwards.

A 1956 three-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, with Francis Bacon as the main attraction and separate rooms given over to pictures by a French aristocrat and Chopping, led to the Bond dust-jacket commissions. Chopping's flower paintings and trompe-l'oeil works were upstairs, as he remembered, "in a little gallery at the back, that was like a kind of long lavatory".

Bacon took Ann, Ian Fleming's wife, in to see his own work, Chopping recalled. "Then he took her upstairs to see mine, which was very good of him, and Ann went back to Ian and said, 'Well, you ought to get this chap to do your next book jacket.'" They met at one of the Flemings' artistic salons, where Fleming granted Chopping the commission for From Russia with Love.

Although the first edition jacket announced that it had been designed by the author, Chopping later said:

He in no way designed it. He did tell me the things he wanted on it. It had to be a rose with a drop of dew on it. There had to be a sawn-off Smith & Wesson. We never discussed the type of revolver we would use. It had to be that one.

Chopping and the artist Denis Wirth-Miller lived together for some 70 years from the time that Wirth-Miller was 21, Chopping 20. Wirth-Miller helped foster Chopping's artistic talent. They bought a house in 1944 in Wivenhoe, Essex, but as it was a port and ship-building centre and it was a wartime restricted area they could not move in until 1945. Eventually, they were the first in Colchester to register a civil partnership, in December 2005.

Chopping and Wirth-Miller were founder-members of a strong artistic colony in Wivenhoe. It received a boost in 1970 when the journalist George Gale invited the politician Edward Heath to open the new Wivenhoe Arts Club, with its own exhibition hall. It attracted not only visual artists but writers such as Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis and Peregrine Worsthorne.

For many years Francis Bacon had a home and studio in Wivenhoe, and Chopping was the subject of his Two Studies for Portrait of Richard Chopping, 1978. "Denis Wirth-Miller was a deep bosom-buddy of Francis from the 1940s," says Chopping's executor and friend Daniel Chapman. "When Richard and Denis had holidays, they were often extended ones in France, Francis with them. They were with Francis in Paris when his partner killed himself in an hotel." The suicide of George Dyer took place two days before Bacon's 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais.

Bacon eventually gave up his home in Wivenhoe, but he, Chopping and Wirth-Miller remained close and, even after Bacon's death in 1992, Chopping and Wirth-Miller remained closely concerned with Bacon's affairs.

Chopping's final years were blighted by sight problems, when first one, then the other, retina detached. He could just read, but could not see a picture and, although unable to paint, determinedly kept on with his writing as best he could.

David Buckman

Richard Wasey Chopping, artist, teacher and writer: born Colchester, Essex 14 April 1917; registered civil partnership 2005 with Denis Wirth-Miller; died Colchester 17 April 2008.

1961: Ian Fleming is inspired to pursue republishing favorite books gone out of print.

Ian Fleming, Andrew Lycett, 1995.

A glance through The Times Literary
Supplement while he was still at the London Clinic suggested another idea.
In the issue of 14 April he read a leading article which put the case for
republishing books long out of print. This encouraged him to remind his
own publisher that he had several times pushed for a reprint of one of his
favourite novels, All Night at Mr Stanyhurst's by Hugh Edwards, with an
introduction he would write himself. In putting forward such ideas, Ian
was thinking about his future. As he told William Plomer, he had again
almost killed off Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me. He had decided not to,
but the appropriate time had now certainly come.

1961: Robert Carlyle is born--Glasgow, Scotland.
1967: Casino Royale general release in the UK.
1980: Moonraker receives an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects.
1996: English Heritage establishes a ceramic plaque (IAN FLEMING 1908-1964 Creator of James Bond lived here) at 22 Ebury Street, Belgravia, London.

1999: Anthony Newley dies at age 67--Jensen Beach, Florida. (Born 24 September 1931--Hackney, London, England.)

Obituary: Anthony Newley
https://sites.google.com/site/herramientastigrupo223/_/rsrc/1438960129460/indice/5--herramientas-de-comunicacion-en-internet/WIKI.png
Tom Vallance | Friday 16 April 1999 00:02

ONE OF Britain's most distinctive talents, Anthony Newley was an actor, singer, composer and writer who had his first starring role in films at the age of 16, composed hit musicals and songs, topped the hit parade himself as a pop star, played everything from romantic leads to quirky character roles in movies, starred on both the West End and Broadway stages, and became a favourite of cabaret audiences from New York to Las Vegas.

His elongated Cockney vowel sounds made his voice an unmistakable one which people either loved or hated. It served him well on novelty songs such as "Pop Goes the Weasel", but he was also a fine ballad singer. "What Kind of Fool Am I", "Who Can I Turn To" and "Candy Man" were just three of the hit songs he co-wrote. "I'm not a trained musician or singer," he once said, "but I can turn out a song."

Born in Hackney, east London, in 1931, he left school at the age of 14. "The saddest thing about myself," he later said, "is that I never read a book. I never got the habit." He was working as an office boy for an insurance company when he spotted a newspaper advertisement reading "Boy Actors Urgently Wanted". Said Newley later, "Suddenly the bell rang! I applied to the advertisers, the Italia Conti Stage School, only to discover the fees were too high." The school agreed to let him audition, however ("I had to read poems to two sweet old ladies who were charmed with my cockney accent"), and were impressed enough to offer him free tuition and a salary of 30 shillings a week as an office boy. The producer Geoffrey de Barkus spotted Newley at the school and gave him the leading role in a children's film serial, The Adventures of Dusty Bates (1947).

Newley was already displaying a distinctly individual style of agreeably knowing confidence, and after another children's film, The Little Ballerina (1947), he was given the plum role of a boy who magically changes places with his own father in Vice Versa (1947), directed by Peter Ustinov. Ustinov recently said, "I was amazed at how convincing Anthony Newley was as someone with an old mind inside him." One of the stars of the film was Kay Walsh, whose ex-husband David Lean was about to direct a screen version of Oliver Twist. Walsh rang Lean and told him, "I've found your Artful Dodger", and Newley's superbly insolent and cheeky performance became one of the many reasons that the 1948 film became a classic.

Given a contract by the Rank Organisation, the actor then settled into a comfortable niche as a character player, often as cocky cockneys, in such films as Here Come the Huggetts (1948, during the filming of which the actor later claimed to have lost his virginity to Diana Dors), The Guinea Pig (1948) and A Boy, a Girl and a Bike (1949), but when Rank dropped him after a year his film career faltered and he spent some time in repertory. Later he played chirpy enlisted men in war films including Above Us the Waves (1955), The Battle of the River Plate (1955) and Cockleshell Heroes (1955).

It was in 1955 that he was able to display just how versatile he was when he starred with Annie Ross in the musical revue Cranks at the small club theatre the New Watergate. This off-beat, almost surreal show proved a hit and transferred to the West End, to St Martin's Theatre, in March 1956, where it had a successful run before going to Broadway, where it fared less well. Newley's engaging rendition of such numbers as "I'm the Boy (You Should Say Yes To)" contributed greatly to the show's charm, and in 1956 he toured England with his own variety show.

A turning point came with a literally star-making role in the low-budget musical film Idle on Parade (1959) in which Newley played a rock 'n' roll star inducted into the Army (in America the film was called Idol on Parade). One of his numbers in the film, "I've Waited So Long" (composed by Jerry Lordan) became a pop sensation and overnight Newley found himself a teenage heart-throb. In 1960 he had seven records in the charts, including Lloyd Price and Harold Logan's "Personality" and two No 1 hits, the wistful "Why", by Robert Marcucci, and Peter de Angelis and Lionel Bart's "Do You Mind".

Newley surprised his public again when in 1960 he made his first record album, Love Is a Now and Then Thing, a beautiful set of ballads such as "This Time the Dream's on Me" and "I Get Along Without You Very Well" which he handled with appealing sensitivity.

Never one to embrace the conventional, Newley next starred in a television series which, though short-lived, is remembered as one of the most avant- garde in television history. The Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960) was a bizarre show in which the central character (named by Newley after the Somerset village of the same name) talked to animals and inanimate objects, heard what people were thinking, had conversations with people who could not see him, and moved in and out of reality. Though written by Sid Green and Dick Hills, its concept was doubtless embraced and heavily influenced by the star.

Newley next fulfilled a long- standing ambition to star in his own stage musical, and fortuitously began a partnership with the composer and author Leslie Bricusse. Newley was later to tell an American columnist, "I'm the laziest son-of-a-bitch who ever drew a breath. I sleep till one and I'm always surprised when someone in blue rinse on a talk show says, `You're a genius, Mr Newley, you do so many things.' Tony Newley never realised his potential, did the things he should have done. That's why I need Leslie Bricusse - he has plenty of ambition."

With Bricusse, Newley wrote the book and score of Stop the World I Want To Get Off, in which Newley starred as Littlechap, an Everyman figure whose whole life is depicted in the show. Newley said, "The role of Littlechap, surrounded by the type of chorus once used in Greek drama, has presented us with a challenge which any cast would surely enjoy tackling." Directed by Newley, the show opened at the Queen's Theatre in July 1961 and was a smash hit, its songs including "What Kind of Fool Am I", "Gonna Build a Mountain" (a hit record for Matt Monro) and "Once in a Lifetime". Sammy Davis was one of many who recorded the songs - he became a close friend of Newley and a great champion of the Newley-Bricusse catalogue.

When Newley was asked why most of his songs became hit records for other singers, he replied, "Sammy Davis, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett . . . their records sell in the millions; when I do it, it just trickles. But for the composer and lyricist there's a tidy bit to be made that way too, so I don't really mind." "What Kind of Fool Am I" won the 1962 Grammy Award as song of the year and has been recorded by over 70 vocalists, though Newley's own recording ran into trouble because he sang the word "damn" - he later made another recording which could be played on sensitive radio stations.

In 1962 Stop the World moved to Broadway where, produced by David Merrick who had bought the American rights while it had been trying out in Nottingham ("I felt no need to wait and see if it would be a hit in London - I had been thoroughly entertained and absorbed by the freshness of conception shown by its authors"), it ran for over 500 performances. Both the London and New York productions were directed by Newley, of whom Merrick was to write, "I have no doubts at all that Mr Newley is going to enjoy widespread and durable success in America. The man does everything - he acts well; he sings with individuality and verve; and most importantly, he is an exceptionally attractive performer. His personality is dynamic and he projects a brilliance of spirit."

During the show's run in 1963 Newley, who had previously been wed to Tiller Girl-turned-actress Ann Lynn, married Joan Collins. "Like most men of my generation," he said, "I had drooled over pictures of Joan. And there she was, backstage at Stop the World and I could not believe it. Did I ask her for a date? Yes I did." Collins described Newley at the time as "a half- Jewish Cockney git" and herself as "a half-Jewish princess from Bayswater via Sunset Boulevard".

The following year the Bricusse-Newley team had a big hit with their lyrics to John Barry's music for Goldfinger, sung over the titles of the James Bond film by Shirley Bassey. The next Newley-Bricusse musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint - the Smell of the Crowd, "a comic allegory about the class system in contemporary Britain", had a better score than its predecessor but its 1964 tryout in Nottingham, starring Norman Wisdom and directed by Newley, did not prove satisfactory and it failed to reach London. David Merrick was again impressed, and offered to take it to Broadway if Newley would assume the leading role.

Co-starring Cyril Ritchard (representing the "haves" to Newley's down- trodden "have-not"), the show received mixed reviews for it's libretto's pretensions ("third-rate commerce masquerading as art," said Walter Kerr of the Herald- Tribune), but unanimous praise for the songs and performances. Whitney Bolton wrote in the Morning Telegraph: "Mr Newley uses his own inventions, plus deliberate and useful, justifiably purloined gestures common to Charlie Chaplin, Lupino Lane, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and others, as though giving us a portrait gallery of great comics who have made their fames as Little Men against the harsh world."

The score ("bursting with songs, all good and several of hit quality," wrote Variety) was exceptional, its hits including "Who Can I Turn To" (already a hit record by Tony Bennett when the show opened), "A Wonderful Day Like Today", "The Joker", "Nothing Can Stop Me Now", "Look at That Face" and "Sweet Beginning". The original cast album sold over 100,000 copies, and the show ran for over eight months. Newley and Bricusse were nominated for the Tony Award for Best Score, and Newley was nominated for Best Director, but this was the year that Fiddler on the Roof took most of the major musical awards. Asked about his predilection for writing about the problems of the "Little Man", Newley replied, "I don't hate anybody or anything. But I do expect to make statements about the problems of being a human being."

Newley made his American film debut with a leading role in the film Doctor Dolittle (1967), with Bricusse alone providing the songs, though Newley made a fine solo album of the score. The actor then starred with Sandy Dennis in Sweet November (1968), a sentimental but rarely mawkish tale of a dying girl who takes a different sweetheart every month.

Newley's own marriage was under pressure and in 1969 he produced, directed and co-wrote Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe and Find True Happiness?, co-starring Collins and with plainly autobiographical overtones. "A zany erotobiography that looks like a Marx Brothers' movie shot in a nudist camp," was Playboy's description of the film, which was not a success. For the score, Newley collaborated with Herbert Kretzmer, who became a lifelong friend.

"Although I was the lyricist, the film's concept and the ideas for the songs were Newley's - he was the architect and I the builder," said Kretzmer. One of the songs they wrote, "When You Gotta Go", was for a time a staple of Barbra Streisand's stage act. Newley and Collins were divorced in 1970, and Newley's third marriage, to an air hostess, Dareth Rich, also ended in divorce. "My only regret is that in a show-business career you can have no private life," said Newley.

He and Bricusse wrote the songs for the 1971 film fantasy Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, including the hit "Candy Man". In 1972 he returned to the West End stage with The Good Old Bad Old Days, which had book, music and lyrics by Newley and Bricusse and direction by Newley. Despite a tuneful score and a personal success, the show had only a moderate run and Newley began to spend more time in the United States, where he had bought a house and had developed a large following. In 1974 he starred with Henry Mancini in a musical revue on Broadway, and he became a top night-club entertainer, with sell-out appearances in Las Vegas. His last major film was Mister Quilp (1976), for which he wrote both music and lyrics, though he made several television movies.

In 1985 he was diagnosed with cancer and had one kidney removed. Returning to England, he moved in with his mother Gracie in Esher, Surrey. With his illness arrested, he continued to work, appearing in television shows, touring in a stage production of Leslie Bricusse's musical Scrooge, and last year playing a successful London cabaret engagement. On television he played an amorous used-car dealer in several episodes of EastEnders.

For the last seven years his partner was Gina Fratini, but he was a valued friend to all those close to him and he had remained on good terms with both Joan Collins and Dareth Rich - Collins would be seen at all of Newley's London openings. Herbert Kretzmer said of Newley, "It's a hackneyed phrase I know, but Newley was truly a `one-off', a totally unique and original talent." Leslie Bricusse echoed these sentiments when he wrote, "Never once have I known Tony to falter for one moment in his perpetual quest for something original - to say things and do things in a new way - to find fresh excitement, even in old themes. He takes infinite pains to bring style and originality to everything he touches."

"He was a true original," said Kretzmer, "driven by the need to innovate and contemptuous of repetition or the following of fashion. His wish was always to break boundaries and push frontiers back."

George Anthony Newley, actor, singer, composer and writer: born London 24 September 1931; married 1956 Ann Lynn (marriage dissolved), 1963 Joan Collins (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1970), thirdly Dareth Rich (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved); died Jensen Beach, Florida 14 April 1999.

1961

2048: The first Ian Fleming Bond novel Casino Royale will enter the public domain in the United States.
(And each of the following 13 years another book will do that.)

Thunderfinger

That Fleming thought of killing off Bond in TSWLM was new to me. He sure thought of it often.

Revelator

I will post Fleming's introduction to All Night at Mr Stanyhurst's in the "Ian Fleming on Crime and Spy Fiction" thread sometime in the near future.

RichardTheBruce

April 15th

1947: Lois Chiles is born--Houston, Texas.
1948: Michael Arnold Kamen is born--New York City, New York.
(He dies 18 November 2003--London, England.)

Michael Kamen
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/nov/21/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries
Driven classical and pop composer
Friday 21 November 2003 01:00

Michael Kamen, composer: born New York 15 April 1948; married Sandra Keenan (two daughters); died London 18 November 2003.

The extraordinary musical career of Michael Kamen was a testament not only to his talent and driven ambition, but also to a ceaseless passion and energy for his chosen course in life: following the twin paths of classical and pop music, he seemingly effortlessly balanced work as a composer, collaborator, performer, orchestrator and producer.

On one hand, he was the driving force behind such fantastically ambitious projects as the 1994 Great Music Experience at Todaiji Temple in Nara, Japan, in aid of Unesco, to which Kamen not only brought Bob Dylan together with an orchestra for the first time, but also composed and conducted an overture for 350 performers including a symphony orchestra, 200 Buddhist monks, 35 Kodo Japanese drummers, an ancient Chinese orchestra, the Irish folk group the Chieftains and an all-star rock band. Yet, he was also the co-composer of Bryan Adams' 1991 hit "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You", a No 1 single in the UK for four months and for seven weeks in the United States. It was the biggest selling single in the history of A & M Records, and won Kamen one of several Grammy awards.

The Adams' hit song, which many loved to hate, was taken from the soundtrack of Robin Hood: prince of thieves. The film world readily came to appreciate Kamen's abilities: he could write under pressure and he was fast - it took him just three weeks to come up with the soundtrack for The Three Musketeers in 1993 ("He thought visually," said the film producer Eric Fellner) and he wrote over 30 musical soundtracks, including those for all the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series, for Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (1986), The Krays (1990), the James Bond film Licence To Kill (1989) and X-Men (2000); several of these soundtracks were Oscar-nominated.

"He was a man of many parts, using a very wide brush," said his close friend David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. "He was about the most successful film writer in recent years. He had such a gift for a memorable tune, and a great gift for melody. He also had huge enthusiasm, and a compulsion to keep at it." Gilmour had considerable experience of Kamen's work method. At the instigation of the producer Bob Ezrin, Kamen was brought in to orchestrate the string sections of Pink Floyd's 1979 album The Wall and subsequently moved to London from his native New York. In 1983 he co-produced Pink Floyd's The Final Cut album with the group. Kamen was an ebullient, bouncing bear of a man, with a gregarious personality.

Annie Lennox said of Kamen's string arrangements on assorted Eurythmics songs, "Although he was one of the best people to do the job, when you meet a person whohas so much heart, he swiftly eclipsed being a string arranger, and became a friend. There were not many people who had so much stardust about them."

It is a prerequisite of modern film soundtrack-composing to secure a hit record that serves as a trailer to the movie. After the spectacular success of the Bryan Adams song, Kamen wrote the music that went with Sting's lyrics on the hit song "It's Probably Me" for the film Lethal Weapon 3 (1992). "What Michael was," said Sting, "was a gatekeeper to the strange and frightening world of the orchestra for those of us who had only worked in rock bands. You needed someone to introduce you to that world. If you were going to dare to approach that world of orchestration, you'd do it through Michael Kamen: he could arrange and produce strings, but he also thought like a rock musician."

Kamen's unique vision was as much a consequence of his upbringing as his own ingrained talent. Born in 1948, he grew up in the Queens, New York City, with three brothers, and parents who were liberal activists (and who were together for 72 years). Raised on what Kamen described as "a healthy diet of Leadbelly and Pete Seeger records", the precocious talent learnt the piano from the age of two, and studied the oboe at the Juilliard School of Music in New York in the 1960s. At Juilliard, under the influence of the Beatles, Michael Kamen started a group called the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, a rock/classical fusion group. The group made five albums but fell apart after seven years.

After David Bowie had come to the premiere of a ballet Kamen had written, the English star asked him to become musical director of the highly theatrical Diamond Dogs tour of 1975. As well as playing the piano, Michael Kamen brought in his friend, the alto saxophonist David Sanborn. "I had already been playing with him, touring to promote a solo record he had out," said Sanborn.

A mutual friend introduced us, and we became friends immediately. One of Michael's endearing qualities was that he was not shy about letting you know about his abilities: in a lesser soul that would have been troublesome, but he could combine monumental ego with incredible humility.

Six years ago Michael Kamen was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an illness that initially he kept secret. Annie Lennox recalls being struck by his fortitude when he was chosen to conduct the orchestra for the Golden Jubilee concert broadcast from Buckingham Palace last year: "I watched him standing on that rostrum, struggling with MS, and conducting this epic show - which would have been exhausting for anyone with vigorous health."

Last year he was commissioned to write a piece for the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. He conducted the Utah Symphony and Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as well as a children's choir and rock'n'roll group. Sting remembers meeting up with him there:

Over the past couple of years he had gone from being a big portly man to a stick man. I didn't recognise him at first. He was obviously struggling, and it was clearly a stressful situation for him.

David Gilmour, however, had seen Michael Kamen last Friday, at the funeral of Steve O'Rourke, the manager of Pink Floyd. "I thought he looked in really great shape, and he was in very good spirits."

Chris Salewicz

1960: Ian Fleming short story "Risico" (as "The Double Take") ends its serial run in The Daily Express.
(Started 11 April 1960.)
1965: Goldfinger released in the Netherlands.
1978: The Spy Who Loved Me released in the Republic of Korea.
2017: Clifton James dies at age 96--Gladstone, Oregon. (Born 29 May 1920--Spokane, Washington.)

http://pamplinmediagroup.com/pt/9-news/357972-237884-gladstone-hometown-hero-clifton-james-fondly-remembered

Gladstone hometown hero Clifton James
fondly remembered
Raymond Rendleman - Monday, May 08, 2017

James, awarded the Silver Star for his bravery in combat in 1945, went on international fame as Louisiana Sheriff JW Pepper in two James Bond films

Clifton James, Gladstone's hometown hero for his World War II bravery and extensive acting career spanning nearly six decades, died last month at the age of 96.


SUBMITTED PHOTO - In the photo circa 1980, Clifton James enjoys the Clackamas River with his family near High Rocks in Gladstone.

James grew up in Gladstone, a town that he always loved. After studying drama at the University of Oregon, he lived in New York and Los Angeles for most of his life, but his sisters lived in Gladstone, so he would often visit them along with his nieces and nephews. He moved in with his daughter, Gladstone resident Mary James, for the final years of his life before succumbing to diabetes on April 15.

SUBMITTED PHOTO - Clifton James as Sheriff JW Pepper plays opposite Roger Moore as James Bond in 1974's 'The Man with the Golden Gun.'

James' memorial service with full military honors is scheduled for 3 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 25, at Willamette National Cemetery, 11800 S.E. Mt Scott Blvd., Portland.

"He almost always played that tough, Southern sheriff type," said James' sister Bev Anslow of his successful acting career that included more than 50 film credits.

James made his Broadway stage debut as a construction foreman in "The Cave Dwellers" (1958). He was involved in a lot of off-Broadway shows, where he played various roles, including starring with Al Pacino in "American Buffalo" from 1980-81, which was turned into a 1997 film production starring Dustin Hoffman.

James played a floor walker in the classic film "Cool Hand Luke" (1967). His most famous role was fast-talking Louisiana Sheriff JW Pepper in two James Bond films opposite Roger Moore: 1973's "Live and Let Die" and 1974's "The Man with the Golden Gun." Anslow said an elephant was supposed to knock James' stunt double, not James himself as JW Pepper, into a Southeast Asian river during a memorable scene in "The Man with the Golden Gun."

Moore paid tribute to James on Twitter: "Terribly sad to hear Clifton James has left us. As JW Pepper he gave my first two Bond films a great, fun character."

As a character actor, James was called upon to reprise variations on JW Pepper many times. Did he mind being type-cast?

"It didn't bother him, and he rather liked it," Anslow said. "He was an actor's actor, and he would act whatever part was given to him and genuinely enjoy the work."

James loved putting on a show throughout his long life. He was a well-known character around Gladstone, often seen with an unlit cigar in his mouth or taking out his false teeth to scare children.

James' mother taught grade school in Woodland, Washington, and would organize local drama productions, including at the old Gladstone Grade School, which which was K-8 at that time. James went to school in Gladstone through the eighth grade and graduated from Milwaukie High School.

SUBMITTED PHOTO - Staff Sgt. Clifton James of Gladstone served in the U.S. Army for 42 months during World War II. (Posted above)

James was one of the last survivors of WWII's 41st Division, composed of National Guard units from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, North Dakota and Washington state. Serving in the U.S. Army for 42 months in the South Pacific during WWII, he was awarded the Silver Star for his bravery in combat on April 21, 1945.

During the spring of '45, James served as a staff sergeant leading a combat patrol to determine the strength of enemy entrenchments on several ridges on the Philippines' Jolo Island, where previous U.S. attacks had been repulsed. Rather than endanger the whole patrol on April 21, he asked them to stay under cover and watch him try to crawl undetected toward an enemy's trench system. James came under "heavy automatic fire" once he crawled within 20 yards of the trench.

"Then, with complete disregard for his life, [James] charged the position, killing its occupants," a now-declassified military document says. "Continuing on his mission, he crawled to a vantage point, where he could observe the activity of the enemy on the next ridge. With this valuable information gained, the forthcoming attack was a success."

More information about James' military service and letters he sent home to family is available in copies of "Gladstone, Oregon: A History" by Gladstone historian Herbert K. Beals available at City Hall. James suffered various injuries during WWII, including the loss of his front teeth. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a drama degree in 1950.

In 1951, James married Laurie Harper, who died in 2015. He is survived by six children, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

RichardTheBruce

April 16th

1917: Barry Nelson (Haakon Robert Nielsen) is born--San Francisco, California.
(He dies 7 April 2007 at age 89--Bucks County, Pennsylvania.)

Barry Nelson, Broadway and Film Actor, Dies at 86
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/obituaries/14nelson.html
By STUART LAVIETES | APRIL 14, 2007

Barry Nelson, an actor who had a long career in film and television, starred in some of the more durable Broadway comedies of the 1950s and ’60s, and achieved a permanent place in the minds of trivia buffs as the first actor to portray James Bond, died last Saturday, his wife said yesterday. He was 86.

The cause was not immediately known. His wife, Nansi Nelson, said he died while traveling in Bucks County, Pa., The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Nelson became familiar to many moviegoers in his middle years, appearing in films like “Airport” and “The Shining.” But it was onstage more than half a century ago that he made perhaps a more enduring mark. Though not a matinee idol, he was blond and handsome and excelled in light romantic comedies, often playing the somewhat overmatched partner of an irrepressible leading lady.

He was a likable young architect who picked up a chirpy Barbara Bel Geddes in one of the most popular Broadway shows of the early 1950s, “The Moon Is Blue.”

He and Ms. Bel Geddes teamed again from 1961 through 1964, this time as a divorcing couple in Jean Kerr’s “Mary, Mary.” Soon after that show closed, he embarked on another long run opposite Lauren Bacall in “Cactus Flower.”

Mr. Nelson maintained his popularity in the 1970s, even as Broadway comedies began to take a darker view of relationships and marriage.

He starred with Deborah Kerr in Edward Albee’s “Seascape” and played a leading role in Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, “The Norman Conquests.”

He continued to perform in pure entertainments as well, earning a Tony nomination in 1978 for best actor in a musical for his role in the Liza Minnelli showcase “The Act.”

Born Robert Haakon Nielsen in San Francisco on April 16, 1920, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941. Spotted by a talent scout, he was soon signed to an MGM contract and appeared in studio films like “Shadow of the Thin Man” (1941) and “Johnny Eager” and “Dr. Kildare’s Victory,” both in 1942. He landed a lead role the same year in “A Yank on the Burma Road,” playing a cabdriver who winds up leading a convoy of trucks for the Chinese government.

Joining the Army and assigned to an entertainment unit, he made his Broadway debut in 1943, billed as Pvt. Barry Nelson, in Moss Hart’s wartime morale builder, “Winged Victory.” He also appeared in the 1944 film version of the play.

Mr. Nelson starred in a number of television series in the 1950s, including a cold war spy adventure, “The Hunter”; a domestic comedy, “My Favorite Husband”; and a Canadian fur-trapping saga, “Hudson’s Bay.”

But it was in an unremarkable one-hour television production in 1954 that he left a lasting mark, or asterisk. That was when he played Jimmy Bond, an Americanized version of Ian Fleming’s ladykilling international spy, in an adaptation of “Casino Royale” for the CBS anthology series “Climax!”

Sean Connery’s Bond followed Mr. Nelson’s eight years later, in “Dr. No.”

In 1964 he starred in one of the most memorable episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” in which a stranded couple wake up in a typical small town to find that it is completely deserted and deathly quiet except for the sound of a child’s laughter.

He appeared in another creepy classic, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film, “The Shining,” playing the manager of the haunted and virtually empty hotel.

Mr. Nelson’s movie credits also include the 1963 adaptation of “Mary, Mary,” with Debbie Reynolds in the Barbara Bel Geddes role, and the 1970 disaster film “Airport,” in which he played an airline captain. He was a familiar face to television viewers throughout the 1970s and 1980s, appearing in cameo roles on many popular shows, including “Cannon,” “Taxi,” “Dallas” and “The Love Boat.”

Mr. Nelson’s first marriage, to the actress Teresa Celli, ended in divorce in 1951. He and his wife, Nansi, were married in 1992. He had no children from either marriage.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C10 of the New York edition with the headline: Barry Nelson, Broadway and Film Actor, Dies at 86.

1918: Syd Cain is born--Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. (He dies 21 November 2011 at age 93--England.)

Syd Cain obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/dec/01/syd-cain
Production designer behind the deadly gadgets used by James Bond – and his foes
Kim Newman - Thu 1 Dec 2011 13.29 EST - First published on Thu 1 Dec 2011 13.29 EST


Syd Cain at Pinewood Studios with the model used in the explosive climax to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). Photograph: 007magazine.com

The production designer Syd Cain, who has died aged 93, was one of many behind-the-scenes professionals elevated to something like prominence by the worldwide interest in the James Bond films. An industry veteran who began work in British cinema as a draughtsman in 1947, contributing to the look of the gothic melodrama Uncle Silas, Cain is credited on a range of film and television projects, but remains best known for his work in various design capacities on the 007 series, from Dr No in 1962 to GoldenEye in 1995.

Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Cain served in the armed forces in the second world war, surviving a plane crash and recovering from a broken back. Working at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire in the 1940s and 50s, he moved up from uncredited draughtsman (on Adam and Evelyne, The Interrupted Journey, You Know What Sailors Are and Up to His Neck) to assistant art director (for The Gamma People, Fire Down Below, Interpol, How to Murder a Rich Uncle and The World of Suzie Wong). During this time, he developed a habit of slipping his name on to the screen among documents provided as props. In Carol Reed's Our Man in Havana (1959), where the blueprints for a vacuum cleaner are mistaken for rocket secrets, he is listed on the papers as the designer of the device. His first credit as art director was on The Road to Hong Kong (1962), the British-produced last gasp of the series of Bob Hope/Bing Crosby comedies. Cain also worked on the Hope vehicle Call Me Bwana (1963), best remembered because of an in-joke reference to it in From Russia With Love, where a sniper is concealed behind a billboard advertising the film.

Having worked as a draughtsman on Hell Below Zero (1954) and assistant art director on The Cockleshell Heroes (1956), both produced by Albert R Broccoli, he was chosen by Broccoli to work on the Bond films. Though uncredited, he worked with the production designer Ken Adam – in whose shadow he modestly remained for much of his career – on Dr No, taking over as art director when Adam was not available for the immediate follow-up, From Russia With Love (1963). This was the film that introduced the character of Q (Desmond Llewelyn). Cain was responsible for the design of the gadgets issued to Sean Connery's Bond, notably the briefcase with concealed sniper rifle and tear-gas talcum tin. For the villains, Cain also provided Rosa Klebb's shoes, with poison-tipped blade, and the chess-themed decor of Blofeld's lair.

Later, he was production designer for On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). With a new Bond (George Lazenby) and a move away from the gadgets and vast sets of Connery and Adam's later work, Thunderball and Goldfinger, this tried to seem less fantastical – the only contraption issued to Bond is a photocopier. Cain was the supervising art director on Roger Moore's first Bond film, Live and Let Die (1973), then left the series, eventually returning as a storyboard artist for Pierce Brosnan's 007 debut, GoldenEye.

Arguably more impressive than his Bond associations, Cain worked with a number of notable film-makers throughout the 1960s and 70s, as assistant art director for Stanley Kubrick (Lolita, 1962), art director for Ronald Neame (Mister Moses, 1965) and François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451, 1966), executive art director for Richard Lester (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1966) and production designer for Ken Russell (Billion Dollar Brain, 1967), Alfred Hitchcock (Frenzy, 1972) and Jack Gold (Aces High, 1976).

Contributing to lasting British pop-culture artefacts, he was also art director on the Cliff Richard vehicle Summer Holiday (1963) and production designer of the revival series The New Avengers (1976). After the popular, action-oriented Alistair Maclean adventure Fear Is the Key (1973), Cain became associated with a brand of high adventure that grew out of the Bond films, working with Peter R Hunt (director of On Her Majesty's Secret Service) on the Moore movies Gold (1974) and Shout at the Devil (1976), both set in Africa, and with the producer Euan Lloyd on a series of boozy, British macho epics – The Wild Geese (1978), The Sea Wolves (1980) and Who Dares Wins (1982).

Cain retired as a production designer after Tusks (1988), but contributed storyboards to a select run of high-profile films, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). His final credit was on the Michael Caine boxing movie Shiner (2000). In retirement, he illustrated children's books, wrote an autobiography (Not Forgetting James Bond: The Autobiography of James Bond Production Designer Syd Cain, 2002) and was a well-liked guest at Bond-themed fan events.

Cain was married twice. His five sons and three daughters survive him.

• Sidney Cain, production designer, art director and illustrator, born 16 April 1918; died 21 November 2011[/quote]

1922: Kingsley William Amis is born--Clapham, London, England.
(He dies 22 October 1995 at age 73--London, England.)

Obituary: Sir Kingsley Amis
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-sir-kingsley-amis-1579017.html
David Lodge | Monday 23 October 1995 01:02

Kingsley Amis was the most gifted of the British novelists who began publishing in the 1950s and were grouped together - by the media rather than by their own volition - as "Angry Young Men". He also proved himself to be the one with the most stamina and capacity for development.

Amis was a key figure in the history of British post-war fiction, but his originality was not always fully appreciated because it did not manifest itself in any obvious novelty of form. Indeed the literary new wave of the Fifties, in which Amis played a leading role (its poetic wing, to which he also contributed, was known as "The Movement"), was an aesthetically conservative force, consciously setting itself against modernist experimentation. A passage in a review Amis contributed to the Spectator in 1958 is representative in both its sentiments and the down-to-earth blokeishness of its manner:

The idea about experiment being the life-blood of the English novel is one that dies hard. "Experiment" in this context boils down pretty regularly to "obtruded oddity", whether in construction - multiple viewpoints and such - or in style. It is not felt that adventurousness in subject matter or attitude or tone really count.

This is a thinly disguised manifesto for Amis's own early fiction, but it is as obscuring as it is revealing. It is true that Lucky Jim (1954) and its successors dealt with what was then new or neglected social territory (for example, the provincial university) from unhackneyed perspectives (for example, the upwardly mobile young professional who is unimpressed by the values and lifestyle of the bourgeoisie). This is presumably what Amis meant by adventurousness of subject matter, attitude and tone. And it is also true that these novels were very traditional in form - the specific tradition to which they belonged being that of the English comic novel, in which satirical comedy of manners and robust farce are combined in an entertaining and easily assimilable story. Fielding, Dickens, Wodehouse and Waugh are some of Amis's obvious precursors. But it is also true that Amis's novels are triumphs of "style" - a way of using language that, if not obtrusively "odd", is highly original, and wonderfully expressive.

Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens [of scholarly articles] like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?

Lucky Jim (1954)

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap, I got indoors, vigorously rubbing lipstick off my mouth with my handkerchief.

That Uncertain Feeling (1955)

All that type of stuff, dying and so on, was a long way off, not such a long way off as it had once been, admitted, and no doubt the time when it wouldn't be such a long way off as all that wasn't such a long way off as all that, but still. Still what?

Take a Girl Like You (1960)

There is nothing quite like this in English fiction before Amis (though a good deal afterwards, for other writers were quick to learn his tricks). It is a kind of English equivalent to the prose of Samuel Beckett (though Amis would have spluttered derisively at the comparison). In each case, language, denied the luxury of metaphysical affirmation and romantic afflatus, coils back upon itself, mocking its own pretensions as well as the follies and foibles of human behaviour. Both writers use repetition and bathos to marvellous effect, eschewing "elegant variation" and "fine writing" except for purposes of parody. The effort is always to be scrupulously exact, honest and undeceived. It was of course carried to a bleaker, more challenging and subversive extreme by Beckett.

Amis's fundamental scepticism is actually quite dark and disturbing, but it is cushioned or concealed by the conventions of the well-made novel. Some critics have seen this as an evasion or betrayal of artistic integrity, a kind of refusal to be "serious". Amis himself would have taken his stand on the writer's responsibility to entertain as well as instruct. The career of Kingsley Amis crystalises, without resolving, a perennial debate about the contemporary English novel: whether, by remaining faithful to the native realistic tradition and refusing the legacy of modernism, it ensures its own authenticity or fails to be significant in a Hegelian "world-historical sense".

Kingsley Amis was born, ironically enough, in 1922, the year in which the great masterpiece of modernist fiction, James Joyce's Ulysses, was published. He was brought up in a dull outer suburb of south London called Norbury, the only child of respectable lower- middle-class parents, and won a scholarship to the City of London School, to which he commuted daily like his father, a clerk in a commercial office. From this school, of which he always spoke highly, Amis went up to Oxford in 1941, as an Exhibitioner of St John's College, to read English. Here he met Philip Larkin, and formed the basis of a lifelong friendship. The two young men had similar backgrounds, tastes, and sensibilities, and fertilised each other's imaginative development. In this chance conjunction lay the seeds of the literary revolution of the 1950s.

After only a year at Oxford, Amis was called up for military service and served in the Royal Signals in Normandy, Belgium and Germany from 1944 to 1945, an experience which left surprisingly little overt trace in his work apart from a few early short stories. After the Second World War he returned to Oxford, graduating with a First Class degree in 1947, and began research towards a BLitt which he never completed. In this period he kept in touch with Larkin, now a librarian at University College, Leicester, and met another young undergraduate who shared his admiration for Larkin's verse, John Wain. The nucleus of the Movement was beginning to form.

In 1947 Amis published his first "slim volume" of verse, Bright November, and later, along with Larkin and Wain, was one of the contributors to Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines (1956), which marked the arrival of the Movement on the English poetic scene, and its displacement of the late modernist mode epitomised by Dylan Thomas (memorably parodied in That Uncertain Feeling). Amis continued to write poetry, not very prolifically, throughout his life. In this department he was always somewhat overshadowed by Larkin, to whom he paid the homage of imitation, but he was an excellent exponent of light verse, especially of a satirical and ribald kind.

Amis married Hilary Bardwell in 1948, and the following year took up a post as lecturer in English Literature at the University College of Wales, Swansea. He settled down in that pleasant but deeply provincial seaside town to teach, write, and raise a family of three children, one of whom was called Martin. From this congenial but humdrum and materially somewhat pinched existence, Amis was catapulted to fame by the publication of Lucky Jim (dedicated to Larkin) in January 1954. It became a bestseller and a cult book - not surprisingly, for it was a sublimely funny novel which also put its finger very accurately on certain changes which had taken place in post-war British culture and society. Although Amis himself belonged to a small elite of pre-war scholarship boys, he articulated through his hero, Jim Dixon, the feelings of a much larger number of people in the next generation (my own) who were products of the 1944 Education Act and the Welfare State. Through the comedy of Jim's private fantasies and accidental breaches of social decorum, Amis gave us, as it were, permission not to be overawed by the social and cultural codes of the class to which we had been elevated by education. It was enormously liberating.

Measured on a simple laugh-out-loud scale, Lucky Jim was probably the funniest novel Amis wrote, and for some readers his career was therefore downhill all the way. But in spite of his talent for comedy, Amis was, in the words of Larkin's poem, always surprising in himself a hunger to be more serious, and in the novels that followed he combined amusing social satire with a thoughtful and sometimes uncomfortable investigation of the moral life, especially in the sexual sphere. Take A Girl Like You (1960) was a particularly interesting response to the first intimations of the Permissive Society.

Because of the antiestablishment stance of the early novels, Amis was identified with the Left, and in 1957 he declared his allegiance to the Labour Party in a Fabian pamphlet. Ten years later, however, he announced his conversion to Conservatism, in an essay entitled "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right". Henceforward he adopted a combatively right-wing stance on the political issues of the day - Vietnam, nuclear arms, the expansion of higher education and women's liberation.

There was always an element of deliberate provocation and self-parody in this stance, as in the case of Evelyn Waugh (whom Amis came to resemble more and more, in all kinds of ways, as he got older), but there is no reason to doubt the fundamental sincerity of his views. The young Amis's identification with the party of the Welfare State was always emotional rather than ideological, and Lucky Jim was a rebel rather than a revolutionary. As soon as left-wing attitudes became trendy, as they did in the late 1960s, Amis's innate scepticism was turned upon them and their proponents.

One does have the impression, however, that in an increasingly unsympathetic cultural climate Amis became less certain of his constituency, and of his own literary identity, than he had been in the heyday of the Movement. This may have been connected with change and upheaval in his private life. In 1961 he had moved from Swansea to Cambridge, to teach English as a Fellow of Peterhouse, but the notoriously factious English Faculty was not very welcoming. Dr Leavis was reported to have described his new colleague as "a pornographer", a failure in close reading if nothing else, for Amis's novels, though much concerned with sex, are notable for their reticence about the sexual act. He resigned his fellowship after three years to become a full-time writer. At about the same time his marriage broke up, and he married the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard.

In the late Sixties and Seventies he experimented a good deal with "genre" fiction: science fiction (The Anti-Death League, 1966, and The Alteration, 1976), the James Bond thriller (Colonel Sun, 1968), the classic detective story (The Riverside Villas Murder, l973) and the ghost story (The Green Man, 1969). These forms perhaps attracted him as ways of escaping the constraints of the realistic novel and the expectations of an audience who kept hoping he would repeat Lucky Jim. In some of them he addressed himself to weighty philosophic and religious themes, such as the nature of evil.

In spite of having had an essentially secular upbringing, Amis always took a lively, though pugnaciously sceptical, interest in Christian doctrine. An essay boldly entitled "On Christ's Nature" reveals an impressive familiarity with the New Testament, and a characteristic refusal to be awed. (A representative passage raises "the question why, if God wanted human beings to have religion, he did not simply give it to them, instead of arranging the world in one way and then sending someone along to explain that really the whole set-up was quite different").

Amis's best novel after Take A Girl Like You was arguably Ending Up (1974), a black comic tale of a group of retired people failing to cope with the afflictions of old age. "I suppose", says one of their young relatives to another in the course of a particularly joyless Christmas, "I suppose with luck we might get a couple of weeks between the last of them going and us being in their situation." The brilliantly titled Jake's Thing (1978) brought the same mordant scrutiny to bear on male impotence and sex therapy, often to wonderfully comic effect, though without the elegant economy of its predecessor. Both these novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

There followed something of a lull in Amis's creativity. But in the late Eighties he enjoyed a kind of second spring, producing in quick succession Stanley and the Women (1984), The Old Devils (1986), Difficulties with Girls (1988) and The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990). The first of these achieved some notoriety as a misogynist tract, and it was rumoured that a feminist cabal in the New York publishing world significantly delayed its publication in America. Amis's distrust of the female psyche was evident, for those who had eyes to see, as early as Lucky Jim, in the characterisation of the hysterical and devious Margaret. Stanley and the Women caused particular offence perhaps because it is cunningly constructed to catch the unwary liberal reader in its narrative trap. In Difficulties with Girls, however, Amis made some amends with a sympathetic portrait of Jenny Bunn, the heroine of Take a Girl Like You, coping with marriage to the compulsively unfaithful Patrick Standish.

These late novels are notable for their intricate if uneventful narrative structures and frequent shifts of point of view, which require considerable powers of concentration and inference from the reader. The best of them was The Old Devils, for which Amis was deservedly awarded the Booker Prize in 1986. This is another fictional study of old age. The setting in Amis's old haunts in south Wales lends the book an affectionate, nostalgic glow which is deceptive; an appalling abyss of pain, despair and anxiety gradually opens up beneath the novel's comic surface. But Amis is in total command of his material and his unique narrative style. The reader knows he is in for a treat from the first few pages describing Malcolm's cautious negotiation of breakfast:

He had not bitten anything with his front teeth since losing a top middle crown on a slice of liver-sausage six years earlier, and the right-hand side of his mouth was a no-go area, what with the hole in the lower lot where stuff was always apt to stick and a funny piece of gum that seemed to have got detached from something and waved about whenever it got the chance.

Kingsley Amis's second marriage broke up in 1983 and in later life he happily shared a house in Hampstead with his first wife, Hillie, and her second husband, Lord Kilmarnock - a twist in his biography that might have come from one of his own late novels. He took pride in the literary success of his son Martin, who occupies much the same key position among the British novelists who came of age in the 1970s as Kingsley did among those of the 1950s - a dynastic succession unprecedented in the annals of English literature. In spite of the differences of tone and ideology that divide them, it is a fascinating critical exercise to track the stylistic gene that unites these two novelists.

It would be an understatement to say that Kingsley Amis enjoyed a drink. He was an opinionated connoisseur of wine, and an unsurpassed observer of bar-room speech and behaviour. In later life he was a habitue of the Garrick Club, in London. He was appointed CBE in 1981, was granted the freedom of the City of London in 1989, and knighted in 1990. In many ways he became a pillar of the Establishment that he had once tilted at. He did not care for foreign travel, and apart from a spell in Portugal to spend the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1955 (which he was awarded for Lucky Jim), and a couple of visiting professorships in America a few years later, "Abroad" made little impact on his life or work. The title of the book inspired by the visit to Portugal was I Like It Here, and "here" meant England. He exploited the English prejudice that foreigners speak funny to marvellous comic effect - witness the overseas students solemnly interrogating the hero of I Like It Here about Grim Gin, Ifflen Voff, Zumzit Mum, Shem Shoice, and that popular classic Sickies of Sickingdom by Edge-Crown.

In 1991 Amis published his Memoirs, consisting mainly of amusing, scandalous and sometimes cruel anecdotes about his literary contemporaries, many of whom were now dead, including Philip Larkin. The two men kept a wary distance from each other in later years, communicating mainly by letter, as if conscious they could never recover the easy intimacy of youthful friendship. "He was my best friend and I never saw enough of him or knew him as well as I wanted to," Amis wrote, rather sadly, in the Memoirs.

This year, Eric Jacobs published a biography, with Amis's collaboration. It revealed (as literary biographies tend to do) a closer correspondence between the life and the fiction than one might have supposed, especially as regards difficulties with women. It also revealed a surprisingly vulnerable person behind the bluff, blimpish public mask, and the poised, sardonic prose stylist: a rather timid man, fearful of flying, unable to drive a car or perform the simplest domestic tasks, needing a regular and repetitive daily routine to keep the black dog of depression at bay: work, club, pub, telly. Work was the most important of these resources. In spite of increasing physical debility, Amis kept writing up till the end of his life. You Can't Do Both (1994) was generally well received and is perhaps the most openly autobiographical of his novels. If The Biographer's Moustache, published earlier this year, was not the biographee's revenge that many reviewers had hoped for, it still had more than a touch of past mastery.

In That Uncertain Feeling the hero is accosted one evening in the street of a small Welsh town by two lascars, one of whom seems to ask him:

"Where is pain and bitter laugh?" This was just the question for me, but before I could smite my breast and cry, "In here, friend", the other little man had said: "My cousin say, we are new in these town and we wish to know where is piano and bit of life, please?"

That is one of my favourite quotations from Amis because it seems to epitomise his art. He did not dodge the pain of existence and his laughter was sometimes bitter, but he always retained the liberating, life- enhancing gift of comic surprise.

Kingsley Amis, writer: born London 16 April 1922; CBE 1981; Kt 1990; books include A Frame of Mind 1953, Lucky Jim 1954, That Uncertain Feeling 1955, A Case of Samples 1956, I Like it Here 1958, Take a Girl Like You 1960, New Maps of Hell 1960, My Enemy's Enemy 1962, One Fat Englishman 1963, The Egyptologists 1965, (with Robert Conquest) The James Bond Dossier 1965, The Anti-Death League 1966, The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 1966, A Look Round the Estate 1967, Colonel Sun 1968, I Want it Now 1968, The Green Man 1969, What Became of Jane Austen? 1970, Girl, 20 1971, On Drink 1972, The Riverside Villas Murder 1973, Ending Up 1974, Rudyard Kipling and His World 1975, The Alteration 1976, Jake's Thing 1978, Collected Poems 1944-79 1979, Russian Hide-and-Seek 1980, Collected Short Stories 1980, Every Day Drinking 1983, How's Your Glass? 1984, Stanley and the Women 1984, The Old Devils 1986, (with J. Cochrane) Great British Songbook 1986, The Crime of the Century 1987, Difficulties with Girls 1988, The Folks that Live on the Hill 1990, We are All Guilty 1991, Memoirs 1991[/i], The Russian Girl 1992, Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories 1993, You Can't Do Both 1994, The Biographer's Moustache 1995; married 1948 Hilary Bardwell (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1965), 1965 Elizabeth Jane Howard (marriage dissolved 1983); died London 22 October 1995.

1939: Dusty Springfield is born--Hampstead, London, England.
(She dies 2 March 1999 at age 59--Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England,.)

1962: Jonathan Cape publishes Ian Fleming's ninth James Bond novel The Spy Who Loved Me.

VIVIENNE MICHEL writes:

'The spy who loved me was called
James Bond and the night on which he
loved me was a night of screaming
terror in The Dreamy Pines Motor
Court, which is in the Adirondacks in the
north of New York State.

'This is the story of who I am and how
I came through a nightmare of torture
and the threat of rape and death to a
dawn of ecstacy. It's all true--absolutely.
Otherwise Mr. Fleming certainly would
not have risked his professional reputa-
tion in acting as my co-author and per-
suading his publisherss, Jonathan Cape,
to publish my story. Ian Fleming has
also kindly obtained clearnace for
certain minor breaches of The Official
Secrets Act that were necessary to my
story.'

FLEMING
The Adventures of James Bond

Casino Royale
Live and Let Die
Moonraker
Diamonds Are Forever
From Russia, With Love
Dr No
Goldfinger
For Your Eyes Only
Thunderball
The Spy Who Loved Me

Non-Fiction:
Thrilling Cities
The Diamond Smugglers

Introduces
his choice among 'lost' books
All Night at Mr Stanyhurst's
by Hugh Edwards

Jacket design by Richard Chopping
Dagger by Wilkinson Swords Ltd;
Ian Fleming 1962

Watermarked promotional letter in early editions.

Richard Chopping at work.

1964: From Russia With Love released in Australia.

RichardTheBruce

April 17th

1918: William Holden is born--O'Fallon, Illinois. (He dies 12 November 1981 at age 63--Santa Monica, California.)

William Holden

Holden in a publicity photo, 1954

William Franklin Beedle Jr.
Born April 17, 1918 | O'Fallon, Illinois, U.S.
Died November 12, 1981 (aged 63) | Santa Monica, California, U.S.

Cause of death Exsanguination
Resting place Ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean
Nationality American
Alma mater South Pasadena High School
Occupation Actor, wildlife conservationist
Years active 1938–1981
Home town South Pasadena, California, U.S.
Height 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m)
Political party Republican
Spouse(s) Brenda Marshall
(m. 1941; div. 1971)
Partner(s) Stefanie Powers (1972–1981) (his death)[1]
Children 3

Awards

Academy Award for Best Actor (1953)
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor (1974)

Military career

Allegiance United States of America
Service/branch US Army Air Corps Hap Arnold Wings.svg United States Army Air Forces
Years of service 1942–45
Rank US-O2 insignia.svg First lieutenant[2]
Unit First Motion Picture Unit (USAAF)
Battles/wars World War II

William Holden (born William Franklin Beedle Jr.; April 17, 1918 – November 12, 1981) was an American actor who was one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1950s and 1960s. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the film Stalag 17 (1953), and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for the television film The Blue Knight (1973). Holden starred in some of Hollywood's most popular and critically acclaimed films, including Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Wild Bunch, Picnic and Network. He was named one of the "Top 10 Stars of the Year" six times (1954–1958, 1961), and appeared as 25th on the American Film Institute's list of 25 greatest male stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

Early life and education

With Lee J. Cobb (right) in Holden's first starring role in a film, Golden Boy (1939)

Holden was born William Franklin Beedle Jr. on April 17, 1918, in O'Fallon, Illinois, son of William Franklin Beedle (1891–1967), an industrial chemist, and his wife Mary Blanche Beedle (née Ball, 1898–1990), a schoolteacher.[3] He had two younger brothers, Robert Westfield Beedle (1921–1944) and Richard P. Beedle (1924–1964). One of his father's grandmothers, Rebecca Westfield, was born in England in 1817, while some of his mother's ancestors settled in Virginia's Lancaster County after emigrating from England in the 17th century.[3] His younger brother, Robert W. "Bobbie" Beedle, became a U.S. Navy fighter pilot and was killed in action in World War II, over New Ireland, a Japanese-occupied island in the South Pacific, on January 5, 1944.

His family moved to South Pasadena when he was three. After graduating from South Pasadena High School, Holden attended Pasadena Junior College, where he became involved in local radio plays.

Career
Paramount
Holden appeared uncredited in Prison Farm (1939) and Million Dollar Legs (1939) at Paramount.

A version of how he obtained his stage name "Holden" is based on a statement by George Ross of Billboard: "William Holden, the lad just signed for the coveted lead in Golden Boy, used to be Bill Beadle. [sic] And here is how he obtained his new movie tag. On the Columbia lot is an assistant director and scout named Harold Winston. Not long ago he was divorced from the actress, Gloria Holden, but carried the torch after the marital rift. Winston was one of those who discovered the Golden Boy newcomer and who renamed him—in honor of his former spouse!"[4]

Golden Boy
Holden's first starring role was in Golden Boy (1939), costarring Barbara Stanwyck, in which he played a violinist-turned-boxer.[5] The film was made for Columbia who negotiated a sharing agreement with Paramount for Holden's services.

Holden was still an unknown actor when he made Golden Boy, while Stanwyck was already a film star. She liked Holden and went out of her way to help him succeed, devoting her personal time to coaching and encouraging him, which made them into lifelong friends. When she received her Honorary Oscar at the 1982 Academy Award ceremony, Holden had died in an accident just a few months prior. At the end of her acceptance speech, she paid him a personal tribute: "I loved him very much, and I miss him. He always wished that I would get an Oscar. And so tonight, my golden boy, you got your wish".[6][7]

Next he starred with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in the Warner Bros. gangster epic Invisible Stripes (1939).[8]

Back at Paramount he starred with Bonita Granville in Those Were the Days! (1940) followed by the role of George Gibbs in the film adaptation of Our Town (1940), done for Sol Lesser at United Artists.[9]

Columbia put Holden in a Western with Jean Arthur, Arizona (1940), then at Paramount he was in a hugely popular war film, I Wanted Wings (1941) with Ray Milland and Veronica Lake.

He did another Western at Columbia, Texas (1941) with Glenn Ford, and a musical comedy at Paramount, The Fleet's In (1942) with Eddie Bracken, Dorothy Lamour and Betty Hutton.[10]

He stayed at Paramount for The Remarkable Andrew (1942) with Brian Donlevy then made Meet the Stewarts (1943) at Columbia. Paramount reunited him and Bracken in Young and Willing (1943).

World War Two
Holden served as a second and then a first lieutenant in the United States Army Air Force during World War II, where he acted in training films for the First Motion Picture Unit, including Reconnaissance Pilot (1943).

Post War
Holden's first film back from the services was Blaze of Noon (1947), an aviator picture at Paramount directed by John Farrow.

He followed it with a romantic comedy, Dear Ruth (1947) and he was one of many cameos in Variety Girl (1947).[11]

RKO borrowed him for Rachel and the Stranger (1948) with Robert Mitchum and Loretta Young, then he went over to 20th Century Fox for Apartment for Peggy (1948).

At Columbia he did a film noir, The Dark Past (1948) and a Western with Ford, The Man from Colorado (1949). At Paramount he did another Western, Streets of Laredo (1949).

Columbia teamed him with Lucille Ball for Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949) then he did a sequel to Dear Ruth, Dear Wife (1949). He did a comedy at Columbia Father Is a Bachelor (1950).


With Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950)

His career took off in 1950 when Billy Wilder tapped him to play a role in Sunset Boulevard, in which he played a down-at-heel screenwriter taken in by a faded silent-screen star, played by Gloria Swanson. Holden earned his first Best Actor Oscar nomination with the part.[12]

Getting the part was a lucky break for Holden, as the role was initially cast with Montgomery Clift, who backed out of his contract.[13] Swanson later said, "Bill Holden was a man I could have fallen in love with. He was perfection on- and off-screen."[14] And Wilder commented "Bill was a complex guy, a totally honorable friend. He was a genuine star. Every woman was in love with him."[14]

Paramount reunited him with Nancy Olson, one of his Sunset Boulevard costars, in Union Station (1950).

Holden had another good break when cast as Judy Holliday's love interest in the big screen adaptation of Born Yesterday (1950). He made two more films with Olson: Force of Arms (1951) at Warners and Submarine Command (1951) at Paramount.

Holden did a sports film at Columbia, Boots Malone (1952) then returned to Paramount for The Turning Point (1952).

Stalag 17 and Peak Era of Stardom
Holden was reunited with Wilder in Stalag 17 (1953), for which Holden won the Academy Award for Best Actor. This ushered in the peak years of Holden's stardom.[5]

He made a sex comedy with David Niven for Otto Preminger, The Moon Is Blue (1953), which was a huge hit, in part due to controversy over its content. At Paramount he was in a comedy with Ginger Rogers that was not particularly popular, Forever Female (1953). A Western at MGM, Escape from Fort Bravo (1953) did much better, and the all star Executive Suite (1954) was a notable success.[15]


With Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina (1954)

Holden made a third film with Wilder, Sabrina (1954), billed beneath Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.[16] Holden and Hepburn became romantically involved during the filming, unbeknown to Wilder: "People on the set told me later that Bill and Audrey were having an affair, and everybody knew. Well, not everybody! I didn't know."[14]:174 The interactions between Bogart, Hepburn, and Holden made shooting less than pleasant, as Bogart had wanted his wife, Lauren Bacall, to play Sabrina. Bogart was not especially friendly toward Hepburn, who had little Hollywood experience, while Holden's reaction was the opposite, wrote biographer Michelangelo Capua.[17]

Holden recalls their romance:

Before I even met her, I had a crush on her, and after I met her, just a day later, I felt as if we were old friends, and I was rather fiercely protective of her, though not in a possessive way.[18]

Their relationship did not last much beyond the completion of the film. Holden, who was at this point dependent on alcohol, said, "I really was in love with Audrey, but she wouldn't marry me."[19] Rumors at the time had it that Hepburn wanted a family, but when Holden told her that he'd had a vasectomy and having children was impossible, she moved on. A few months later, Hepburn met Mel Ferrer, whom she would later marry.[20]

He took third billing for The Country Girl (1954) with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, directed by George Seaton from a play by Clifford Odets.

It was a big hit, as was The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), a Korean War drama with Kelly.[21][22]

In 1954, Holden was featured on the cover of Life. On February 7, 1955, Holden appeared as a guest star on I Love Lucy as himself.[23]

The golden run at the box office continued with Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), from a best-selling novel, with Jennifer Jones, and Picnic (1955), as a drifter, in an adaptation of the William Inge play with Kim Novak.[24][25] Picnic was his last film under the contract with Columbia.

A second film with Seaton did not do as well, The Proud and Profane (1956), where Holden played the role with a moustache.

Neither did Toward the Unknown (1957), the one film Holden produced himself.

The Bridge on the River Kwai
Holden had his most widely recognized role as an ill-fated prisoner in David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) with Alec Guinness,[26] a huge commercial success.

He made another war film for a British director, The Key (1958) with Trevor Howard and Sophia Loren for director Carol Reed.[27] He played an American Civil War military surgeon in John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959) opposite John Wayne, which was a box office disappointment.[28] Columbia would not meet Holden's asking price of $750,000 and 10% of the gross for The Guns of Navarone (1961); the amount of money Holden asked exceeding the combined salaries of the stars Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn.[29]

Holden had another big hit with The World of Suzie Wong (1960) with Nancy Kwan that was shot in Hong Kong.

Less popular was Satan Never Sleeps (1961), the last film of Clifton Webb and Leo McCarey; The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), this third film with Seaton; or The Lion (1962), with Trevor Howard and Capucine. The latter was shot in Africa and sparked a fascination with the continent that was to last until the end of Holden's life.

Holden's films continued to struggle at the box office however: Paris When It Sizzles (1964) with Hepburn that was shot in 1962 but given a much delayed release; The 7th Dawn (1964) with Capucine and Susannah York, a romantic adventure set during the Malayan Emergency produced by Charles K. Feldman; Alvarez Kelly (1966), a Western; and The Devil's Brigade (1968). He was also one of many names in Feldman's Casino Royale (1967).

Holden in The Revengers (1972)

In 1969, Holden made a comeback when he starred in director Sam Peckinpah's graphically violent Western The Wild Bunch,[5] winning much acclaim.

Also in 1969, Holden starred in director Terence Young's family film L'Arbre de Noël, co-starring Italian actress Virna Lisi and French actor Bourvil, based on the novel of the same name by Michel Bataille. This film was originally released in the United States as The Christmas Tree and on home video as When Wolves Cry.[30]

Holden made a Western with Ryan O'Neal and Blake Edwards, Wild Rovers (1971). It was not particularly successful. Neither was The Revengers (1972), another Western.

For television roles in 1974, Holden won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his portrayal of a cynical, tough veteran LAPD street cop in the television film The Blue Knight, based upon the best-selling Joseph Wambaugh novel of the same name.[31][5]

In 1973, Holden starred with Kay Lenz in a movie directed by Clint Eastwood called Breezy, which was considered a box-office flop.[32]

Also in 1974, Holden starred with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in the critically acclaimed disaster film The Towering Inferno,[33] which became a box-office smash and one of the highest-grossing films of Holden's career.

Two years later, he was praised for his Oscar-nominated leading performance in Sidney Lumet's classic Network (1976),[34] an examination of the media written by Paddy Chayefsky, playing an older version of the character type for which he had become iconic in the 1950s, only now more jaded and aware of his own mortality.

Around this time he also appeared in 21 Hours at Munich (1976).

Final Films
Holden made a fourth and final film for Wilder with Fedora (1978). He followed it with Damien: Omen II (1978) and had a cameo in Escape to Athena (1978).

Holden had a supporting role in Ashanti (1979) and was third-billed in another disaster movie with Paul Newman for Irwin Allen, When Time Ran Out... (1980), which was a flop.[35]

In 1980, Holden appeared in The Earthling with popular child actor Ricky Schroder,[36] playing a loner dying of cancer who goes to the Australian outback to end his days, meets a young boy whose parents have been killed in an accident, and teaches him how to survive.

After making S.O.B. (1981) for Blake Edwards, Holden refused to star in Jason Miller's film That Championship Season.[37]

Personal life


Matron of honor Brenda Marshall (left) and best man William Holden, sole guests at Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan's wedding in 1952

Holden was best man at the wedding of his friend Ronald Reagan to Nancy Davis in 1952; however, he never involved himself in politics.

While in Italy in 1966, Holden killed another driver in a drunk-driving incident. He received an eight-month suspended sentence for vehicular manslaughter.[38]

Holden maintained a home in Switzerland and also spent much of his time working for wildlife conservation as a managing partner in an animal preserve in Africa. His Mount Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki (founded 1959) became a mecca for the international jet set.[39] On a trip to Africa, he fell in love with the wildlife and became increasingly concerned with the animal species that were beginning to decrease in population. With the help of his partners, he created the Mount Kenya Game Ranch and inspired the creation of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation.[40] The Mount Kenya Game Ranch works to assist in Kenya with the wildlife education of its youth.[41] Within the Mount Kenya Game Ranch is the Mount Kenya Conservancy, which runs an animal orphanage as well as the Bongo Rehabilitation Program in collaboration with the Kenya Wildlife Service. The orphanage provides shelter and care for orphans, injured and neglected animals found in the wild, with the aim of releasing these animals back into the wild whenever possible. The conservancy is home to the critically endangered East African mountain bongo, and aims to prevent its extinction by breeding.[42][43]
Marriage and relationships

Holden was married to actress Ardis Ankerson (stage name Brenda Marshall) from 1941 until their divorce 30 years later, in 1971.[5] They had two sons, Peter Westfield "West" Holden (1943–2014)[44] and Scott Porter Holden (1946–2005).[45] He adopted his wife's daughter, Virginia, from her first marriage with actor Richard Gaines. During the filming of the film Sabrina (1954), costar Audrey Hepburn and he had a brief but passionate affair. Holden met French actress Capucine in the early 1960s. The two starred in the films The Lion (1962) and The 7th Dawn (1964). They reportedly began a two-year affair, which is alleged to have ended due to Holden's alcoholism.[46] Capucine and Holden remained friends until his death in 1981.

In 1972, Holden began a nine-year relationship with actress Stefanie Powers, and sparked her interest in animal welfare.[1] After his death, Powers set up the William Holden Wildlife Foundation at Holden's Mount Kenya Game Ranch.[47]

Death
According to the Los Angeles County Coroner's autopsy report, Holden was alone and intoxicated in his apartment in Santa Monica, California, on November 12, 1981, when he slipped on a rug, severely lacerating his forehead on a teak bedside table, and bled to death. Evidence suggests he was conscious for at least half an hour after the fall. He likely may not have realized the severity of the injury and did not summon aid, or was unable to call for help. His body was found four days later. The causes of death were given as "exsanguination" and "blunt laceration of scalp."[48] Rumors existed that he was suffering from lung cancer, which Holden himself had denied at a 1980 press conference. His death certificate made no mention of any cancer.[39][48] He had dictated in his will that the Neptune Society cremate him and scatter his ashes in the Pacific Ocean. In accordance with his wishes, no funeral or memorial service was held.[49]

Ronald Reagan released a statement, saying, "I have a great feeling of grief. We were close friends for many years. What do you say about a longtime friend – a sense of personal loss, a fine man. Our friendship never waned." [5] For his contribution to the film industry, Holden has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 1651 Vine Street.[50] He also has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[51] His death was noted by singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, whose 1987 song "Tom's Diner" (about a sequence of events one morning in 1981) included a mention of reading a newspaper article about "an actor who had died while he was drinking". Vega subsequently confirmed that this was a reference to Holden.[52]

Filmography

Film
Year . . . Title . . . . Role . . . . Notes
1938 Prison Farm Prisoner Film debut
Uncredited
1939 Million Dollar Legs Graduate Who Says 'Thank You' Uncredited
1939 Golden Boy Joe Bonaparte
1939 Invisible Stripes Tim Taylor
1940 Those Were the Days! P.J. "Petey" Simmons
1940 Our Town George Gibbs
1940 Arizona Peter Muncie
1941 I Wanted Wings Al Ludlow
1941 Texas Dan Thomas
1942 The Fleet's In Casey Kirby
1942 The Remarkable Andrew Andrew Long
1942 Meet the Stewarts Michael Stewart
1943 Young and Willing Norman Reese
1947 Blaze of Noon Colin McDonald
1947 Dear Ruth Lt. William Seacroft
1947 Variety Girl Himself
1948 Rachel and the Stranger Big Davey
1948 Apartment for Peggy Jason Taylor
1948 The Dark Past Al Walker
1949 The Man from Colorado Del Stewart
1949 Streets of Laredo Jim Dawkins
1949 Miss Grant Takes Richmond Dick Richmond
1949 Dear Wife Bill Seacroft
1950 Father Is a Bachelor Johnny Rutledge
1950 Sunset Boulevard Joe Gillis Nominated – Academy Award for Best Actor
1950 Union Station Lt. William Calhoun
1950 Born Yesterday Paul Verrall
1951 Force of Arms Sgt. Joe "Pete" Peterson
1951 Submarine Command LCDR Ken White
1952 Boots Malone Boots Malone
1952 The Turning Point Jerry McKibbon
1953 Stalag 17 Sgt. J.J. Sefton Academy Award for Best Actor
Nominated – New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor
1953 The Moon Is Blue Donald Gresham
1953 Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach Tourist Uncredited
1953 Forever Female Stanley Krown
1953 Escape from Fort Bravo Capt. Roper
1954 Executive Suite McDonald Walling Venice Film Festival Special Award for Ensemble Acting
1954 Sabrina David Larrabee
1954 The Bridges at Toko-Ri LT Harry Brubaker, USNR
1954 The Country Girl Bernie Dodd
1955 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing Mark Elliott
1955 Picnic Hal Carter Nominated – BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor
1956 The Proud and Profane Lt. Col. Colin Black
1956 Toward the Unknown Maj. Lincoln Bond
1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai Cmdr. Shears
1958 The Key Capt. David Ross
1959 The Horse Soldiers Major Henry Kendall
1960 The World of Suzie Wong Robert Lomax Nominated – Laurel Award for Top Male Dramatic Performance
1962 Satan Never Sleeps Father O'Banion
1962 The Counterfeit Traitor Eric Erickson
1962 The Lion Robert Hayward
1964 Paris When It Sizzles Richard Benson / Rick Shot in 1962, given delayed release
1964 The 7th Dawn Major Ferris
1966 Alvarez Kelly Alvarez Kelly
1967 Casino Royale Ransome Cameo role
1968 The Devil's Brigade Lt. Col. Robert T. Frederick
1969 The Wild Bunch Pike Bishop
1969 The Christmas Tree Laurent Ségur
1971 Wild Rovers Ross Bodine
1972 The Revengers John Benedict
1973 Breezy Frank Harmon
1974 Open Season Hal Wolkowski Cameo role
1974 The Towering Inferno Jim Duncan
1976 Network Max Schumacher Nominated – Academy Award for Best Actor
Nominated – BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role
Nominated – National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor
1978 Fedora Barry "Dutch" Detweiler
1978 Damien: Omen II Richard Thorn
1979 Escape to Athena Prisoner smoking a cigar in prison camp Uncredited
1979 Ashanti Jim Sandell
1980 When Time Ran Out Shelby Gilmore
1980 The Earthling Patrick Foley
1981 S.O.B. Tim Culley Final film role

Television

1955 Lux Video Theatre Intermission Guest Episode: "Love Letters"
1955 I Love Lucy Himself Episode: "Hollywood at Last"
1956 The Jack Benny Program Himself Episode: "William Holden/Frances Bergen Show"
1973 The Blue Knight Bumper Morgan Television film
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie
1976 21 Hours at Munich Chief of Police Manfred Schreiber Television film

Radio

1940 Lux Radio Theatre Our Town
1946 Lux Radio Theatre Miss Susie Slagle's[53]
1952 Lux Radio Theatre Submarine Command[54]
1952 Hollywood Star Playhouse The Joyful Beggar[54]
1953 Lux Radio Theatre Appointment with Danger[55]
1953 Lux Summer Theatre High Tor[56]

Box-office ranking
For a number of years, exhibitors voted Holden among the most popular stars in the country:

1954 – 7th (US)
1955 – 4th (US)
1956 – 1st (US)
1957 – 7th (US)
1958 – 6th (US), 6th (UK)
1959 – 12th (US)
1960 – 14th (US)
1961 – 8th (US)
1962 – 15th (US)

1930: Rémy Julienne is born--Cepoy, Loiret, France.
1959: Sean Bean is born--Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England.
1992: Arthur Calder-Marshall dies at age 84. (Born 19 August 1908--Wallington, London.)

Arthur Calder-Marshall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Calder-Marshall
Arthur Calder-Marshall (19 August 1908 – 17 April 1992) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist and biographer.

Life and career

Calder-Marshall was born in El Misti, Woodcote Road, Wallington, Surrey, the son of Alice (Poole) and Arthur Grotjan Marshall (later Calder-Marshall; 1875 –1958),[1][2] a civil engineer.[3] The elder Arthur was grandson of the sculptor William Calder Marshall (1813–1894). William Calder Marshall's father William Marshall (1780–1859), D.L. (Edinburgh), a goldsmith (including to the King in the early nineteenth century) and jeweller, had married Annie, daughter of merchant William Calder, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1810-11, by his wife Agnes, a daughter of landed gentleman Hugh Dalrymple. The Marshall family were Episcopalian goldsmiths from Perthshire; the Calder family were merchants.[4]

A short, unhappy stint teaching English at Denstone College, Staffordshire, 1931–33, inspired his novel Dead Centre.[5] In the 1930s, Calder-Marshall adopted strong left-wing views. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain[6] and was also a member of the London-based left-wing Writers and Readers Group which also included Randall Swingler, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mulk Raj Anand, Maurice Richardson and Rose Macaulay.[7]

In 1937, Calder-Marshall wrote scripts for MGM although none appears to have been filmed.[8]

Calder-Marshall's fiction and non-fiction covered a wide range of subjects. He himself remarked, "I have never written two books on the same subject or with the same object."[9]

In the 1960s, Calder-Marshall took on commissioned work which included a novelisation of the Dirk Bogarde film Victim. He has additionally been proposed as the author of The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½ a children's novel about British spy James Bond's nephew, published under the pseudonym R. D. Mascott.[10]

With his wife, writer Ara Calder-Marshall (born Violet Nancy Sales),[11] he was the father of the actress Anna Calder-Marshall and the grandfather of the actor Tom Burke.
Media adaptations

Orson Welles adapted The Way to Santiago in 1941 for RKO. However Welles's troubles with the studio saw to it that no film got made.[12]

James Mason purchased the film rights to Occasion of Glory, intending to make this project his directorial debut.[13] Mason hired Christopher Isherwood to write the script.[14]

Bibliography

Biography
"The Enthusiast; An Enquiry into the Life Beliefs and Character of the Rev. Joseph Leycester Lyne alias Fr. Ignatius,O.S.B., Abbot of Elm Hill, Norwich and Llanthony Wales" (1962, Faber and Faber; Facsimile reprint 2000, Llanerch Publishers, Felinfach)

Adult fiction

Novels:
Two of a Kind (1933)
About Levy (1933)
At Sea (1934)
Dead Centre (1935)
Pie in the Sky (1937)
The Way to Santiago (1940)
A Man Reprieved (1949)
Occasion of Glory (1955)
The Scarlet Boy (1961)

Short fiction:
Crime Against Cania (1934)
A Pink Doll (1935)
A Date with a Duchess (1937)

Play:
Season of Goodwill (1965) (based on Every Third Thought by Dorothea Malm) [15]

As William Drummond:
Midnight Lace (1960) (novelisation)
Victim 1961 (novelisation)
Life for Ruth 1962 (novelisation)
Night Must Fall 1964 (novelisation)
Gaslight 1966 (novelisation)

Children's fiction
The Man from Devil's Island (1958)
The Fair to Middling (1959)

Adult non-fiction

Memoirs
The Magic of My Youth (1951)

Travel
Glory Dead (Trinidad) (1939)
The Watershed (Yugoslavia) (1947)

Miscellany
(With Edward J. H. O'Brien and J. Davenport) The Guest Book (1935 and 1936)
Challenge to Schools: A Pamphlet on Public School Education (1935)
The Changing Scene (essays on English society) (1937)
(With others) Writing in Revolt: Theory and Examples (1937)
The Book Front (1947)
No Earthly Command (biography of Alexander Riall Wadham Woods) (1957)
Havelock Ellis: A Biography (1959) US title The Sage of Sex: A Life of Havelock Ellis (1960)
The Enthusiast (biography of Joseph Leycester Lyne) (1962)
The Innocent Eye (biography of Robert Flaherty) (1963)
Wish You Were Here: The Art of Donald McGill (1966)
Lewd, Blasphemous, and Obscene: Being the Trials and Tribulations of Sundry Founding Fathers of Today's Alternative Societies (1972)
The Grand Century of the Lady (1976)
The Two Duchesses (1978)

Children's non-fiction
Lone Wolf: The Story of Jack London (1963)

Editor - Calder-Marshall edited and wrote the introduction to:
Tobias Smollett (1950)
The Bodley Head Jack London (four volumes: 1963–66)
Prepare to Shed Them Now: The Ballads of George R. Sims (1968)
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man and Other Writings (1970)

2002: BOND 20 films 007 and Jinx killing Mr. Kil.
2008: Richard Wasey Chopping dies at age 91--Colchester, Essex, England.
(Born 14 April 1917--Colchester, Essex, England.)

Richard Chopping: Versatile
illustrator best known for his
distinctive Bond book jackets
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/richard-chopping-versatile-illustrator-best-known-for-his-distinctive-bond-book-jackets-813974.html
Wednesday 23 April 2008 00:00

Richard Chopping is probably best known today as the creator of dust-jackets for the publisher Jonathan Cape's Ian Fleming James Bond novels. From Russia with Love (1957), with its pistol and flower design, the skull and rose for Goldfinger (1959), and the slightly eerie spyhole and Ian Fleming's name-plate artwork for For Yours Eyes Only [sic] (1960) are distinctively Chopping's work.

The creator of these confections, with their meticulous attention to detail and delicacy of colour, was, however, much more than a book-jacket designer. By the time they appeared, Chopping had established a reputation as a versatile illustrator who was noted for his depictions of natural objects such as butterflies, flowers, insects and fruit, based on close observation, as well as being a sympathetic teacher, busy exhibitor and author.

Richard Wasey Chopping was born in 1917 in Colchester, Essex – Wasey was an old family name. His father was an entrepreneurial businessman from a milling family, was himself a miller and store owner and eventually became mayor of Colchester. Chopping's twin brother died when young. He also had an older brother, a pilot killed on a Pathfinder mission over Europe in the Second World War.

Chopping began painting as a small boy, encouraged by his art master at Gresham's School, at Holt, in Norfolk. The future composer Benjamin Britten and spy Donald Maclean were his contemporaries at Gresham's, and Britten remained a friend.

In the late 1930s Chopping attended the London Theatre Studio and learned stage design under Michel St Denis. Next, and important to him, came his period as student, cook and housekeeper at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing run by Cedric Morris and Lett Haines. They had opened the school in 1937, and it was eventually based for many years at Benton End near Hadleigh, in Suffolk. Lucian Freud, who had enrolled in the early summer of 1939, was another student of this unique school.

At this rural paradise, Morris and Haines aimed to "provide an environment where students can work together with more experienced artists in a common endeavour to produce sincere painting". Morris, a great plantsman, created a wonderful garden. Chopping learned a great deal from him, as much through observation as direct instruction.

Morris painted a fine portrait of Chopping in 1941, his subject dark-haired, sloe-eyed, duffel-coated and alert. It was included in the Tate Gallery's 1984 Morris exhibition, illustrated in the catalogue.

From 1942 until 1949, Chopping was able to use his great abilities as a plant draughtsman working on Penguin Books' projected 22-volume flora of the British Isles. Chopping would draw every flower, the Bloomsbury writer Frances Partridge supplying the accompanying text. But Allen Lane had over-stretched himself on this, one of Penguin's great failures. The plug was pulled after seven years, by which time the project had only got as far as the end of the letter C.

From the early 1950s Chopping was able to pass on his knowledge of plant drawing to others as a part-time teacher at Colchester School of Art. He left in 1961 to teach at the Royal College of Art, where he was incidentally a popular feature of the end-of-term Christmas stage shows. Chopping worked under the Marquess of Queensberry in the ceramic department, where his plant-drawing skills and ability to paint butterflies and flowers on porcelain were much valued.

He eventually transferred to the general studies course teaching creative writing and continued with this until his retirement aged 65. When in 1959 he shared an exhibition at the Minories, Colchester with Denis Wirth-Miller, Chopping was already quoted as saying that he considered himself more a writer than a painter.

He was by then well established as an author and illustrator of natural history and children's books. Butterflies in Britain (1943) was followed by A Book of Birds, The Old Woman and the Pedlar, The Tailor and the Mouse and Wild Flowers (all 1944) and Mr Postlethwaite's Reindeer (1945), stories broadcast by the BBC.

When Chopping's first novel, The Fly, was completed, his friend Angus Wilson steered it towards David Farrer at Secker & Warburg for consideration who, commenting that he found it "a perfectly disgusting concoction", passed it on to his young colleague Giles Gordon as a first editing job. In his 1993 memoir Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement?, Gordon tells how he was "determined to like the novel", believing that "more, and no doubt better, books would follow. The Fly was indeed disgusting."

Chopping was invited to the newly married Gordon's tiny London flat, arriving with a crate of champagne for what turned out to be a bizarre weekend's editing. Gordon, who found Chopping "a most fastidious person", was convinced that The Fly, which appeared in 1965, "was sufficiently sordid to appeal to voyeurs, and if Chopping were to adorn it with one of his famous dust-jackets it could be a succès de scandale; and so it proved." Chopping's more mundane second novel, The Ring (1967), "sank with very little trace, even in the second-hand bookshops".

Chopping exhibited widely. He had showed a couple of works in a mixed exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1939, and others followed. In 1956, he shared a show of paintings and drawings at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery with Robin Ironside, the painter and theatre designer, and the Australian artist Kenneth Rowell. Chopping was also in "20th Century British Painting" at the influential New Art Centre in 1977.

He also received painting commissions. At the time of the Minories show, he had recently finished a still life as a 50th birthday present for Prince Ludwig of Hesse from his family and was completing a portrait of Lord Astor with a view of Cliveden. In addition, there were solo exhibitions. His distinctive trompe-l'oeil and flower watercolours were at the Hanover Gallery in 1953; later shows included the Aldeburgh Festival Gallery in 1979, which surveyed his paintings and graphic work from 1940 onwards.

A 1956 three-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, with Francis Bacon as the main attraction and separate rooms given over to pictures by a French aristocrat and Chopping, led to the Bond dust-jacket commissions. Chopping's flower paintings and trompe-l'oeil works were upstairs, as he remembered, "in a little gallery at the back, that was like a kind of long lavatory".

Bacon took Ann, Ian Fleming's wife, in to see his own work, Chopping recalled. "Then he took her upstairs to see mine, which was very good of him, and Ann went back to Ian and said, 'Well, you ought to get this chap to do your next book jacket.'" They met at one of the Flemings' artistic salons, where Fleming granted Chopping the commission for From Russia with Love.

Although the first edition jacket announced that it had been designed by the author, Chopping later said:

He in no way designed it. He did tell me the things he wanted on it. It had to be a rose with a drop of dew on it. There had to be a sawn-off Smith & Wesson. We never discussed the type of revolver we would use. It had to be that one.

Chopping and the artist Denis Wirth-Miller lived together for some 70 years from the time that Wirth-Miller was 21, Chopping 20. Wirth-Miller helped foster Chopping's artistic talent. They bought a house in 1944 in Wivenhoe, Essex, but as it was a port and ship-building centre and it was a wartime restricted area they could not move in until 1945. Eventually, they were the first in Colchester to register a civil partnership, in December 2005.

Chopping and Wirth-Miller were founder-members of a strong artistic colony in Wivenhoe. It received a boost in 1970 when the journalist George Gale invited the politician Edward Heath to open the new Wivenhoe Arts Club, with its own exhibition hall. It attracted not only visual artists but writers such as Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis and Peregrine Worsthorne.

For many years Francis Bacon had a home and studio in Wivenhoe, and Chopping was the subject of his Two Studies for Portrait of Richard Chopping, 1978. "Denis Wirth-Miller was a deep bosom-buddy of Francis from the 1940s," says Chopping's executor and friend Daniel Chapman. "When Richard and Denis had holidays, they were often extended ones in France, Francis with them. They were with Francis in Paris when his partner killed himself in an hotel." The suicide of George Dyer took place two days before Bacon's 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais.

Bacon eventually gave up his home in Wivenhoe, but he, Chopping and Wirth-Miller remained close and, even after Bacon's death in 1992, Chopping and Wirth-Miller remained closely concerned with Bacon's affairs.

Chopping's final years were blighted by sight problems, when first one, then the other, retina detached. He could just read, but could not see a picture and, although unable to paint, determinedly kept on with his writing as best he could.

David Buckman

Richard Wasey Chopping, artist, teacher and writer: born Colchester, Essex 14 April 1917; registered civil partnership 2005 with Denis Wirth-Miller; died Colchester 17 April 2008.

RichardTheBruce

April 18th

1964: Screenwriter Ben Hecht dies of a heart attack while reading on a Saturday.
That's after writing three serious Casino Royale script versions for Charles K. Feldman.

Casino Royale: 60 years old
https://telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/jamesbond/9988216/Casino-Royale-60-years-old.html

Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Casino Royale was first published on April 13 1953 and there is an intriguing tale behind the original screenplay of the 007 film adaptation.


Daniel Craig starred in the film adaptation of Ian Fleming's 1963 novel Casino Royale.

By Jeremy Duns - 8:00AM BST 13 Apr 2013

Sixty years ago, the first 5000 copies of a novel by a new author were printed. The novel was Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, published April 13, 1953.

When he took the part of Dr No in the first James Bond film, Joseph Wiseman had no inkling that the franchise would become such a success. As he admitted in 1992, he thought he’d signed up for "another Grade-B Charlie Chan mystery". How wrong. Last November, 50 years after the premiere of Dr No, the 23rd Bond film was released, directed by Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, co-written by Oscar-nominated John Logan and starring Daniel Craig as the bare-knuckled Bond he debuted in 2005’s [sic] Casino Royale.

The Bond films have come a long way since 1962. The likes of Mendes, Logan, Paul Haggis and Marc Forster signing up to be involved is worlds away from even a decade ago, when the series seemed to be heading into self-parody.

Much of the creative renaissance of the past decade stems from the decision to return to the spirit of Fleming’s novels. Craig’s Casino Royale was an adaptation of Fleming’s first novel. The book merged the traditions of vintage British thrillers with the more realistic and brutal style of hardboiled American writers such as Dashiell Hammett.

But Craig’s debut (below) was not the first attempt to film the novel, but the third. The first was a one-hour play performed live on American television in October 1954: Barry Nelson starred as crew-cut American agent "Jimmy Bond" out to defeat villain Le Chiffre, played by Peter Lorre, at baccarat to ensure he will be executed by Soviet agency Smersh for squandering their funds. Due to the format, this was a much-simplified version of Fleming’s novel, with little of its extravagance or excitement.


The book features a wince-inducing scene in which Le Chiffre, desperate to discover where Bond has hidden the cheque for 40 million francs that he needs to save his life, ties Bond naked to a cane chair with its seat cut out and proceeds to torture him by repeatedly whacking his testicles with a carpet-beater. This could clearly not be shown on television, so instead Bond was placed in a bath, his shoes removed, and viewers watched him howl with pain as, off-screen, Le Chiffre’s men attacked his toenails with pliers.

The second attempt to film Casino Royale was altogether different. Also in 1954, Gregory Ratoff bought a six-month film option on the novel, and the following year bought the rights outright. An extravagant bear of a man who had fled Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ratoff was a well-known actor, producer and director – he had directed Ingrid Bergman's first Hollywood film, Intermezzo, in 1939. He was also a close friend of Charles K. Feldman, the playboy producer and super-agent.


In January 1956, the New York Times announced that Ratoff had set up a production company with actor-turned-agent Michael Garrison, and planned to film Casino Royale that summer in England, Estoril and San Remo, with Twentieth Century-Fox slated to release it. The article mentioned that Fleming himself had written an adaptation of the novel, but that Ratoff was instead negotiating with a "noted scenarist" to write a new script.

Ratoff died in December 1960, and his widow sold the film rights to Casino Royale to Charles Feldman. The long-dormant project soon became a potential goldmine. In March 1961, Life magazine listed From Russia, With Love as one of John F Kennedy’s 10 favourite books, and the Bond novels rapidly became best-sellers in the United States. Three months later, one of Feldman’s former employees at Famous Artists, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, formed EON Productions with Canadian producer Harry Saltzman after buying the rights to the rest of Fleming’s novels.


In response to the growing popularity of Bond, Feldman turned to Ben Hecht (below) to write a script for Casino Royale. Known as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", Hecht was a novelist, poet and playwright who had written or co-written several classic scripts, including The Front Page, based on a play he had co-written; Underworld, for which he won the first best screenplay Oscar in 1927; the original Scarface; and Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Notorious. Hecht also worked uncredited on dozens of other screenplays, including Gone With The Wind, Foreign Correspondent and a few other Hitchcock films.


The fact that Ben Hecht contributed to the script of Casino Royale has been known for decades, and is mentioned in passing in many books. But perhaps because the film Feldman eventually released in 1967 was a near-incoherent spoof, nobody has followed up to find out precisely what his contribution entailed. My interest was piqued when I came across an article in a May 1966 issue of Time, which mentioned that the screenplay of Casino Royale had started many years earlier "as a literal adaptation of the novel", and that Hecht had had "three bashes at it". I decided to go looking for it.

To my amazement, I found that Hecht not only contributed to Casino Royale, but produced several complete drafts, and that much of the material survived. It was stored in folders with the rest of his papers in the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it had been sitting since 1979. And, outside of the people involved in trying to make the film, it seemed nobody had read it. Here was a lost chapter, not just in the world of the Bond films, but in cinema history: before the spoof, Ben Hecht adapted Ian Fleming’s first novel as a straight Bond adventure.

The folders contain material from five screenplays, four of which are by Hecht. An early near-complete script from 1957 is a faithful adaptation of the novel in many ways but for one crucial element: James Bond isn’t in it. Instead of the suave but ruthless British agent, the hero is Lucky Fortunato, a rich, wisecracking American gangster who is an expert poker player. Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr, who travelled around Europe with Gregory Ratoff, says he didn’t write it, but it seems likely Feldman sent this script to Hecht as a starting point to see what he could do with it.

Of the remaining material, two of the scripts are missing title pages and so are undated and without a credit, while the other two are from 1964 and are clearly credited to Hecht. There are also snippets of notes, letters, and three pages of "notes for an outline" dated December 17 1963, which feature scenes in Baghdad, Algiers and Naples and culminate in a raid on a German castle. These pages may have been Hecht’s first stab at coming to grips with the novel.

Of all the Bond books, Casino Royale was one of the more problematic to adapt for film. On the one hand, it’s one of Fleming's strongest novels (Raymond Chandler and Kingsley Amis both felt it his best): intense, almost feverishly so, and richer in characterisation and atmosphere than many of the others.

But the novel is also short — practically a novella — with little physical action in it other than the infamous torture scene. Bond also falls in love with his fellow agent on the mission, Vesper Lynd, and even considers proposing marriage to her before he discovers she has been coerced into working for Smersh and has betrayed him. She kills herself, and the novel ends with Bond reporting to London savagely that "the bitch is dead". Although Hecht was tackling the novel 10 years after it had been published, these are all elements it seems hard to imagine in a film adaptation.

But these drafts are a master-class in thriller-writing, from the man who arguably perfected the form with Notorious. Hecht made vice central to the plot, with Le Chiffre actively controlling a network of brothels and beautiful women who he is using to blackmail powerful people around the world. Just as the theme of Fleming’s Goldfinger is avarice and power, the theme of Hecht’s Casino Royale is sex and sin. It’s an idea that seems obvious in hindsight, and Hecht used it both to raise the stakes of Fleming’s plot and to deepen the story’s emotional resonance.

This is visible in the surviving pages of two separate undated drafts. Judging from the plotlines and character names, they were written after the December 1963 notes, but before the three drafts from 1964. Hecht wrote to Feldman on January 13 1964 to say he had 110 pages of "our blissful Casino Royale" ready to be typed and sent to him, but that if he could wait three days he would be able to send him 130 pages of what he refers to as a first draft, which will bring it up to its conclusion. As there is no other material dating from January 1964 in his papers, it seems likely that these are excerpts from that time. Hecht also adds that he has "never had more fun writing a movie".

Both draft fragments feature a British secret agent called James Bond who gambles against a Colonel Chiffre, aided by an American agent called Felix Leiter and a French agent called Rene Mathis. In both, Bond falls in love with Vesper Lynd, who betrays him and kills herself. Both drafts stick closely to the atmosphere of the novel, while adding several new plot elements and characters. These include Mila, one of Chiffre’s former brothel madams and a former lover of Bond’s. Surnamed alternatively Vigne and Brant, she is a classic femme fatale, trying to seduce Bond in her night gown. Bond turns her down — just.

In one of the undated drafts, Chiffre escapes at the last moment and Bond returns to London following Vesper’s suicide, where M tells him to take a holiday in Jamaica. Bond says he would rather stick around in case M has any errands for him. This suggests Feldman may have been considering slotting the film into Broccoli and Saltzman’s series, as he didn’t have the rights to any other Bond novels. The James Bond in these pages is a deft blend of Fleming’s character and the film version as portrayed by Sean Connery. The second Bond film, From Russia With Love, premiered in England in late 1963, but the series had not yet solidified: perhaps as a result, there are no vodka martinis or "Bond. James Bond" lines.

The 40 pages of the draft dated February 20 1964 elaborated on many of the scenes and ideas in these pages, but add an unusual gimmick. Bond is precisely the same character as he was in the other drafts: suave, laconic, ruthless and predatory. But he is not James Bond. Instead, he is an unnamed American agent called in by M who is given the name James Bond. M says that "since Bond’s death" MI6 has put several agents into operation using his name: "It not only perpetuates his memory, but confuses the opposition."

After this scene this agent is indistinguishable from Bond, and doesn’t seem American at all. It may be that Feldman was also considering how to make the film with an actor other than Sean Connery. There are very few logical inconsistencies in Hecht's material – this gimmick sticks out like a sore thumb.

The draft opens with a pre-titles sequence – itself a nod to the Connery films – in which Felix Leiter arrests senior United Nations diplomats and the beautiful prostitutes who have ensnared them in honey traps. Then we cut to M informing his new Bond about the villain he is sending him after. Instead of being a rather small-time agent on the run from Smersh, as he is in the novel, Chiffre is now the head of a massive operation being run by Spectre against the free world’s leaders and scientists, using brothels and honey traps to film them and then extort them for secrets. Bond is assigned to work with fellow MI6 agent Vesper Lynd and sent to Hamburg to check out one of Chiffre’s brothels.

Hecht introduces more new characters in this draft, including Lili Wing, a beautiful but drug-addicted Eurasian madam who once had a fling with Bond, and her girlfriend, Georgie, who carries a black kitten on her shoulder.

Many of the scenes are darkly comic, and some of the sexual antics are politically incorrect even for the Sixties, with references to politicians being attracted to children and a car chase through Hamburg’s red light district ending with Bond drenched in mud disguised as a lesbian wrestler.

The most significant new character is Gita, Chiffre’s beautiful wife. She and much of this draft returned in the final two surviving sections of script, which are dated April 8 and April 14, 1964. The first has 84 pages, and covers most of the plot. The second is 49 pages long and is an addition to it, indicating which pages are to remain untouched from the draft of a week earlier. Taken together, they form a near-complete story. Taken with the rest of the documents, with gaps in one draft often being filled in by others, these 260 or so pages give a strong sense of what a completed final Hecht screenplay would have been like.

The April 8 pages revert to Bond being the real thing. He flirts with Moneypenny, M gives him his mission, and he’s off: it reads just like an early Connery Bond film. The April 14 draft switches back to the counterfeit Bond idea, but adds to and improves the earlier draft in other ways. The first third of the story follows Bond and Vesper as they track down the incriminating rolls of film that Chiffre has collected for Spectre, which are being transported from a warehouse in Hamburg by a protected van.

The Hamburg car chase culminates in Lili Wing being captured by Chiffre’s men and fed into the crusher of a rubbish truck, while Bond uses Gita Chiffre as a shield. She is shot by mistake by Chiffre’s henchmen. Bond commandeers the van and impersonates one of the eye-patched henchmen in the darkness. During a car chase in the Swiss Alps, the van goes over the cliff and explodes with the films in it, Bond escaping at the last moment.

As a result of Bond ruining the extortion scheme, Chiffre loses half of his budget allocated to him by Spectre, and sets about trying to win it back. Then we relocate to northern France and the area around the fictional Royale. Vesper gives Bond instructions from M to accompany her to the casino there to finish Chiffre off for good. This is ingenious in several ways. In the book, Le Chiffre and Bond duel without ever having met each other. Now, Bond is directly responsible for his precarious situation and the reason he sets up the baccarat game, and we have a rematch.

In addition, Madam Chiffre, with half her face destroyed by bullet wounds and speaking metallically through a tube inserted in her ripped out larynx, is a classic Bond villain, a sinister presence lurking in the shadows waiting to exact revenge on 007. In undated handwritten notes, Hecht wrote that a man torturing a naked Bond in this way on screen would seem to audiences like he was not only indulging in "a far-fetched and unmotivated type of cruelty", but also a "yelping pansy".

The torture scene is faithful in spirit to the novel, but perhaps even more brutal, and contains many of the best lines of dialogue. Chiffre quietly continues to ask a naked Bond the location of the missing cheque while encouraging his wife to thrash him with the carpet beater. At one point he tells her to stop, adding: "M’sieur Bond may want to change his mind while he is still a m’sieur." Bond refuses, of course, and when asked about the check later, gives the memorable reply "Up your gizzard, you fat pimp." Chiffre also briefly waterboards Bond with whisky in an attempt to get him to talk.

Just as it seems that Bond is destined to die he is rescued by Specter’s assassins, who let him go but scar his hand so they can identify him in any future operations, and then shoot Chiffre who has hidden in a cupboard. The "brothel Napoleon", as Bond calls him, dies with silk dresses and negligees draping over his corpse.

Bond recovers in hospital, and proposes to Vesper. She accepts, but shortly after confesses she has been working for Spectre all along, then takes her life with cyanide. But just as it seems that the film will end with a grief-stricken and impotent Bond, a doctor prescribes him with testosterone, and a minor character, Georgie, returns and tries to seduce him. Bond is surprised and delighted to find that his body responds to her advances, and order is restored as he plants two solid kisses on her mouth and we fade out.

All the pages in Hecht’s papers are gripping, but the material from April 1964 is phenomenal, and it’s easy to imagine it as the basis for a classic Bond adventure. Hecht’s treatment of the romance element is powerful and convincing, even with the throwaway ending, but there is also a distinctly adult feel to the story. It has all the excitement and glamour you would expect from a Bond film but is more suspenseful, and the violence is brutal rather than cartoonish.

On Thursday April 16 1964, Hecht sent a letter to Feldman attaching an article from Time about Bond and saying he would write up a critique of their "current script" on Monday. He added some comments on Bond, including that he felt the character was cinema’s first "gentleman superman" in a long time, as opposed to Hammett and Chandler’s "roughneck supermen". But Monday never came: Hecht died of a heart attack at his home on Saturday April 18 while reading.


At some point, Feldman went to Broccoli and Saltzman and tried to broker a deal to film Casino Royale in partnership with them, but he wanted too large a share and the talks broke down. It seems he also claimed that Goldfinger had plagiarized Casino Royale and threatened to sue – perhaps he felt that the scene in which gangster Mr Solo is crushed at a scrap yard was too reminiscent of Lili Wing’s death.

Furious that he had not come to an agreement with Broccoli and Saltzman, Feldman approached Connery to see if he would be interested in jumping ship. Connery said he would for a million dollars, but this was too much for Feldman’s blood and he turned him down. He decided to take a new tack, signing an unknown Northern Irish actor, Terence Cooper, who he kept on salary for two years, and recruited Orson Welles, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Woody Allen and several others. A set report in Time in May 1966 revealed that after Hecht’s "three bashes" at the script, it had been completely rewritten by Billy Wilder, after which Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Wolf Mankowitz and John Law had all taken their turn at it. Much of the film was improvised on the spot, and Woody Allen also worked on it.

Very little of Hecht’s work made it to the screen apart from the idea of calling other agents James Bond to confuse the opposition, which grew into the main theme. Eventually released in 1967, it was a bloated and incoherent comedy that wasted the prodigious talent it had assembled, and the title Casino Royale was indelibly linked with a cinematic disaster rather than Fleming’s novel (below, some of the Bond novels he wrote). Finally, in 2004 EON gained the rights to the novel, and set about filming it with Daniel Craig.



The big question raised by Hecht’s material is what would have happened if Feldman had managed to come to an agreement with EON, and Casino Royale had been made with Sean Connery in 1965 or 1966. Perhaps it would have divided the audience, as Goldfinger took Bond into superspy territory, and even a disfigured villainess might not have been enough for viewers so recently awestruck by the Aston Martin DB5’s ejector seat and Odd Job’s hat, especially if coupled with James Bond watching the woman he loves take her own life.

Then again, perhaps it would have deepened Bond as a character and taken the series in a different direction. Casino Royale might even have been regarded as not just a classic Bond film, but as a classic thriller. We’ll never know, but Hecht’s surviving material offers a glimpse into a cinematic genius at work, and an alternate James Bond adventure as rich and thrilling as anything yet brought to the screen.

Jeremy Duns is the author of spy novels. You can order his novels at TelegraphBookshop

1965: Serialisation of The Man With The Golden Gun continues in the Italian Domenica Del Corriere.

1966: John Stears receives the Best Visual Effects Oscar for Thunderball (accepted by Ivan Tors).

1984: Olympic fundraiser with guest of honor Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is attended by Roger Moore, John Barry, Sheena Easton, Anthony Newley, Tom Jones.
2015: BOND 24 films inside London City Hall.
2018: Dynamite Entertainment publishes James Bond: The Body #4 (of 6).

https://www.comixology.eu/James-Bond-The-Body-2018-4-of-6/digital-comic/650259

RichardTheBruce

April 19th

2004: Philip Locke dies at age 76--Dedham, Essex, England.
(Born 29 March 1928--St. Marylebone, London, England.)

Philip Locke
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1460134/Philip-Locke.html
12:02AM BST 24 Apr 2004

Philip Locke, the actor who has died aged 76, was a veteran of numerous productions at the Royal Court, the National Theatre and with the RSC, although he was better known to the film-going public as Vargas, the silent assassin in Thunderball (1965) who ends up impaled on a palm tree by 007's speargun.

Tall, gaunt, balding and intense-looking, Locke was noted for his portrayals of nervy fanatics: Vargas (unlike his nemesis) "does not drink, does not smoke and does not make love". But Locke was capable in genres from classical tragedy to light comedy. His Lear at the Young Vic (1980) reduced a Telegraph critic to tears. At the other end of the spectrum, he gave a finely-judged comic performance as the irascible Sir Roderick Glossop in Jeeves and Wooster (Granada TV, 1993).

In his autobiography, Almost a Gentleman, John Osborne described Locke as "special and reliable", praise which, coming from such a curmudgeonly source, qualifies as almost fulsome. Osborne was particularly delighted with Locke's performance as Father Evilgreene, who leads a Satanic dance in the playwright's The World of Paul Slickey, a musical satire on the world of critics and gossip columnists, which was roasted by Osborne's targets after its opening in 1959.

Philip Locke was born on March 29 1928 at St Marylebone, London, and educated at St Marylebone Central School. After training at Rada, he made his professional debut with Oldham Rep in 1954 as Feste in Twelfth Night, before touring with the Old Vic as Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

From the late 1950s, he became a member of the ensemble at the Royal Court, taking mostly minor parts. After the late 1960s he made frequent appearances at the National Theatre and with the RSC, playing numerous Shakespearean roles, including Boyet in Love's Labour's Lost; Jacques in As You Like It (both 1969); Lord Stanley in Richard III (1970); Lepidus in Antony and Cleopatra (1973); Casca in Julius Caesar (1973); Junius Brutus in Coriolanus (1973); Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida (1976); and Kent in King Lear (1986).

Locke was particularly effective as a gentle and over-anxious Quince in Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream (1970), and as a bespectacled, academic Horatio in Hamlet (Old Vic, 1975), for which he won a Plays and Players award for best supporting actor.

Other stage roles included the schoolmaster Medvedenko in Tony Richardson's 1964 staging of The Seagull at the Queen's Theatre; the English chaplain John de Stogumber in Shaw's Saint Joan (Olivier, 1984); Mycetes, King of Persia in Tamburlaine the Great (Olivier, 1976); the Colonel in Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (Royal Festival Hall, 1977); and - his own favourite role - Gaev in The Cherry Orchard (Olivier, 1979).

In Gorky's Enemies (Aldwych, 1971), Locke played the well-meaning but ineffectual head of a family firm at odds with his hard-line partner (Patrick Stewart) over how to deal with a workers' revolt. In Thomas Bernhard's poetic farce The Force of Habit (Lyttleton, 1976), he played a circus ringmaster struggling against fearful odds to bully his little troupe into playing the Trout Quintet.

His performance as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes (Aldwych, 1974) won Locke a Tony award nomination. The Telegraph's critic noted that the vigorous booing that greeted the character's downfall was "a fine tribute from a grateful audience".

Locke's first film appearance was in a Rank B-movie, Cloak without Dagger, in 1955; in addition to Thunderball, he appeared in several Edgar Wallace productions, worked with Ronnie Barker in a film version of Porridge (1979), played Vogel in Escape to Athena (1979) and a prime minister on board a doomed ship in Fellini's E La Nave Va (And The Ship Sailed On, 1983).

Locke's television credits included many appearances on ABC's Armchair Theatre, and he played the villain in numerous crime dramas, including The Avengers; Inspector Morse; Poirot; Bergerac; Minder; and The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. He was an android in a Dr Who series, and the magical sage Arnold of Todi in the BBC Television version of Masefield's Box of Delights (1984).

A private man who spent much of his time in his pyjamas, Locke died on April 19; he is survived by his companion Michael Ivan.

1961: In a note to Dennis Hamilton, Ian Fleming confesses he must live as an old man after coming close to death during a meeting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2519995/For-eyes-Letters-reveal-deepest-secrets-007-creator-Ian-Fleming--day-dropped-dead-Sunday-Times-meeting.html
For your eyes only: Letters that reveal
deepest secrets of the 007 creator Ian Fleming...
and the day he almost dropped dead at a Sunday Times meeting

- Letters between James Bond creator Ian Fleming and his friend Dennis ‘CD’ Hamilton are on sale for £160,000
- They reveal Fleming had a heart attack at a Sunday Times editorial meeting
- He also confided his plans to marry Ann Rothermere after her divorce
- Fleming predicted the news would cause a 'Fleet Street sensation'

By Chris Hastings - Published: 17:01 EDT, 7 December 2013 | Updated: 20:17 EDT, 7 December 2013

i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/12/07/article-2519995-19F1842D00000578-248_306x423.jpg
Letters from James Bond creator Ian Fleming and his friend Dennis Hamilton have gone on sale for £160,000


As the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming was a master of dreaming up death-defying situations from which the super-spy only just manages to escape.

But Fleming himself owed his life to the prompt actions of one of his closest friends who spotted he was having a major heart attack.

In previously unseen letters, published for the first time today, Fleming also admitted his impending marriage would cause a ‘Fleet Street sensation’ – and reveals that he regards the genteel pastime of gardening as a ‘death trap’.

Fleming’s intimate exchanges with his colleague Dennis ‘CD’ Hamilton form part of an archive of more than 80 letters now on sale for £160,000.

In one note, dated April 19, 1961, Fleming told Hamilton, who was working alongside him at The Sunday Times, that he is now having to behave like an old man following his brush with death during an editorial meeting.

He writes: ‘Although neither of us knew it I am afraid I was in the middle of a rather major heart attack this time last week.’

Fleming adds: ‘One never believes these things so I sat stupidly on trying to make intelligent comments about the thrilling new project about which I long to hear more. However, a thousand thanks for noticing my trouble so quickly and for shepherding me away when the time came.’

The two men had been friends for more than a decade by the time of Fleming’s heart attack.

In 1952, Fleming confided to Hamilton his plans to marry Ann Rothermere, the soon-to-be divorced wife of the 2nd Viscount Rothermere, who was then chairman of Associated Newspapers, owner of the Daily Mail.

He writes from his home in Chelsea: ‘CD – just so you won’t see it first in the public print. This is to tell you that I am getting married to Ann Rothermere, which will cause something of a Fleet Street sensation I fear as the divorce goes into the lists next Wednesday.’

i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/12/07/article-2519995-19F1843E00000578-997_306x423.jpg
Revelations: The letters reveal Ian Fleming had a heart attack during a Sunday Times editorial meeting and that he believed his plans to marry Ann Rothermere once she divorced would cause a 'Fleet Street sensation'

He adds: ‘In fact this has been on the cards for a long time. We have known each other for years. There are no hard feelings anywhere.’

Ann had first met Fleming in 1936, and had thought him, then aged 28, ‘a handsome, moody creature’.

Ann was later one of the most charismatic society hostesses, her house in Victoria Square becoming a renowned salon where high society, artists and intellectuals mixed.

In his letter, Fleming assures Hamilton that Lord Kemsley, the then owner of The Sunday Times, has no problems with his relationship with the former wife of a rival newspaper magnate.

He writes: ‘So please calm down excitement at levels other than K [Kemsley] who knows and accepts with an apparent good grace.’

Fleming and Ann eventually married in 1952 and remained together until the author’s death from heart disease in August 1964.

Fleming died aged 56 on their son Caspar’s 12th birthday. In a touching letter, Ann tells Hamilton that her son, who later took his own life, was in turmoil. She wrote: ‘I was deeply touched by your letter to Caspar .  .  . Alas he refuses to answer as he says he refuses to owe anything to friends of his parents.


i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/12/07/article-2519995-19F1842000000578-486_634x799.jpg
Happy couple: Ian Fleming later married Ann, pictured together in 1963, and they remained together until his death from heart disease in 1964

‘His present frame of mind is very distressing to me. I can only pray that it will alter. The only sign of grace is his unhappiness which I am powerless to help.’

Fleming, who joined The Sunday Times after serving as a wartime naval intelligence officer, continued as a journalist even when his career as a novelist took off.

By the time he formally quit the paper in 1961, he had written nine of his Bond novels, including Casino Royale and Live And Let Die.

The letters show also the dividing line between Fleming’s roles of journalist and thriller writer could become obscured. On July 17, 1960, Harry Hodson, the then Sunday Times editor, criticised his profile of the German city of Hamburg because he thought it was too obsessed with its red-light district. He writes: ‘We have to remember that for a great many of our readers .  .  . prostitution is not even a necessary evil, but something entirely immoral and degrading.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/12/07/article-2519995-19F1841200000578-255_306x438.jpg
Colleagues: Dennis Hamilton, pictured in 1966, worked alongside Fleming at The Sunday Times

‘Again striptease acts may be alright for callow youths, and frustrated middle-aged men, but are a vulgar .  .  . sort of entertainment for balanced people.’ Fleming’s journalist colleagues were keen to capitalise on the success of the Bond characters, and several letters deal with how the spy may be included in the paper.

On September 5, 1961, Fleming lobbies for an article on ‘the guns of James Bond’ even though he accepts it may bore female readers.

He refuses Hamilton’s request for a 1,000-word article about 007 himself which the editor feels would be more ‘bonne bouche’ to readers.

Just two months before his death, Fleming chastises Hamilton for wasting time in his garden.

A letter dated June 15, 1964, says: ‘I am sorry you have been playing the fool in the garden. You must know that all forms of gardening are tantamount to suicide for the normal sedentary male. For heaven’s sake leave the whole business alone.’

The correspondence also shows that the friends could sometimes fall out. In one undated letter, Fleming criticises his friend for a particularly ‘harsh’ exchange of words.

He writes: ‘You were under great pressure so your wrath is excusable. But you should not use such words to a friend. They were unforgivable so I shall forget them.’

The correspondence has been acquired from Hamilton’s family by independent booksellers Bertram Rota. Owner Julian Rota said: ‘We are asking £160,000 for the letters which we do not consider an unreasonable amount. They show that the relationship between the two men became more relaxed and more intimate with the passing of time.’

Andrew Lycett, Fleming’s official biographer, said of the letters to Hamilton: ‘I think it was very much a mutual admiration society.

‘Ian Fleming was certainly a great fan of Hamilton’s and liked the fact that he had served with distinction during the war.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2519995/For-eyes-Letters-reveal-deepest-secrets-007-creator-Ian-Fleming--day-dropped-dead-Sunday-Times-meeting.html#ixzz5Cz07S8Hp
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

1967: US premiere of Casino Royale.
2006: BOND 21 films Bond and his poisoned vodka martini.
2008: En route to the BOND 22 filming location, an Aston Martin DBS plunges into Lake Garda, Italy.

2010: Troubles at MGM force the Bond producers to announce a delay to the BOND 22 production. For a potential release eventually beyond Fall 2011. Or even Spring 2012.
2017: Dynamite Entertainment releases James Bond: Felix Leiter #4 (of 6).

https://www.comixology.eu/James-Bond-Felix-Leiter-2017-4-of-6/digital-comic/487889

RichardTheBruce

April 20th

1904: Bruce Cabot is born--Carlsbad, New Mexico.
(He dies 3 May 1972 at age 67--Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California.)

Bruce Cabot, Film Actor, Dies; Played the Hero in ‘King Kong’
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/04/archives/bruce-cabot-film-actor-dies-played-the-hero-in-king-kong.html
MAY 4, 1972

HOLLYWOOD, May 3 (AP)— Bruce Cabot, whose starring role in the 1933 screen classic “King Kong” was his best known part during four decades of acting, died today at the age of 67. He succumbed to lung cancer at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills.

Mr. Cabot played the young man who rescued Fay Wray from the clutches of the giant ‘ape in “King Kong.” In the nineteen‐thirties and forties, the 6‐foot 2‐inch actor appeared in numerous films as a cowboy, tough guy or soldier of fortune.

The brown‐haired, blue‐eyed Mr. Cabot was seen with Errol Flynn, who became a close friend, in “Dodge City” and “The Bad Man of Brimstone.”

After World War II service in the Army Air Forces that took him to Africa, Sicily and Italy as an intelligence and op erations officer, Mr. Cabot cut down on his movie‐making. He spent much time in Europe dur ing the nineteen‐fifties, making films and living there.

Mr. Cabot was in several movies with his close friend, John Wayne. Among them were “The Green Berets” in 1968 and “Big Jake” in 1971. He also had a role in “Diamonds Are Forever,” also made last year.

The actor, whose real name was Jacques de Bujac, was born in Carlsbad, N. M. He was married and divorced twice, to Adrienne Ames and Francesca de Scaffa, both actresses. In recent years he had lived in Hollywood.

Tackled Many Jobs

Before Mr. Cabot entered the movies he had had a variety of jobs—hauling bleached bones of animals from prairies, working on tramp steamers and as a paper salesman, a printing salesman and a real‐estate man. He tried the cotton goods business and even essayed an unsuccessful film test.

At a Hollywood party—he had been working in a cafe— he met David O. Selznick, the producer, who offered him a screen test. Mr. Cabot said he had been on the stage and offered to do a scene from the play “Chicago.”

He had seen the play several times and had all but memorized one scene, which he proceeded to enact. He recalled later that the test was “rather awful,” but it led to a job in his first film, “Roadhouse Murder.”

1953: Sebastian Faulks is born--Donnington, Berkshire, England.
1963: From Russia With Love main unit relocates to Turkey to film at Saint Sophia, with Ian Fleming in attendance as a guest of Terence Young. (Meanwhile, the second unit crew toils away in Pinewood.)
1971: Bond comic strip Fear Face ends its run in The Daily Express. (Started 18 January 1971. 1520–1596)
Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/ff.php3




https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Fear_Face?file=Twine_casino6.jpg



Swedish 1972 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1972.php3


Danish 1973 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no25-1973/

1989: Domark releases top-down shooter game Licence to Kill developed by Quixel.
Available for DOS, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, MSX, ZX Spectrum.

2016: Guy Hamilton dies at age 93--Majorca, Balearic Islands, Spain. (Born 16 September 1922--Paris, France.)

Guy Hamilton, Director
of ‘Goldfinger,’ Dies at 93
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/movies/guy-hamilton-director-of-goldfinger-dies-at-93.html


From left, the director Guy Hamilton, Sean Connery and Honor Blackman on the set of
“Goldfinger.” Credit United Artists, via Photofest

By William Grimes and Robert Berkvist | April 21, 2016

Guy Hamilton, a director whose emphasis on fast pacing and witty repartee made “Goldfinger” a model for the James Bond films to follow, and who directed three more installments in the series, died on Wednesday on the Mediterranean island of Majorca. He was 93.

His death was announced in a statement to The Associated Press by the Hospital Juaneda Miramar in the city of Palma. It provided no other details.

Mr. Hamilton, a former assistant to the British director Carol Reed, had the hit prison-escape movie “The Colditz Story” to his credit when the producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli asked him to direct “Dr. No,” the first Bond film. Unable to leave Britain, Mr. Hamilton turned down the job (it went to Terence Young), but he enthusiastically accepted the assignment to direct “Goldfinger,” the third Bond film.

He delivered a gem, “the most trendsetting directorial job of all the films,” Raymond Benson wrote in The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984). He sped up the action; accentuated the banter between Bond and his boss, M, and the equipment expert, Q — the key to Q, he told the actor Desmond Llewelyn, was that Q could not stand Bond — and added innumerable touches that became signatures.

“Everyone understands what is ‘Bondian,’” he told The Banner-Herald of Athens, Ga., in 2009. “If it was a cigarette lighter, it couldn’t just be a Zippo, it had to be the latest exclusive toy. It had to be more glamorous. Bond couldn’t have just any yacht — it had to be the biggest yacht in the world. We were creating a dream world, defining what was ‘Bondian.’”

After the modest successes of the first two Bond films, “Goldfinger” (1964) was a blockbuster hit, with Sean Connery giving a definitive performance, aided by a memorable slate of opponents: the supervillain Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), his henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) and the femme fatale Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman).

Mr. Hamilton took a break from the series when Mr. Saltzman hired him to direct the Cold War thriller “Funeral in Berlin” (1966), with Michael Caine, and “The Battle of Britain” (1969), a star-studded action film with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave and Mr. Caine.

He returned to the Bond films with “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), the seventh in the series, and brought the franchise into the Roger Moore era with its two successors, “Live and Let Die” (1973) and “The Man With the Golden Gun” (1974).

Guy Hamilton was born on Sept. 16, 1922, in Paris, where his father was a press attaché to the British Embassy. Early on, he became a passionate film fan. As a teenager he worked at menial jobs at a film studio in Nice, and he served an apprenticeship with the director Julien Duvivier. With the outbreak of World War II he returned to London and served in the Royal Navy.


Guy Hamilton at the Cannes
International Film Festival in 2005. Credit
Jean-Francois Guyot/Agence France-
Presse — Getty Images

In January 1944, as part of the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla, a secret unit that ferried agents into France and brought downed British pilots back to England, he and several crewmates missed a rendezvous and spent a month on the run in Brittany.

After the war he worked for Mr. Reed on “The Fallen Idol,” “The Third Man” and “Outcast of the Islands.” He made his directing debut with “The Ringer” (1952), a mystery about a shady solicitor whose life is threatened.

After directing the film version of the J.B. Priestley play “An Inspector Calls,” with Alastair Sim in the starring role, he made several films with a military theme.

“The Colditz Story” (1955), written with Ivan Foxwell, was an oddly humorous melodrama set in a Nazi prison camp where the British inmates seem to be having a good time, even as they plot their escape.

Another battleground, the American Revolution, was the setting for Mr. Hamilton’s interpretation of “The Devil’s Disciple” (1959), based on the play by George Bernard Shaw. Laurence Olivier played the British commander, General Burgoyne, Burt Lancaster a Yankee pastor who takes up arms against the British, and Kirk Douglas a rebel who discovers his true beliefs.

“The Best of Enemies” (1962) was another semi-serious war story, this time set in Ethiopia, about a British officer, played by David Niven, who continually crosses paths, and swords, with his Italian counterpart, played by Alberto Sordi. Mr. Hamilton’s skill in directing that movie’s action sequences led the producers of the Bond films to seek him out.

He later directed “Force 10 From Navarone” (1978), with Robert Shaw and Edward Fox as British saboteurs in the Balkans attempting to destroy a strategically vital bridge with the aid of Army Rangers led by Harrison Ford.

Mr. Hamilton returned to the mystery genre in the 1980s, his last active decade in the industry, with two films based on Agatha Christie novels:“The Mirror Crack’d” (1980), with Angela Lansbury as Miss Jane Marple, and “Evil Under the Sun” (1982), in which Peter Ustinov played the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

One of Mr. Hamilton’s last efforts was “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” (1985), about a policeman-turned-assassin, played by Fred Ward, who sets out on multiple missions of vengeance.

Mr. Hamilton’s first marriage, to the actress Naomi Chance, ended in divorce. His second wife was the actress Kerima, whom he met on the set of “Outcast of the Islands.” Complete information on his survivors was not avaliable.

“Goldfinger” remained the shining jewel in Mr. Hamilton’s career. In 2010, The Guardian of London, cataloging the film’s virtues, wrote: “Where to start? The card game that opens the movie or the epic golf match in the middle? The gold-obsessed villain or the hulking Korean hardman? The near-castration with the laser beam or the gangster compacted in his Continental? And who could forget sexually ambiguous Pussy Galore, as essayed by husky-voiced, karate-chopping 40-year-old bombshell Honor Blackman? It’s a compendium of everything one loves about 007.”

2019: David V. Picker dies at age 87--New York, New York. (Born 14 May 1931--New York, New York.)

David Picker, Studio Chief Who Brought Bond, The
Beatles and Steve Martin to the Movies, Dies at 87
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/david-picker-studio-chief-who-brought-bond-the-beatles-and-steve-martin-to-the-movies-dies-at-87/ar-BBWa5FX
Scott Feinberg


David V. Picker, who served as the head of United Artists, Paramount and Columbia over more than a half-century in the film business, died Saturday night after succumbing to colon cancer at his home in New York, his longtime friend and former UA colleague Kathie Berlin told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 87.

Picker was born in New York on May 14, 1931 — and into the movie business. His grandfather, also named David V. Picker, ran a small chain of theaters that he eventually sold to Loews, the company for which his father, Eugene Picker, then got a job booking theaters, which enabled the young Picker to see a movie for free at virtually any theater in the Big Apple, a privilege he took full advantage of.

Most importantly, his uncle was Arnold Picker, who became a partner and executive vp international distribution at UA in 1951, the same year the old studio was risen from the dead by a pair of lawyers, Arthur B. Krim and Robert Benjamin, who, by bankrolling independent filmmakers and then staying out of their way during the filmmaking process, quickly began attracting top talent and raking in profits.

In 1956, having graduated from Dartmouth College and served in the U.S. Army, Picker got a job at UA in the advertising and publicity department. Two years later, he was made assistant to head of production Max Youngstein, and when Youngstein left the company in 1962, Picker was elevated to his position. Any questions about the role that nepotism had played in Picker's rapid ascent at the company were quickly silenced by his major contributions in his new role.

Seeking a property for Alfred Hitchcock, he acquired the rights to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and fought for Sean Connery to star in the first adaptation, 1962's Dr. No, which was ultimately directed by Terence Young and spawned a franchise that continues to draw masses — and bear the UA name — to this day.

The first film that Picker recommended UA's partners finance from scratch, Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, a British production, became a giant hit and was awarded the best picture Oscar, becoming only the second non-American film to earn that high honor, 24 years after the first. (Richardson, who also produced the film, could not attend the ceremony, so on his behalf Picker accepted the statuette from Frank Sinatra.)

And, looking out for the United Artists Records and Music Publishing division, Picker recommended that the company make a low-budget documentary around a young British band that had impressed him, The Beatles. 1964's A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester, proved a blockbuster and helped to explode the Fab Four all around the world. UA and The Beatles reteamed on 1965's Help! and 1968's The Yellow Submarine.

UA, however, fell upon hard times thanks to a run of big-budget flops, including 1965's The Greatest Story Ever Told and 1966's Hawaii, causing shuffling in the top ranks. In June 1969, at just 38, Picker was made president and COO of UA, part of a wave of young executives in their thirties — others including Richard Zanuck, Robert Evans and Jay Kanter — who assumed positions of immense power in Hollywood as the old moguls began retiring and dying in the 1960s and 1970s.

Within a year, the company made — at the urging of Picker's assistant, a young Larry Kramer — Women in Love, for which Glenda Jackson won a best actress Oscar; and Midnight Cowboy, which became the first X-rated film ever awarded the best picture Oscar. During Picker's reign, UA also released John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1973).

Picker, though an imposing 6-foot-2, was known in the business as a gentleman, as well as an expert packager and a man with a real eye for young talent. He cut a multi-picture deal with the comedian Woody Allen, whose only prior films had been the moderately successful What's Up, Tiger Lilly? (1966) and Take the Money and Run (1969), and their partnership yielded Bananas (1971), Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972) and — released after Picker's exit from the company in 1973, the year after Transamerica purchased UA and Picker decided he wanted to be a personal producer with a deal at the company he previously ran, just like Paramount's Evans — Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1974) and Annie Hall (1977), the last of which won the best picture Oscar.

Picker's stint as a personal producer was fruitful — it yielded Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), among others — but was brief, as he went to work as Paramount's head of production in 1976, under Barry Diller. Picker's years at Hollywood's oldest studio — where he took on a young assistant by the name of Jeffrey Katzenberg — were tumultuous, as Diller was focused on building movies around stars, whereas Picker, conditioned by his years at UA, always prioritized directors and material. Still, it was Picker who greenlighted Randal Kleiser's Grease (1978) and Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980), the latter of which was awarded the best picture Oscar.

Picker left Paramount in 1979, returning to independent producing with Carl Reiner's The Jerk (1979), which turned comedian Steve Martin into a movie star. He then briefly served as president of feature films at Lorimar Productions, where his output included another comedy classic, Hal Ashby's Being There (1979); years earlier, Picker had given the go-ahead for Ashby, a film editor, to make his directorial debut with The Landlord (1970).

In 1985, Picker returned to the executive suite, hired by Columbia Pictures to serve as president of production alongside CEO David Puttnam. Picker, who drove to work every day in his station wagon, stayed on the job for just 30 months, during which he reunited with Bertolucci to make The Last Emperor (1987), which went on to win the best picture Oscar, but also taking some of the blame for the spectacular failure of Elaine May's Ishtar (1987), which had been greenlighted by his predecessor.

In his later years, Picker continued to occasionally work as an independent producer, with credits including The Appointments of Dennis Jennings (1988), which was awarded an Oscar for best live-action short, and Nicholas Hytner's The Crucible (1996), starring Daniel Day-Lewis. He served for several years as president of Hallmark Entertainment Productions Worldwide, tasked with ushering the company into the features business, and earning Emmy nominations as a producer of the company's The Temptations (1998) and P.T. Barnum (1999). He was the Producers Guild of America's East Coast chairman from 2004 through 2008. He was presented with The Producer Award at the Gotham Awards in 1998 and the Charles Fitzsimmons Award at the PGA Awards in 2008. And his memoir, Musts, Maybes and Nevers: A Book About the Movies, was published in 2013.

Picker is survived by his wife, the photographer Sandra Lyn Jetton Picker, and his sister, Jean Picker Firstenberg, the former president and CEO of the American Film Institute. He was previously married to — and divorced from — Caryl Schlossman, with whom he had two children, Caryn Picker and Pamela Lee Picker; and Nessa Hyams.

MooseWithFleas

I really enjoy this thread thanks to @RichardTheBruce for collating all these great Bond related facts so frequently. You are awesome!!

RichardTheBruce

April 21st

1962: The New Yorker publishes an interview with Ian Fleming.

The Talk of the Town
James Bond Comes to New York
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/04/21/bonds-creator
The author Ian Fleming spent a weekend in the city to see his publishers and
"assorted crooks" en route from his Jamaica hideaway to his London home.
By Geoffrey T. Hellman | April 13, 1962

Photograph by Horst Tappe / Hulton Archive / Getty

Ian Fleming, whose nine Secret Service thrillers (“Casino Royale,” “Doctor No,” “For Your Eyes Only,” “From Russia with Love,” “Live and Let Die,” “Moonraker,” “Goldfinger,” “Diamonds Are Forever,” and “Thunderball”) have had phenomenal sales in this country and abroad (more than eleven hundred thousand hardcover copies and three and a half million paperbacks), was here for a weekend recently en route from his Jamaica hideaway to his London home, and we caught him on Sunday morning at his hotel, the Pierre, where he amiably stood us a lunch. He ordered a prefatory medium-dry Martini of American vermouth and Beefeater gin, with lemon peel, and so did we.

“I’m here to see my publishers and assorted crooks,” he said. “Not other assorted crooks, mind you. By ‘crooks,’ I don’t mean crooks at all; I mean former Secret Service men. There are one or two of them here, you know.”

“Who?” we asked.

“Oh, men like the boss of James Bond, the operative who’s the chief character in all my books,” said our host. “When I wrote the first one, in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be the blunt instrument. One of the bibles of my youth was ‘Birds of the West Indies,’ by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, My God, that’s the dullest name I’ve ever heard, so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one. Mrs. Bond once wrote me a letter thanking me for using it.”

Mr. Fleming, a sunburned, tall, curly-haired, blue-eyed man of fifty-three in a dark-blue suit, blue shirt, and blue-dotted bow tie, ordered another Martini, and so did we. “I’ve spent the morning in Central Park,” he said. “I went there to see if I’d get murdered, but I didn’t. The only person who accosted me was a man who asked me how to get out. I love the Park; it was so wonderful to see the brown turning to green. I went to the Wollman skating rink and saw all those enchanting girls skating around, and then I thought, This is the place to meet a spy. What a wonderful place to meet a spy! A spy with a child. A child is the most wonderful cover for a spy, like a dog for a tart. Do tarts here have dogs? I was interested to see that in the bird reservation in the Park there was not a single bird. There are no people there—It’s fenced in, you know, with a sign—but no birds, either. Birds can’t read.”

Mr. Fleming lit a Senior Service cigarette and, in answer to some questions from us, said that he was a Scot, that he had been brought up in a hunting-and-fishing world where you shot or caught your lunch, and that he was a graduate of Eton and Sandhurst. “I shot against West Point,” he said. “When I got my commission, they were mechanizing the Army, and a lot of us decided we didn’t want to be garage hands running those bloody tanks. My poor mamma, in despair, suggested that I try for the diplomatic. My father was killed in the ‘14-‘18 war. Well, I went to the Universities of Geneva and Munich and learned extremely good French and German, but I got fed up with the exams, so in 1929 I joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent and had a hell of a time. Wonderful! I went to Moscow for Reuters. My God, it was fun! It was like a tremendous ball game.”

He ordered a dozen cherrystones and a Miller High Life, and we followed suit. “I like the name ‘High Life,’ ” he said. “That’s why I order it. And American vermouth is the best in the world.”

He added that he had been with Reuters for four years, and we asked what happened next.

“I decided I ought to make some money, and went into the banking and stock-brokerage business—first with Cull & Company and then with Rowe & Pitman,” he said. “Six years altogether, until the war came along. Those financial firms are tremendous clubs, and great fun, but I never could figure out what a sixty-fourth of a point was. We used to spend our whole time throwing telephones at each other. I’m afraid we ragged far too much.”

We inquired about the war, from which, according to the British Who’s Who, Mr. Fleming emerged a naval commander, and he said, “I was personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, so I went everywhere.”

We asked what he’d done after the war.

“I joined the editorial board of the London Times,” he said. “I still write articles for it, and I’m a stockholder. And in 1952, when I was in Jamaica, Cyril Connolly asked me to write an article about Jamaica for his magazine, Horizon. It was rather a euphoric piece, about Jamaica as an island for you and me to go to.”

We promised to go, and he said, “How about some domestic Camembert? It’s better here than the French.”

During this and the coffee, he reverted to the non-ornithological James Bond. “I think the reason for his success is that people are lacking in heroes in real life today,” he said. “Heroes are always getting knocked—Philip and Mountbatten are examples of this—and I think people absolutely long for heroes. The thing that’s wrong with the new anticolonialism is that no one has yet found a Negro hero. They’re scratching around with Tshombe, but ... Well, I don’t regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way, and in the end, after giant despair, he wins the girl or the jackpot or whatever it may be. My books have no social significance, except a deleterious one; they’re considered to have too much violence and too much sex. But all history has that. I finished the last one, my tenth James Bond story, in Jamaica the other day; it’s long and tremendously dull. It’s called ‘The Spy Who Loved Me,’ and it’s written, supposedly, by a girl. I think it’s an absolute miracle that an elderly person like me can go on turning out these books with such zest. It’s really a terrible indictment of my own character—they’re so adolescent. But they’re fun. I think people like them because they’re fun. A couple of years ago, when I was in Washington, and was driving to lunch with a friend of mine, Margaret Leiter, she spotted a young couple coming out of church, and she stopped our cab. ‘You must meet them,’ she said. ‘They’re great fans of yours.’ And she introduced me to Jack and Jackie Kennedy. ‘Not the Ian Fleming!’ they said. What could be more gratifying than that? They asked me to dinner that night, with Joe Alsop and some other characters. I think the President likes my books because he enjoys the combination of physical violence, effort, and winning in the end—like his PT-boat experiences. I think James Bond may be good for him after the dry pack of the day.”

Mr. Fleming is married to a former wife of Lord Rothermere and has a nine-year-old son, Caspar, who is away at boarding school. “He doesn’t read me, but he sells my autographs for seven shillings a time,” his father said. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the April 21, 1962, issue, with the headline “Bond's Creator.”

1969: Toby Stephens is born--Middlesex Hospital, London, England.
1971: Bond comic Double Jeopardy begins its run in the The Daily Express. (Ends 28 August 1971, 1597–1708.)
Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Double_Jeopardy

https://spyguysandgals.com/sgLookupComicStrip.aspx?id=1004


https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/dj.php3


Swedish 1978 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1978.php3


Danish 1972 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no24-1972/

1993: TBS starts James Bond Wednesday.

2017: A Daily Mail article cites a recent poll proposing the reading of Bond books as the most-lied-about.

Do you lie about books you have read?
You are not alone...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-4432690/Do-lie-books-read-You-not-.html
By Press Association | Published: 09:19 EDT, 21 April 2017 | Updated: 09:29 EDT, 21 April 2017

Many Britons are fibbers when it comes to their reading habits, failing to tell the truth in a bid to impress, a poll suggests.

Around two-fifths (41%) say they would stretch the truth when it comes to what, or how much, they have read, with young people (18 to 24-year-olds) most likely to do so.

A job interview was the most likely place for people to lie about books, the Reading Agency survey found, followed by on a date and when meeting the in-laws.

And given a list of books that were turned into films, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are the books people are most likely to claim they have read when they have, in reality, just seen the movie, the Reading Agency concluded. In second place was the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, followed by CS Lewis’s Chronicles Of Narnia.

The poll of 2,000 adults does reveal that two-thirds (67%) would like to read more than they currently do, while nearly half (48%) said they are too busy to read more.

Around 38% said they are rarely in the mood to read, while around a third (35%) said they find it difficult to find books they really like. The survey comes before World Book Night on Sunday.

Reading Agency chief executive Sue Wilkinson, said: “It’s great to see from our research that Brits still love to read, but not surprising that some people feel they are too busy to do so.

“Finding the right book can be key to getting back into the reading habit, and our research shows how influential book recommendations and book gifting can be. So on World Book Night, we are urging keen readers to give a book to someone they know who doesn’t currently read for pleasure.”

List of books adults are most likely to claim they’ve read,
when they’ve actually seen the film, in order of popularity:

1. James Bond books, Ian Fleming
2. Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien

3. The Chronicles Of Narnia, CS Lewis
4. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown

5. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
6. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh

7. The Wizard Of Oz, L Frank Baum
8. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding

9. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
10. The Godfather, Mario Puzo

11. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
12. Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

13. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

The online survey questioned 2,000 British people in March.

Thunderfinger

Great interview.

RichardTheBruce

April 22nd

1950: Lee Tamahori is born--Wellington, New Zealand.
1963: From Russia With Love films at the Sophia Mosque in Istanbul.

1976: Ken Adam directs construction of the 007 sound-stage at Pinewood Studios.
2008: Bond Bound: Ian Fleming and the Art of Cover Design begins its run, eventually ending 28 June, at the Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London.

Ian Fleming and the art of book design
https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/10-april-2008/ian-fleming-and-the-art-of-book-design/
By System Administrator April 16, 2008 12:08 am

Those who blinked and missed the Royal Mail’s set of stamps featuring James Bond covers back in January should rush to a new exhibition opening next week. Bond Bound: Ian Fleming and the Art of Cover Design is just one part of the author’s centenary celebrations taking place this year, but for designers, it promises to be the best. Covering all of Ian Fleming’s books and a range of archive material, the focus of the show will be firmly on the James Bond novels, beginning with Fleming’s own design for the first one, Casino Royale, published in 1953, and including two subsequent titles art directed by the author, Live and Let Die and Moonraker. The former features the neo-Victorian lettering typical of the then-popular Festival of Britain style, the latter introduces Kenneth Lewis’s flame pattern that would become an integral element of Maurice Binder’s classic 007 titles. What the exhibition clearly shows is how these covers stand strong in their own right, but also combine to paint a fascinating portrait of Britain over the past 60 years. Their designs clearly illustrated Britain’s fast-changing moral attitudes and cultural shifts as designers quickly began to expose the innate animal magnetism of the hero and make obvious a nation’s desire to engage openly with issues such as sex, style, power and politics. The exhibition will incorporate Fleming’s literary legacy with Bond spin-offs by other authors, right up to the yet to be released Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks’s tribute to Fleming. Like a perfect full stop to the dialogue created by the covers, the cover is designed by The Partners, and features Rankin muse and model Tuuli Shipster, who is a diplomat’s daughter in real life. Fleming couldn’t have made it up.

Bond Bound: Ian Fleming and the Art of Cover Design runs from 22 April to 28 June at the Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1 For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond is on at London’s Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London SE10 until 1 March 2009

Devil May Care is published on 28 May by Penguin books

2010: With BOND 23 delayed, rumors fly that Sam Worthington will play Bond.
2012: Michael Wilson assures the Turkish press that filming does not destroy precious antique buildings.
2015: After a scheduled break and minor knee surgery, Daniel Craig resumes filming at Pinewood Studios.
2019: Cologne, Germany, enjoys Hunting 007 - A Night With James Bond.

HUNTING 007 - A NIGHT WITH JAMES BOND in Cologne, Germany
http://www.filmphilharmonic.com/typo3temp/GB/7f92157ebb.jpg

22.April.2019
Kölner Philharmonie, 8:00 p.m.

Performed by The Deutsche Filmorchester Babelsberg under the baton of Christian Schumann.

Vocals: Tertia Botha & Dennis LeGree

Excerpts from "Skyfall", "GoldenEye", "Casino Royale", "From Russia with Love", "The Spy Who Loved Me", "Goldfinger", "For Your Eyes Only", "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and others.

RichardTheBruce

April 23rd

1943: Hervé Villechaize is born--Paris, France.
(He dies 4 September 1993 at age 50--North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.)

Hervé Villechaize
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervé_Villechaize

Villechaize in 1977

Born Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaize 23 April 1943, Paris, France
Died 4 September 1993 (aged 50), North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Cause of death Suicide by shooting
Resting place Ashes sprinkled into the Pacific Ocean
Occupation Actor
Years active 1966–1993
Notable work
Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Spider in Seizure (1974)
King Fausto in Forbidden Zone (1980)
Smiley in Two Moon Junction (1988)
Height 3 ft 11 in (119 cm)
Television Fantasy Island
Spouse(s)
Anne Sadowski | (m. 1970; div. 1979)
Camille Hagen | (m. 1980; div. 1982)

Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaize (French: [ɛʁve vilʃɛz]; April 23, 1943 – September 4, 1993) was a French American actor. He is best remembered for known for his role as the evil henchman Nick Nack in the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, and for playing Mr. Roarke's assistant, Tattoo, on the 1977–1984 American television series Fantasy Island, where his catch phrase was "Ze plane! Ze plane!"

Early life

Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaize was born in Paris, France on April 23, 1943. to English-born Evelyn (Recchionni) and André Villechaize, a surgeon in Toulon. The youngest of four sons, Villechaize was born with dwarfism, likely due to an endocrine disorder, which his surgeon father tried unsuccessfully to cure in several institutions. In later years, he insisted on being called a "midget" rather than a "dwarf". Villechaize was bullied at school for his condition and found solace in painting. He also had a brief modeling career.[citation needed] In 1959, at age 16, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study art. In 1961, he became the youngest artist ever to have his work displayed in the Museum of Paris.

In 1964 he left France for the United States. He settled in a Bohemian section of New York City and taught himself English by watching television.[citation needed]
Career

Villechaize initially worked as an artist, painter and photographer. He began acting in Off-Broadway productions, including The Young Master Dante by Werner Liepolt and a play by Sam Shepard, and he also modeled for photos for National Lampoon before moving on to film.[citation needed]

His first film appearance was in Chappaqua (1966). The second film was Edward Summer's Item 72-D: The Adventures of Spa and Fon filmed in 1969.[8] This was followed by several films including Christopher Speeth's and Werner Liepolt's Malatesta's Carnival of Blood; Crazy Joe; Oliver Stone's first film, Seizure; and The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. He was asked to play a role in Alejandro Jodorowsky's film Dune, which had originally begun pre-production in 1971 but was later cancelled.

His big break was getting cast in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), by which time he had become so poor he was living out of his car in Los Angeles. Prior to being signed up by Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli, he made ends meet by working as a rat catcher's assistant near his South Central home. From what his co-star Christopher Lee saw, The Man with the Golden Gun filming was possibly the happiest time of Villechaize's life: Lee likened it to honey in the sandwich between an insecure past and an uncertain future. In addition to being an actor, Villechaize became an active member of a movement in 1970s and 1980s California to deal with child abuse and neglect, often going to crime scenes himself to help comfort abuse victims. Villechaize's former co-workers recalled that despite his stature, he would often confront and chastise spousal and child abusers when he arrived at crime scenes. In the 1970s, on Sesame Street, Villechaize performed Oscar the Grouch as a pair of legs peeping out from a trash can, for scenes which required the Grouch to be mobile. These appearances began in the second season and included the 1978 Hawaii episodes.

Though popular with the public, Villechaize proved a difficult actor on Fantasy Island, where he continually propositioned women and quarreled with the producers. He was eventually fired after demanding a salary on par with that of his co-star Ricardo Montalbán. Villechaize was replaced with Christopher Hewett, of Mr. Belvedere and The Producers fame.

In 1980, Cleveland International Records released a single by The Children of the World, featuring Villechaize as vocalist: "Why" b/w "When a Child is Born"[9]

He starred in the movie Forbidden Zone (1980), and appeared in Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), and episodes of Diff'rent Strokes and Taxi. He later played the role of the character Rumpelstiltskin in the Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre episode Rumpelstiltskin.

In the 1980s, he became popular in Spain due to his impersonations of Prime Minister Felipe González on the television show Viaje con nosotros (Travel with us), with showman Javier Gurruchaga.

He made his final appearance in a cameo appearance as himself in an episode of The Ben Stiller Show.

Personal life and death

Villechaize was married twice. He met his second wife Camille Hagen, an actress and stand-in double, on the set of the pilot for Fantasy Island.[2] They resided at a 1.5-acre (0.61 ha) San Fernando Valley ranch which also was home to a menagerie of farm animals and pets.[2]

In 1983, for a television program That Teen Show which included messages directed at depressed and suicide-prone teenagers, Haywood Nelson, star of the sitcom What's Happening!!, interviewed Villechaize about his many suicide attempts. Villechaize said then that he had learned to love life.

In the early morning hours of September 4, 1993, Villechaize is believed to have first fired a shot through the sliding glass patio door to awaken his longtime girlfriend, Kathy Self, before shooting himself at his North Hollywood home. Self found Villechaize in his backyard, and he was pronounced dead at a North Hollywood facility. Villechaize left a suicide note saying he was despondent over longtime health problems. Villechaize was suffering from chronic pain due to having oversized internal organs putting increasing pressure on his small body. According to Self, Villechaize often slept in a kneeling position so he could breathe more easily.

At the time of his suicide, Cartoon Network was in negotiations for him to co-star in Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which was in pre-production at the time. Villechaize would have voiced Space Ghost's sidekick on the show.

His ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean off Point Fermin in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California.[citation needed]

Depictions in media

In a March 2012 New York Times interview, Peter Dinklage revealed that he and Sacha Gervasi spent several years writing a script about Villechaize. Gervasi, a director and journalist, conducted a lengthy interview with Villechaize just prior to his suicide; according to Dinklage, "[a]fter he killed himself, Sacha realized Hervé's interview was a suicide note". The film, My Dinner with Hervé, which is based on the last few days of Villechaize's life, stars Dinklage in the title role, and premiered on HBO on October 20, 2018.

Filmography

Chappaqua (1966) as Little Person (uncredited)
Maidstone (1970)
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971) as Beppo
The Last Stop (1972) as Deputy
Greaser's Palace (1972) as Mr. Spitunia
Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973) as Bobo
Seizure (1974) as The Spider
Crazy Joe (1974) as Samson
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) as Nick Nack
Hot Tomorrows (1977) as Alberict
Fantasy Island (TV series, 1977–1983) as Tattoo
The One and Only (1978) as Milton Miller
Forbidden Zone (1980) as King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension
Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) as Little Breather
The Telephone (1988) as Freeway (voice)
Two Moon Junction (1988) as Smiley

1953: Ian Fleming's article "2,200 Year Old Wine from Wreck; It Tastes Terrible" published in the Milwaukee Journal confirms what explorer Jacques Cousteau should have suspected all along.

Jacques Yves Cousteau
Un Étudiant Terrible
http://www.coopertoons.com/caricatures/jacquescousteau_bio.html

Jacques Yves
Cousteau
(It should have a
hyphen.)

...
After Jacques retired from the Navy, he began working as an independent researcher and film producer. His funding came from various sources. The French government provided some grants and it was Loel Guinness - a titled Englishmen - whose inherited wealth was the wherewithal that let Jacques purchase the Calypso. Loel - not to be confused with the Irish Guinness brewers (whose titled name is Iveagh) - had been a military man himself.

By the mid-1960's Jacques had won another Oscar and had been honored at the White House by John Kennedy. Then in 1968 he began his series, The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau. Jacques was a household name.

Jacques' research later expanded to more general exploration and he conducted projects with various countries and government agencies. But he is still remembered best for his work beneath the waves. In 1953 Jacques was salvaging the wreck of a ship that had sunk just off the bay of Marseille around 250 BC. Although the ship was Greek, inscriptions indicated that the boat had been owned by Marcus Sestus, a Roman politician and businessman. The excavators hypothesized the boat, hugging the coast as was the navigational custom of the time, had run aground.

The European editor of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) came aboard the Calypso and interviewed Jacques. At that point they had just been able to recover deck cargo which included over 1500 amphora - clay wine jars - and many of them still had the clay seals intact and the contents inside.

Jacques approached the discovery of 2000 year old wine like a true fils de France and tried a sample. It was disgusting, he said.

Oh, yes. The NANA editor who interviewed Jacques was a one-time stock broker who had just published what was to be his first novel. His name was Ian Fleming.


A One-Time Stock
Broker
(He interviewed
Jacques.)

...
"2,200 Year Old Wine from Wreck; It Tastes Terrible", Ian Fleming, Milwaukee Journal, April 23, 1953. Yes, this article was written by the Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. He was a reporter and editor for the North American News Alliance.

2002: BOND 20 films scenes with the Aston Martin "Vanish".
2005: Ian Fleming Publications releases Kev Walker's illustration of thirteen-year-old Young Bond.

2013: Ian Fleming's Casino Royale is one of twenty titles given out on World Book Night.

Books given away on World Book Night
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-22266106
23 April 2013


More than 20,000 volunteers have handed out hundreds of thousands of free books
as part of the third World Book Night.

Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Casino Royale and Jojo Moyes' best-seller Me Before You were among the 20 titles being given away.

The event aims to promote literacy in the "spirit of generosity, passion and mass participation".

Each volunteer was due to give out 20 copies of their favourite book to people who do not normally read.

Rose Tremain, whose The Road Home was part of the mass giveaway, described it as a "kind of benign Ponzi scheme for the mighty word".

And Tracy Chevalier, whose historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring was part of the giveaway, signed up as a volunteer. She was due to hand out Tremain's Orange Prize-winning novel as her book of choice.

Writer and comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli hosted an evening of readings by authors, poets and performers in one of four flagship events across the UK.

His event at London's Southbank on Tuesday was due to feature Irish playwright Sebastian Barry, actor Charles Dance and One Day writer David Nicholls.

Hundreds of libraries, village halls and local book clubs also celebrated World Book Night across the UK. Some 100,000 of the 500,000 books were due to be distributed in hospitals, shelters, care homes, community centres and prisons.