On This Day

RichardTheBruce

April 14th

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

Joie Chitwood

See the complete article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

Joie Chitwood (I) (1912–1988)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0158374/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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

See the complete article here:

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.

- - -

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.

- - -

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 at 22 Ebury Street, Belgravia, London:

IAN FLEMING 1908-1964 Creator of James Bond lived here.

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

Obituary: Anthony Newley

See full article here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-anthony-newley-1087464.html

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."

- - -

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.

Anthony Newley (1931–1999)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0627969/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

2021: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher release an updated version of Jeremy Black's
World Of James Bond: The Lives & Times Of 007.

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

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

See the complete article here:

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.

- - -

Chris Salewicz

Michael Kamen (1948–2003)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004383/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

Pink Floyd - The Final Cut

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.
1969: On Her Majesty's Secret Service films Moneypenny and a new Bond.

1978: 007 나를 사랑한 스파이 (007 Love Me Spy) released in the Republic of Korea.

http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=cine212722&logNo=221767682162&parentCategoryNo=&categoryNo=28&viewDate=&isShowPopularPosts=false&from=postView

2017: Clifton James dies at age 96--Gladstone, Oregon.
(Born 29 May 1920--Spokane, Washington.)

Gladstone hometown hero Clifton James
fondly remembered

See original article here:

http://pamplinmediagroup.com/pt/9-news/357972-237884-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.

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.

Clifton James (I) (1920–2017)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0416378/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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

See the complete article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/obituaries/14nelson.html[/center[

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.
- - -

Barry Nelson (I) (1917–2007)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0625167/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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

Syd Cain obituary
Production designer behind the deadly gadgets used by James Bond – and his foes

See the full article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/dec/01/syd-cain

Kim Newman - 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

Syd Cain (1918–2011)

Filmography

Production designer (17 credits)

1988 Tusks
1985 Wild Geese II
1982 The Final Option
1981 Loophole
1980 Lion of the Desert
1980 The Sea Wolves

1978 The Wild Geese
1976 The New Avengers (TV Series) (13 episodes)
- Dirtier by the Dozen (1976)
- Gnaws (1976)
- Sleeper (1976)
- Faces (1976)
- Three Handed Game (1976)
- The Tale of the Big Why (1976)
- Target! (1976)
- Cat Amongst the Pigeons (1976)
- To Catch a Rat (1976)
- The Last of the Cybernauts...? (1976)
- House of Cards (1976)
- The Midas Touch (1976)
- The Eagle's Nest (1976)
1976 Aces High
1976 Shout at the Devil
1974 Gold
1972 Fear Is the Key (as Sidney Cain)
1972 Frenzy
1969 On Her Majesty's Secret Service
1967 Billion Dollar Brain
1966 Fahrenheit 451
1965 The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders

Art department (27 credits)

2001 The Fourth Angel (storyboard artist)
2000 Shiner (storyboard artist)

1998 Tarzan and the Lost City (storyboard artist)
1995 GoldenEye (storyboard artist)
1994 The NeverEnding Story III (storyboard artist)
1991 Robin Hood (storyboard artist - as Sydney Cain)

1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit (storyboard artist: UK)
1984 Supergirl (research art director)

1966 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (executive art director)
1962 Lolita (associate art director - as Sidney Cain)
1960 The World of Suzie Wong (assistant art director - as Sydney Cain)
1959 Our Man in Havana (assistant art director)
1958 Tank Force (assistant art director)
1957 High Flight (assistant art director)
1957 How to Murder a Rich Uncle (assistant art director)
1957 Fire Down Below (assistant art director)
1957 Pickup Alley (assistant art director)
1956 Zarak (assistant art director - uncredited)
1956 The Gamma People (assistant art director)
1955 The Cockleshell Heroes (assistant art director)
1954 Up to His Neck (draughtsman - uncredited)
1954 You Know What Sailors Are (draughtsman - uncredited)
1954 Hell Below Zero (draughtsman - uncredited)

1949 The Interrupted Journey (draughtsman - uncredited)
1949 Madness of the Heart (draughtsman - uncredited)
1949 Adam and Evalyn (draughtsman - uncredited)
1947 The Inheritance (draughtsman - uncredited)

Art director (10 credits)

1973 Live and Let Die (supervising art director)
1966 Fahrenheit 451
1965 Mister Moses
1965 McGuire, Go Home!
1964 Agent 8 3/4
1963 From Russia with Love
1963 Call Me Bwana
1963 Summer Holiday
1962 Dr. No (uncredited)
1962 The Road to Hong Kong

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

Obituary: Sir Kingsley Amis

See the complete article here:

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.

- - -

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.

- - -

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,.)

Dusty Springfield

See the complete article here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/5900498/Dusty-Springfield.html
04 Mar 1999

Dusty Springfield, who has died aged 59, was one of Britain's most successful female pop singers; she had nine Top 10 hits in the 1960s, and with her upswept hair and panda-shadowed eyes was among the emerging pop scene's most readily identifiable stars.

Photo: GETTY IMAGES

She was distinguished from her contemporaries both by her choice of material and by the quality of her voice. Dusty Springfield was a fine judge of a lyric, and favoured emotional songs written by the American teams of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and Jerry Goffin and Carole King. Their songs, rooted in the Broadway tradition, were perfectly suited to a voice often described as soulful but whose ideal setting would perhaps have been cabaret.

Usually backed by lush string arrangements, she sang with a voice that was low and sensual and made her songs sound like confessions of sins she took increasing pleasure in committing. Her voice sounded mature and smooth too, and the assurance of her performances gave her records longer life than the fizzier offerings of such rivals as Lulu and Cilla Black.

Dusty Springfield was among the first British singers to champion the sound of black America, Motown. She was much influenced by that label's girl groups, and in turn her rich voice surprised them. The singer Mary Wells believed Dusty Springfield must be black before seeing her on television, while Cliff Richard dubbed her "The White Negress".

When Motown's stars came to London to host an edition of the pop programme Ready, Steady, Go, they invited only one British guest - Dusty Springfield.

She was born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in Hampstead, north London, on April 16 1939. Her father was a tax inspector and she was educated at a convent school in Ealing.

- - -

But her star was declining. Although she had had some success with a song from the soundtrack of the Bond film Casino Royale - "The Look of Love", perhaps her definitive vocal performance - her two most recent albums had flopped. She seemed out of step with the mood of popular music as it edged towards rock, psychedelia and more overt rebellion.

In 1968 she fled London for Memphis. She had long been fascinated by America - she was a considerable expert on the Civil War - and in Tennessee recorded her finest album, Dusty in Memphis (1968). It was supervised by Jerry Wexler - Ray Charles's and Aretha Franklin's producer - who gave her voice more room to breathe, unlike the British producers who had tended to bury it beneath over-elaborate arrangements.

- - -

A new generation discovered her music when Son of a Preacher Man featured in the film Pulp Fiction (1994). Then shortly afterwards she began her fight against breast cancer.

Published March 4 1999

Dusty Springfield (1939–1999)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0819778/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

"I Only Want To Be With You"

"The Windmills of Your Mind"

"The Look of Love"

"Six Million Dollar Man"

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.

Daybills

2021: Helen Elizabeth McCrory OBE dies at age 52--London, England.
(Born 17 August 1968--Paddington, London, England.)

Helen McCrory, British ‘Skyfall’ and
‘Harry Potter’ Actress, Dies at Age 52

‘GO NOW, LITTLE ONE’

See the complete article here:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/helen-mccrory-british-skyfall-and-harry-potter-actress-dies-at-age-52

Cheyenne Roundtree | Entertainment Reporter
Published Apr. 16, 2021 12:18PM ET

Photo: Stuart C. Wilson

British actress Helen McCrory has died of cancer at age 52 surrounded by family, her husband, actor Damian Lewis, announced Friday. “I’m heartbroken to announce that after a heroic battle with cancer, the beautiful and mighty woman that is Helen McCrory has died peacefully at home, surrounded by a wave of love from friends and family,” he wrote on Twitter. “She died as she lived. Fearlessly. God we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.” Lewis and McCrory had been married for 14 years, with 14-year-old daughter Manon and 13-year-old son Gulliver.

With more than 72 acting credits to her name, McCrory was best known for her roles in Peaky Blinders, the Harry Potter franchise, and the James Bond movie Skyfall.

Helen McCrory (1968–2021)

Actress
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0567031/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

RichardTheBruce

April 17th

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

William Holden

See the complete article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
(He dies 21 January 2021 at age 90--Montargis, France.)

Legendary stunt driver Rémy Julienne has
passed away

See the complete article here:

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/movies/legendary-stunt-driver-remy-julienne-has-passed-away

The skills behind the stunts on The Italian Job and six Bond films dies aged 90
Jason Barlow | 22 Jan 2021



Rémy Julienne, arguably the greatest stunt driver of all time, has died at the age of 90 having contracted Covid-19. According to French news sources, he had been in intensive care in a hospital in the town of Montargis since early January. “What was bound to happen has happened,” a relative commented. “He left us early in the evening [Thursday]. It was predictable, he was on a respirator.”

Julienne was perhaps best-known for his work on 1969’s The Italian Job, in which his sheer bravery was matched by his peerless driving skills and the balletic precision of the sequences he devised, along with his right-hand man, Raphaël Olivotti. “We were very, very lucky to get Rémy Julienne [and his] stunt driving team,” Michael Caine noted, “because they were really the stars of the film in a way.” Added producer Michael Deeley, “During our initial meeting with Rémy, Peter Collinson [the film’s director] and I were delighted to discover that he was prepared to take the chase sequence even further than we had envisaged, suggesting a different range of hair-raising stunts that could be written into the script.”

Julienne was born on 17th April 1930 in the village of Cepoy, and grew up riding motorbikes. By 1957, he was French motocross champion, and began his movie career doubling for Jean Marais in the 1964 film Fantômas. He would go on to amass 1400 film and many more commercial credits, famously allying with Fiat and conducting a variety of improbable stunts for the Italian giant during the Seventies. The great Claude Lelouch, (whose 1976 short film C’était un rendez-vous is a car chase classic), was once moved to call him a ‘reasonable madman’.

Although not a household name – unless the occupants of the house were car obsessives – Julienne’s work on six James Bond films was certainly appreciated by millions of cinema fans worldwide. His speciality was in making ordinary cars do extraordinary things, not least the Citroen 2CV in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only or the Renault 11 in 1985’s A View To A Kill. Then there was the truck tanker sequence in 1989’s Licence To Kill, during which Julienne expanded his core team to include a man who could make a Kenworth perform a wheelie, and another who could get it onto half of its 18 wheels.

“The tanker chase was the most dangerous sequence I ever devised,” the film’s director John Glen told me. But he also points out that, for all his flamboyance, Julienne was fastidious in his preparation. “Remy never really spoke particularly good English, but we somehow managed to communicate very well. He was fantastic, a stopwatch man, nothing was left to chance. He didn’t do anything daring – it was all worked out meticulously.”

As the man himself confirms. “I was a scared little boy, but I had a taste for risk. Over time, I discovered that the real difficulty is finding the right balance between doubt and self-confidence,” he told France Dimanche in 2015. “You must have constant concern for perfection, precision and absolute safety while ensuring that the wishes of the director are met. My job was to calculate the risks.”

Julienne worked with a number of big names during his long career, including Lee Marvin, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Harrison Ford, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. “I shot three James Bond films with Roger Moore,” he recalled. “This kind of Anglo-Saxon production is so strict that insurers refuse to let him do anything. He would say to me, ‘My only stunts, I do them with women’.”

In 1998, he worked with John Frankenheimer on Ronin, another memorable showcase for his commitment to panel-crunching car chase verité. But there was tragedy during the making of Taxi 2 the following year, during which cameraman Alain Dutartre was killed and his assistant seriously injured when one of the stunts went badly wrong. The French authorities alleged safety compromises, and Julienne was given a one year suspended jail sentence and €13,000 fine. He claimed that the film’s producers rejected his demand that the stunt be trialled ahead of shooting. The Paris Court of Appeal subsequently overturned the verdict.

Julienne’s sons Michel and Dominique continue in the family business, and TG.com sends them and the extended Julienne clan our condolences. Rémy Julienne was the original maestro of the car chase and a fearless cinematic pioneer. Back to the man himself, his defining moment, and the film star who he made look very good indeed.

“Very often people ask, ‘what was my favourite stunt?’ I’d say the jump between the two Fiat factory roofs must be the one, because it was emotional, because it was difficult. We worked on the ground, we prepared the ramps, calculated distances, speeds etc. [Originally] it was decided I had to do three separate jumps in each Mini. I explained that, as the roof was very wide, we could make the three Minis jump all together… it looked much better as a shot. It was more complicated, but really amazing.”

Adds Michael Caine: “Afterwards, I said to Rémy, ‘Bloody hell, my heart was in my mouth.’
He said, ‘Michael, it’s mathematics.’”

Rémy Julienne (1930–2021)

Stunts | Actor | Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0432293/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

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

See the complete article here:

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), a civil engineer. 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.

A short, unhappy stint teaching English at Denstone College, Staffordshire, 1931–33, inspired his novel Dead Centre. In the 1930s, Calder-Marshall adopted strong left-wing views. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain 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.

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

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."

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.

With his wife, writer Ara Calder-Marshall (born Violet Nancy Sales), 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.

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

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)

https://bondfanevents.com/the-search-for-rd-mascott-james-bond-junior-003-1-2/

2002: Die Another Day 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

See the complete article here:

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.

- - -

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.

- - -

https://literary007.com/richard-chopping/

2020: Tony Parsons proposes he is ready to write a Bond novel.

Tony Parsons has planned his first
James Bond novel

See the complete article here:

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/books/article/tony-parsons-james-bond

By Tony Parsons | 17 April 2020

As his latest detective thriller #Taken comes out in paperback and e-book, Tony Parsons muses on the appeal of ‘the space between books’ and how it has shaped the idea for his first James Bond novel. All he needs now is the tap on the shoulder…

Like every writer of a certain vintage, I have always prepared myself for the day I am called by Ian Fleming’s estate. “Tony,” they will say, “we need you now. It’s what Ian would have wanted.”

James Bond’s dapper creator may have died in 1964, but the James Bond books – the first books to fill my dreams – have never stopped coming. Fleming wrote just 13 007 books in his lifetime but since then numerous writers have had a crack at extending his legacy, including Kingsley Amis, Anthony Horowitz, Jeffery Deaver, Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd: some big names trying to catch that Fleming voice and to capture that 007 essence. My day, I always felt – and still do, between you and me – will come to carry on what my literary hero started back in 1953. And I know exactly what I will do – I will write my James Bond story in the space between books.

I have always planned to set my own James Bond book after the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and before the start of You Only Live Twice. That means the lost days between the murder of Bond’s wife, Tracy, in the final chapter of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but before the first chapter of You Only Live Twice, which finds our hero out east in a geisha house, given one last chance of redemption by M. That is surely fertile ground for any novelist – between the loss of the love of your life and your last chance to do something right. I even have a title – spoiler alert – Always Say Die. You can almost imagine Adele or Shirley Bassey singing it.

So I have thought a lot about the space between books. What happens to a series hero when the lights go out? What agonies and ecstasies is he suffering when one adventure ends and the next begins? I spent years thinking about what James Bond did between all those iconic Ian Fleming books and more recently I have thought long and hard about what my own series hero, Max Wolfe, got up to between books.

The space between books was my model and inspiration for the three Max Wolfe short stories – “Dead Time”, “Fresh Blood” and “Tell Him He’s Dead”. The latter is now being brought to you by GQ; you can read the whole thing for free.

When you write a series, the reader should be able to pick up any title and jump right in – this is because almost nobody in the world ever reads a series in order. But when you write a series – and I have published six Max Wolfe titles over the last six years – you need it all to fit together and make perfect sense, because if you choose to run the marathon of writing a series of books about one character – from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, from Ian Fleming's Bond to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock and Watson – you better believe in every single word.

The Max Wolfe short stories were conceived as novellas that would only be available as e-books – but they always had to fit perfectly with the rest of the Max Wolfe universe. So if Max carries a scar at the end of a book – physical, psychological, romantic – then that scar must still be throbbing with pain when the next story starts.

“Dead Time”, the first digital short, happens immediately after The Murder Bag, the first Max Wolfe title. It is Christmas at the end of The Murder Bag so it is a snowy new year in London at the start of "Dead Time", when Max is tasked with hunting down the villain who invented the recreational drugs industry. The second short, “Fresh Blood”, takes place after the end of The Slaughter Man, the second Max Wolfe title, and sees Max hunting a couple of spiffy young villains who are obsessed with the Kray brothers. And the third title, “Tell Him He’s Dead” sees the apparent return of the terrorist who dies in the first chapter of the first book. But these stories were not conceived as full-length books. They were meant to be what happens between books, they were conceived as somewhere between marketing device and bonus for hard-core Max Wolfe fans. I probably tried too hard on them. I thought when I wrote them – and still do – that they would have all made good full-length books, that there is enough in them to sustain a proper novel. But I would never sneer at a cracking short story. A lot of my literary heroes have been short story writers.

Raymond Carver never wrote a novel in his brief, chain-smoking life, but in my eyes, Carver stands up there with Philip Roth and John Updike.

Ian Fleming wrote good short stories – and some of them were turned into full-length films – but that is no doubt because, as someone who only wrote a series hero, he thought a lot about the place between books. If your character is real to you (and he has to be to write book after book, year after year about him), then inevitably your mind often drifts to what he is up to now like it might an old lost lover.

So: Max Wolfe.

He is a detective in homicide and serious crime at West End Central, the massive police station that stands on Savile Row. Max is youngish – pushing 30 – the single father of a young daughter. They have a cavalier King Charles spaniel called Stan and a loft overlooking the meat market in Smithfield. And he boxes. When I write this down, I realise how much of myself I have used to create this character who has been my shadow for six years. But then that is exactly what Fleming did with Bond – when Bond talks about women, or Jamaica, or alcohol, or a good shirt, you can hear Fleming’s voice.

But the big difference is that Bond was a hero and Fleming was not. But Fleming knew what it was like to stand in the shadow of a hero. Me too, Ian, me too.

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

See the complete article here:

https://www.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: Spectre films inside London City Hall.
2018: Dynamite Entertainment publishes James Bond: The Body #4 (of 6).
Eoin Marron, artist. Ales Kot, writer.

JAMES BOND: THE BODY #4

https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C72513026419004011
Cover A: Luca Casalanguida
Writer: Ales Kot
Art: Eoin Marron
Genre: Action
Publication Date: April 2018
Format: Comic Book
Page Count: 32 Pages
UPC: 725130264190 04011
ON SALE DATE: 4/18/2018

On the run from a lethal antagonist, weaponless and wounded deep in the Highlands, Bond finds solace with a woman who exchanged her job as a doctor and a life in the city for a cottage and solitary life of a writer. Can Bond find a quiet peace unlike he has known before or will his life choices catch up with him?

2021: London Walks continues their virtual tours of ‘Bond, James Bond’ – Ian Fleming’s and 007’s London.

https://www.walks.com/our-walks/james-bond-virtual-tour/

2020 Walk, Madeleine Smith looking amazing here

2021: WIRED explains why the latest Bond film won't go to streaming.

Why a James Bond film will never
premiere on Netflix

See the complete article here:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/james-bond-no-time-to-die-netflix

The economics of blockbusters like No Time to Die simply don’t work
without cinemas. And the pandemic proved it
By Will Bedingfield | Sunday 18 April 2021

https://wi-images.condecdn.net/image/meE2PEmjEPj/crop/810/f/wired-hollywood.jpg

In 2011, movie studio Universal Pictures announced that it would be carrying out a test: it would put out its new film, Tower Heist, on video-on-demand just three weeks after releasing it in cinemas.

The move was doomed. Cinemas were furious. AMC, Regal and Cinemark announced that, if Universal went ahead with the test, they would simply not play the film. Chastened, Universal capitulated and the “test” never went ahead.

Things have changed. Over the last year, cinemas have had no leverage, and studios have been able to carry out the streaming experiments they’ve been pondering for the past decade. But far from opening up a brave new era of home entertainment, these experiments have actually shown Hollywood studios that, yes, they do still need cinemas – at least if they want to make the globe-spanning blockbusters that pull in the big bucks.

Studio responses to the pandemic have varied. Some, lacking popular streaming platforms, have made deals with companies that do: Paramount sold Coming 2 America to Amazon for $125 million; Sony sold Tom Hanks’ Greyhound to Apple TV+ for around $70m.

Others have used the pandemic as a chance to release films on their own platforms. Disney, for instance, has churned out a glut of movies on Disney+, including Mulan, Soul and Raya and the Last Dragon. AT&T, which owns Warner Bros, has released multiple films – like Wonder Woman 1984 and Godzilla vs. Kong – in theatres at the same time as on its streaming service HBO Max, and plans to continue this throughout 2021 with Mortal Kombat, Dune and The Matrix 4.

Filmmakers have lined up to criticise this practice: Denis Villeneuve, director of Dune, publish an op-ed in Variety claiming the move shows “absolutely no love for cinema”, while Christopher Nolan said that “some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”

It’s not hard to see why streaming would be attractive to studios: if you beam a film directly to people’s homes, you don’t have to share your profits with cinema owners. “Studios have been trying for about ten years to carry out this experiment, but they weren’t allowed to because cinemas boycotted their films if they did anything like that,” says David Hancock, a film analyst at Omdia. “They’ve been making up for ten years worth of experimentation that they couldn’t do.”

While these experiments have yielded different results for different films – Greyhound did well, Raya and the Last Dragon flopped – there’s been a clear takeaway. Hollywood still needs cinemas, and it needs us to return in our droves as they reopen across the world. Omdia’s research shows that video on demand claimed $1 billion in consumer spending globally in 2020, which pales in comparison to the $30bn lost by cinema over the same period.

For big blockbusters, streaming simply cannot match theatres. The new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, is instructive here. The film, to be distributed by MGM in America and Universal in the rest of the world, has been postponed repeatedly because of the pandemic. In October 2020, rumours (which MGM denied) began to circulate that the studio was shopping the film around to streaming platforms for $600m; no one bought it, explains Hancock, because it was way too expensive. It’s questionable whether streaming will ever bring in enough revenue to make blockbusters like Bond, which

could gross more than a billion dollars, a viable proposition.

The rise of Netflix, then, has warped the media industry, and forced major studios to adopt a business model that, at the very least, has some question marks over its longterm viability. Tara Lachapelle at Bloomberg, for instance, calls it “fundamentally broken”. “Spend billions of dollars to create an endless supply of content, then sell monthly access to this deluxe all-you-can-eat buffet for little more than the cost of dinner at McDonald’s.”

One long-term change we may see as a result of the pandemic is in the length of release windows. Both Paramount and Warner Bros. have announced a maximum of 45-days exclusivity for cinemas – half the typical 90 – going into 2022. This is a coup for studios. “Other than stuff like The Greatest Showman, most films make 80 per cent of their box office in the first three weeks, and then they’re gone,” says Kathryn Jacobs, CEO of cinema advertising company Pearl and Dean.

Streaming will also continue to change the industry profoundly, particularly as companies like Netflix and Amazon finance more and more films for their platforms – Sony has agreed an exclusivity deal with the latter – and Disney continues to tinker with the most profitable way to release its films (Cruella, out next month, will come to Disney+ at the same time as cinemas). Release schedules will continue to be in flux. “Because people are working flexibly from home, perhaps they’ll go on a Wednesday, rather than wait and go on a Friday to a multiplex,” says Jacobs.

The billion-dollar question that remains, then, is whether there is an appetite for consumers to return post-pandemic. Will they fear catching some new variant of Covid-19, or have they gotten used to the convenience of home streaming? Or, perhaps, many will consider the cinema an unnecessary luxury in a time of economic recession. Early signs suggest not: Godzilla vs Kong has managed to rake in an impressive amount despite restrictions, while New York cinemas have reported sold-out seats (albeit at 25 per cent capacity).

Cinemas have been battered by the pandemic--forced to watch, helpless, as their streaming rivals have hoovered up tens of millions of new subscribers. But despite Hollywood experiments, the economics of huge blockbusters simply don’t work without your local multiplex. “First it was telly that was gonna kill us, then it was VHS, then it was having more than four television stations in the UK,” says Jacob. Like James Bond, the cinema industry refuses to die.

Will Bedingfield is a culture writer at WIRED. He tweets from @WillBedingfield

RichardTheBruce

April 19th

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.

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

See the complete article here:

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

- 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.

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

Philip Locke, actor

https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/philip-locke-actor-1-523590
Born: 29 March, 1928, in London
Died: 24 April, 2004, in London, aged 76

WITH his gaunt and invariably haggard looks, Philip Locke was ideal casting for nervy, rather saturnine villains, corrupt Mafia bosses or somewhat refined bullies. He brought an evil streak to his characters that brought them alive. However, this tall and imposing man also had a fine line in comedy.

His major cinema credit was as Vargas, the silent assassin who fell foul of James Bond’s spear-gun in Thunderball. His list of television credits was substantial and varied (The Avengers seemed to employ him as their resident baddie for a while) and he was often seen to great advantage in the theatre - especially London’s Royal Court in the Sixties.

Philip Locke trained at RADA in the Fifties and he was soon being cast in minor roles at the Royal Court, then soon to enter its golden decade. In 1959, he was in the premire of John Osborne’s The World of Paul Slickey, a musical satire about gossip columnists and critics. It was given a real pasting by the critics - indeed, Noel Coward and John Gielgud were said to have led the booing on the first night - but many still recall the satanic dance Locke performed in the second act.

From the Royal Court, he went on to play at the National Theatre and at the Royal Shakespeare Company (he was Quince in Brook’s famous Midsummer Night’s Dream). His career was to burgeon and Locke was seldom out of work: he played Horatio in Peter Hall’s production of Hamlet which opened the National Theatre in 1975 and four years later he was again directed by Hall in the premire of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. In the latter, he played Salieri’s valet and spent much of the time feeding Mozart cream buns.

Locke’s TV appearances never let up. He was much in demand for the fondly remembered Armchair Theatre plays and was often seen on the wrong side of the small screen’s best-known detectives, including Inspector Morse, Bergerac and Poirot. He also turned up in Minder, played a newspaper editor alongside Michael Caine in Jekyll and Hyde (LWT, 1990) and was a rather camp uncle in Jeeves and Wooster (Granada, 1993).

His most striking film appearance was undoubtedly in Thunderball (1965), in which he made a particularly sinister appearance in dark glasses and black polo-neck jumper. However, a few years later, he showed his lighter side in the movie version of Porridge. In a favourite scene, Ronnie Barker’s Fletcher asks how Locke can face the prison grub, and Locke laconically replies: "I was at a top English public school and the food was very similar."

Strangely, Locke was at only one Edinburgh Festival, in 1954, with the Old Vic Company in a star-studded production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Scottish National Orchestra was in the pit and Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann were to dance within the play. It was a bold plan to fuse music, drama and dance.

Locke played Puck and although Shearer, in an article in The Scotsman in 1976, recalled that Festival with "particular surprised pleasure" she did refer to the production as "rambling". However, it filled the Empire (now the Festival Theatre) to capacity.

Locke was always a support actor, never a major star, but he had the ability to bring a certain touch of wicked style or a chilling frisson to a role. The fact that he appeared in so many high-profile and prestigious productions in a career spanning 50 years is a sure reflection of the standing he enjoyed in his profession.

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/philip-locke-actor-1-523590

Philip Locke (1928–2004)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0516784/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

2006: Casino Royale 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: On-time release date for Daniel Craig's third Bond film. 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).
Aaron Campbell, artist. James Robinson, writer.

JAMES BOND: FELIX LEITER #4 (OF 6)

https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C72513025458004011
Cover A: Mike Perkins
Writer: James Robinson
Art: Aaron Campbell
Genre: Action/Adventure, Media Tie-In
Publication Date: April 2017
Format: Comic Book
Page Count: 32 pages
ON SALE DATE: 4/19

In the aftermath of a major terrorist attack in Tokyo by an Aum Shinrikyo-like cult, Felix Leiter finds himself unwittingly drawn into the investigation. And under the oversight of Tiger Tanaka-the Japanese James Bond-and with a squad of Tanaka's elite operatives, Leiter himself helps to bring down the cult's leader!

But now it's up to Leiter and Tanaka to work desperately against the clock: they must discover the secret of the cultist's deadly bio-weapon - especially if they're going to try and avert another terrorist attack!

2020: From Hawaii with love, Pierce Brosnan executes a GoldenEye watchalong as prompted by Esquire.

Pierce Brosnan Says He Would Return To James Bond As A Villain

See the complete article here:

https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a32205810/pierce-brosnan-would-return-to-james-bond-as-a-villain/

He revealed all in Esquire's live GoldenEye watchalong on Sunday night
By Nick Pope | 20/04/2020

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/bond-1587376445.png?resize=768:*
Getty Images

Pierce Brosnan has revealed he would be willing to return to the Bond series, but not as the iconic spy.

During Esquire’s live GoldenEye watchalong with the man himself last night (that’s us. We’re Esquire), the 66-year-old revealed to fans that he’d be up for making an appearance as a Bond villain.

Answering questions from his Hawaii home, Brosnan said: “Would [ I ] return as a villain? If asked, yes! I believe so.”

So there you have it! And it’s not too late to add him into No Time To Die in post-production, either. A cameo as a henchman? A computer hacker? Some kind of evil croupier? This is above our pay-grade, Fukunaga. Just make it happen.

Brosnan wore the blood-splattered tuxedo for seven years, his acclaimed tenure starting with 1995’s GoldenEye and finishing with 2002’s Die Another Day. He earned a Saturn Award nomination for his performance in the latter, but many critics were in agreement that the series as a whole would benefit from a shift in tone (away from invisible cars, crucially).

Not that Brosnan is bitter. Elsewhere in the livestream, he spoke of his admiration for Daniel Craig, who is departing the franchise following No Time To Die. He also opined on whether 007 should ever have a beard (a very firm "No") and delved into the Tarantino X Brosnan spy thriller that never was.

Better still:
https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a32205182/best-anecdotes-moments-pierce-brosnan-goldeneye-watchalong/

2021: Theater am Aegi, Hanover, Germany, presents The Music of James Bond and More.

THE MUSIC OF JAMES BOND
AND MORE

https://www.theater-am-aegi.de/termine/the-music-of-james-bond/
Montag, 19. April 2021 | Theater am Aegi
Einlass: 18:30 | Beginn: 19:30 Uhr

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’

See the complete article here:

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

- - -

Bruce Cabot (1904–1972)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0127677/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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.

http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/55935


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

Stålspionen (Steel Spy - Fear Face)

Danish 1973 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no25-1973/

James Bond Agent 007 no. 25:
“Fear Face” (1973)

1985: Billy Magnussen is born--Woodhaven, New York City, New York.
1985: Dali Benssalah is born--Rennes, France.
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.

1999: The World Is Not Enough films Electra's attempt to seduce OO7 following the avalanche.

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

See original article here:

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.

- - -

“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.”

Guy Hamilton (I) (1922–2016)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0357891/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3

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

See the complete article here:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/david-picker-dead-studio-chief-who-brought-bond-movies-dies-1203570

In 1969, at just 38, Picker became president and COO
of United Artists; he later ran Paramount and
Columbia.
https://static.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2019/04/picker-928x523.jpg

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.

- - -

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.

David V. Picker (1931–2019)

Producer | Miscellaneous Crew
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0681802/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

2020: Ronan O'Rahilly dies at age 79--County Louth, Ireland.
(Born 21 May 1940--Dublin, Ireland.)

Ronan O’Rahilly obituary: Founder of
Radio Caroline captured spirit of the
swinging 60s

See the complete article here:

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/ronan-o-rahilly-obituary-founder-of-radio-caroline-captured-spirit-of-the-swinging-60s-1.4242812

Dublin-born maverick who launched pirate station was son of 1916 rebel The O’Rahilly
Sat, May 2, 2020, 07:22

Ronan O’Rahilly, third from left, with former Caroline DJs Tony Blackburn, Tom Lodge, Johnnie Walker, Mike Ahern and Mark Sloane, on a visit to the Radio Caroline ship
at Canary Wharf, London, in 1997.
Photograph: Glen Copus/Evening Standard/Rex/Shutterstock

- - -

He also made Universal Soldier (1971), featuring George Lazenby as a mercenary in Africa. It came two years after Lazenby’s starring role as James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which not only flopped, but was notable for O’Rahilly having disastrously advised Lazenby – whom he managed – not to sign a seven-film deal because he doubted that the 007 craze would last.

- - -

Ronan O'Rahilly (1940–2020)

Producer | Director | Actor
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0642371/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

RichardTheBruce

April 21st

1962: The New Yorker publishes an interview with Ian Fleming.

The Talk of the Town

James Bond Comes to New York

See the complete article here:

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 strip 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 Semic Comic 1978 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1978.php3

Farligt Uppdrag: Dödens Dubbelgångare
("Dangerous Commission" - Double Jeopardy)

Danish 1972 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no24-1972/

James Bond Agent 007 no. 24: “Double Jeopardy” (1972)

1993: TBS starts James Bond Wednesday.

2010: British store HMV lists Blood Stone as coming soon.

UK retailer lists James Bond:
Bloodstone

See the complete article here:

https://www.gamesradar.com/uk-retailer-lists-james-bond-bloodstone/

By GamesRadar Staff April 21, 2010

Has HMV just revealed the name of the new Bond game?

Just yesterday EON Productions, producer of the James Bond films announced that it has indefinitely postponed all work on Bond 23 (which was slated for release in 2011/12). The delay comes after uncertainty surrounding the future of Hollywood studio MGM.

Well imagine our surprise then to discover thaT HMV is listing a new Bond game for pre-order: title, James Bond: Bloodstone. [sic]

Could this be the game that UK soap actor Adam Croadsell told the BBC he'd just played Bond in back in November last year? The game described as a third-person shooter with a mix of driving elements? The one that was previously leaked by UK retailers as being titled James Bond Racing?

If this all adds up, the delay of the film wouldn't likely affect the game production - if we believe Croadsell (and why would he make it up?) the game won't have anything to do with the film, and seems unlikely to feature the voice of current Bond, Daniel Craig.

Intiguingly, HMV are listing the game in the driving/racing section of the site, giving credence to the theory it will be a James Bond 'racing game' - but contradicting Croadsell's intel that it's a third-person shooter. Who's right?

Only time will tell.

Which would make a great name for a Bond film.

21 April 2010

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...

See the complete article here:

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.

2021: Casino Royale screens in Singapore theaters.

Casino Royale

https://www.allmovies.sg/movies/2160-casino-royale
PG | Action, Thriller

After becoming a 007 agent, James Bond hunts down a bomb maker in Madagascar, which leads him to shady financier Alex Dimitrios in the Bahamas, and then to a plot to blow up the prototype Skyfleet airliner at Miami Airport. Now on the verge of bankruptcy, Le Chiffre sets up a high-stakes poker game in Montenegro to win back the lost money. Bond attends with Treasury agent Vesper Lynd and wins, but Le Chiffre kidnaps Lynd and tortures Bond in an attempt to regain the winnings. They are saved when Mr White, a senior figure in terrorist organisation QUANTUM, kills Le Chiffre. In love with Lynd, Bond resigns from MI6 and travels to Venice with her. There, he realises she has betrayed him and stolen the money. A series of events ensues, culminating in Bond pursuing and shooting White, and then introducing himself: “The name’s Bond, James Bond”. _•

Not eligible for any discounts and/or vouchers. • Not valid with VIP and/or Complimentary Passes. • Not valid for purchase with HSBC Movie Card. _
---
21 April
Golden Village | 1.42km | Suntec
1830
Golden Village | 3.85km | VivoCity
1830, 2155

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. The same day, The Trustees of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation publish Bond Bound: Ian Fleming and the Art of Cover Design.

Ian Fleming and the art of book design

See the complete article here:

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

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 buildings of antiquity.
2015: After a scheduled break and minor knee surgery, Daniel Craig resumes filming at Pinewood Studios.

2020: Halle Berry shares the story about how James Bond star Pierce Brosnan saved her life.

When Pierce Brosnan saved Halle Berry from choking

See the complete article here:

https://www.outlookindia.com/new/images/newsscroll/logo.jpg

The News Scroll 22 April 2020 Last Updated at 2:20 pm | Source: IANS

Los Angeles, April 22 (IANS) Actress Halle Berry has shared that "James Bond" star Pierce Brosnan once saved her from choking while filming "Die Another Day".

She made the revelation when she appeared on "The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon", reports dailymail.co.uk.

"I was supposed to be all sexy, trying to seduce him with a fig, and then I end up choking on it and he had to get up and do the Heimlich," said the actress, who was seen as Jinx in 2002''s "Die Another Day".

"That was so not sexy. James Bond knows how to Heimlich! He was there for me, he will always be one of my favourite people in the whole world," added the 53-year-old.

Heimlich is a first-aid procedure to dislodge an obstruction from a person''s windpipe by applying strong pressure to the abdomen between the belly button and rib cage.

It was not the only accident that Berry faced. The actress suffered an injury during an action sequence, being shot in Spain, when debris from a smoke grenade stunt got lodged in her left eye.

Berry was last seen on the big screen in last year''s "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum" opposite Keanu Reeves. She will next be seen in "Bruised", a drama set in the world of mixed martial arts. She is directing the feature. The actress is also attached to star in a remake of the 1985 classic "Jagged Edge".

--IANS

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.

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

Hervé Villechaize (1943–1993)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0898199/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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

See the complete article here:

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: Die Another Day 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

See the complete article here:

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.

RichardTheBruce

April 24th

1946: Virginia North is born--London, England.
(She dies 5 June 2004 at age 58--West Sussex, England.)

Virginia North

See the entire article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_North

Born 24 April 1946 | London, England, United Kingdom
Died 5 June 2004 (aged 58) | East Sussex, England, United Kingdom
Nationality British | Occupation Actress | Years active 1967–1971]

Virginia North, Lady White (24 April 1946 – 5 June 2004) was an Anglo-American actress who appeared in small roles in five films and one TV programme between 1967 and 1971.

Life and career
Born Virginia Anne Northrop in London to a British mother and a U.S. Army father, North spent her early years in Britain, France, Southeast Asia and finally Washington, following her father's military postings. By the mid-1960s she had returned to Britain, where she worked as a model, specialising in swim wear. In 1968 she joined the newly established London agency Models 1, which has since gone on to become one of the major modelling agencies in Europe.

North began her brief film career with small parts in the Bulldog Drummond film Deadlier Than the Male (1967) and the Yul Brynner vehicle The Long Duel (1967). She returned to film two years later as Robot Number Nine in Some Girls Do (1969), the second in the Bulldog Drummond franchise, and as Olympe in two short scenes in the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), thus becoming a "Bond girl".

The 1969 Department S episode "The Mysterious Man in the Flying Machine" marked her only television appearance.

Her last and perhaps best-known role was as Vincent Price's silent assistant, the delectably deadly Vulnavia, in the horror comedy The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971).

Personal life
In 1974 North married the wealthy industrialist Gordon White. Later that year she gave birth to her only child, Lucas, who would later become a well-regarded polo player and one of the richest young men in the United Kingdom.[citation needed]

When her husband was awarded a KBE in 1979 for services to British industry, becoming Sir Gordon White, Virginia White became Virginia, Lady White. She and White were divorced in 1991. She never remarried and died at her home in West Sussex, England, in June 2004 after a two-year battle with cancer. She was 58.

Filmography

1967 Deadlier Than the Male (Brenda)
1967 The Long Duel (Champa)
1969 Some Girls Do (Robot No. 9)
1969 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Olympe)
1971 The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Vulnavia, final film role)

Virginia North (1946–2004)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0636075/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

2008: BOND 22 stops filming when Aris Cominos crashes an Alfa Romeo near Lake Garda, Limone sul Garda, northern Italy.

Stuntman injured on James Bond set

See the complete article here:

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2008/04/24/stuntman_injured_on_james_bond_set.htm

2011: The inaugural Boscobel Jamaica Air Show celebrates the recent opening of Ian Fleming International Airport, Boscobel, St. Mary.

http://jis.gov.jm/hundreds-at-ian-fleming-airport-air-show-2/

2018: Dynamite Entertainment releases their graphic novel James Bond: Casino Royale.
Ian Fleming, Van Jensen, writers. Dennis Calero, artist. Fay Dalton, cover.

Dynamite introduces James Bond to a new generation of
readers with graphic novel adaptation of Casino Royale

https://borg.com/2018/06/26/dynamite-introduces-james-bond-to-a-new-generation-of-readers-with-graphic-novel-adaptation-of-casino-royale/
Filed under: Comics & Books, Fantasy Realms, Retro Fix — Leave a comment
June 26, 2018

The world first met Ian Fleming’s James Bond with the release of the novel Casino Royale in 1953. That first Bond story would be adapted into a newspaper comic strip in the UK in 1958, followed by a film–a satirical comedy version–in 1967 starring David Niven, followed by a dramatic film version in 2006 starring Daniel Craig. But it’s the print comic version, the newspaper adaptation, that received a new retooling of sorts this year. Dynamite Comics tapped writer Van Jensen (Flash, The Six Million Dollar Man: Fall of Man), artist Dennis Calero (Masks, Kolchak), colorist Chris O’Halloran (Lockjaw, Black Panther), letterer Simon Bowland (Red Sonja, Judge Dredd), and vintage cover artist Fay Dalton (Worlds of Tomorrow) to deliver a 2018 update to Casino Royale for a new generation of readers. The result is a rich and elegant new look at Fleming’s first Bond adventure.

From the look of Bond’s classic 1933 Bentley to the French casino where much of the story happens, the tone, mood, and style is fresh while also nostalgic. Jensen balances the extensive dialogue from the original novel to avoid a graphic novel that is merely talking heads. He is most successful at having Bond explain the rules of Baccarat to the reader via a conversation at dinner with M’s assigned companion for him, Vesper Lynd. Calero’s Bond has the steely eyes of Michael Fassbender. At the card table we meet some doppelgangers in this reader’s eyes: Grace Kelly as the American film star, Barbara Bel Geddes as the rich American, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the DuPont heir, Emma Thompson as Mrs. DuPont, Julian Glover as the Belgian, Nigel Green as Lord Danvers, Pete Postlethwaite or Titos Vandis as the Greek. And in Le Chiffre we see a bit of Aleister Crowley (Fleming’s inspiration for the character) mixed with Orson Welles (who played him in the 1967 film), and a little JFK meets Brad Pitt for American CIA agent Felix Leiter.

O’Halloran’s minimalist use of color and Calero’s lack of background detail helps keep the reader engaged, and Calero’s work is particularly interesting visualizing Bond’s thoughts in a way that evokes a Bill Sienkiewicz style. The characters are not reminiscent of actors who have portrayed them previously, leaving readers to experience this version of Casino Royale without any preconceptions, although this version may make fans of the original films wonder how Sean Connery would have played Bond in this tale. The various lettering styles required of the text give more significance to Bowland’s part in telling the story, and O’Halloran’s colors definitely evoke a 1950s world.

Here are some pages from Dynamite’s Casino Royale: [Below]

An appendix includes a behind-the-scenes peek at the script and artwork behind Dynamite’s graphic novel, plus a rundown of all the titles from Dynamite that have carried James Bond in new directions: Kill Chain, Felix Leiter, Hammerhead, Black Box, Eidolon, and Vargr.

For $75, tomorrow a special limited edition of Dynamite’s Casino Royale graphic novel will be available with a tipped-in sheet signed and remarked with a James Bond head sketch by artist Dennis Calero, or for $49.99 you can get a hardcover version with a tipped-in sheet signed by writer Van Jensen. Both of these are only available on order from your local comic book store. Or order a copy of the standard version of the hardcover from your comic shop. The standard hardcover is also available here at Amazon. This looks to be the first of what may be many new graphic novel adaptations of Fleming’s original stories from Dynamite.

C.J. Bunce
Editor
borg.com

Atlanta comics writer Van Jensen takes
James Bond back to the beginning with
“Casino Royale”

See the complete article here:

https://www.artsatl.org/atlanta-comics-writer-van-jensen-takes-james-bond-beginning-casino-royale/

Curt Holman | April 24, 2018

The title You Only Live Twice actually underestimates the number of James Bond’s many lives. Ian Fleming wrote 14 Bond books, and 007 has been played by no fewer than seven actors in 25 films, in addition to appearing in countless satires, follow-up books by various authors, video games and now — a graphic novel.

Atlanta-based comics writer Van Jensen views the many different sides of Bond with an expert eye. Growing up in Western Nebraska, he became interested in the film series as a 13-year-old when GoldenEye was released in 1995. “My cousin and I decided to track down all the Bond movies and watch them in order,” Jensen says. “The Roger Moore ones were my favorite. Growing up in the middle of nowhere, I found them so colorful, so over the top, so absurd; it was a pure escapism that really resonated.”

https://www.artsatl.org/wp-content/uploads/VanJensen-683x1024.jpg
Atlanta-based comics writer Van Jensen says he’s been a James Bond fan
ever since he came across the films while growing up in Nebraska.
(Holly Renee 2018)

He acknowledges that Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, which introduced the Bond character in 1953 and which Jensen has adapted into a new graphic novel, is a strikingly different work. “You can’t get much more different than a Roger Moore Bond film like Octopussy and the novel Casino Royale,” he says. “There’s barely a connection beyond the name James Bond.”

Alongside Dennis Calero’s artwork, Jensen strove to retain the seedy cynicism of Fleming’s original book, which bears few traces of the film series’ escapist spectacle. “The gadgets, the action set pieces, the femme fatales, the quips and puns, the novel has pretty much none of that,” Jensen says. “It’s a relatively bleak, fairly slow-moving examination of someone who’s seen the horrors of WWII, survived and entered a new world that’s kind of dangerous and broken.”

The book introduces Bond at the titular French casino, on a mission to bankrupt a cash-strapped criminal and spy called Le Chiffre at the baccarat table, with assistance from the CIA’s Felix Leiter and the ambiguous British agent Vesper Lynd. Calero’s spare, moody art feels more faithful to the book’s noir influences than the films’ globetrotting glamour.

Jensen broke into comics writing with his original series Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer and has written for established superheroes such as The Flash and The Green Lantern Corps. In the early 2010s, Dynamite Entertainment attained the rights to publish new James Bond comics, and Jensen pitched some ideas for Bond stories. While those didn’t pan out, Dynamite came back to Jensen with the notion of adapting Casino Royale.

Jensen’s concepts had to meet the approval of not just the publisher but the Ian Fleming estate, which had very specific requirements for the book. “The sort of marching orders were, ‘This needs to be as close to the original as possible.’ No updating baccarat, no new set pieces, and much of Fleming’s original lines. It was a challenging gig; lots of text doesn’t make for good comics.”

He struck a particularly careful balancing act with the book’s treatment of women. In the adaptation as in the original, Bond reflects that “women were for recreation,” and at one point his assistant Mathis describes Vesper as having “splendid, er, protuberances back and front.”

Jensen did not want to gloss over the book’s sexism and misogyny. “Even if you approach it from a dumb, masculine vantage point, there’s nothing sexy about it; it’s just clueless and gross,” he says. “I don’t buy into saying ‘Well, that was a different era’ as a blanket protection of crappy behavior. Instead, let’s use it as a conversation starter. There’s a lot of James Bond that’s toxic masculinity wrapped up in a tuxedo. I think we can go back and say, the character is what he is, but he’s not what you should want to be. If you read the book, I trust that the last thing you should want is to be anything like James Bond.”

He admits there were parts of the original that crossed a line for him. “I gave [the Fleming estate] three things from the novel that were grossly misogynist. I said, ‘I just can’t write this. I can’t have my name on these phrases.’ And they were like, ‘Please cut that.’”

The need to hew close to the source material, as well as the book’s sexual anxieties, led to one of Jensen’s favorite sequences, set in a hospital after Le Chiffre has tortured Bond with a carpet beater. “Bond has had his nuts pummeled and is laid up in a hospital bed for two chapters,” says Jensen. “The least visually interesting thing is someone sitting in hospital bed, talking to people. The narration has this really deep dive into his doubt and fear that he will be impotent. I asked myself, ‘What in God’s name can I do? I can’t just leave him sitting there!’”

Jensen’s solution was to design a two-page spread with Bond’s interior monologue in word balloons and a close-up of his eyes superimposed over the technical schematics of his signature handgun – the symbol of his masculinity literally dismantled. “It’s an example of when you have really strict narrative restraints, it spurs creativity. And that’s an example of how comics can do things that other media can’t. That’s my favorite part of the whole book, and one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.”

Jensen has already written the script for Fleming’s follow-up, Live and Let Die, which he describes as having more action that fits with film-fan expectations. Illustration hasn’t begun, so he can’t predict a publication date, but he says that soon enough he will have Bond returning to Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

https://www.firstcomicsnews.com/james-bond-casino-royale-preview/

2021: A seminar at Institut für England- und Amerikastudien (Institute for English and American Studies), Frankfurt, addresses For Your Eyes Only? James Bond in the Times of Black Lives Matter. (Homework: For Your Eyes Only, Skyfall, Spectre.)

For Your Eyes Only?James Bond in the Times of
Black Lives Matter

See the complete article here:

https://moodle.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/moodle/enrol/index.php?id=1257

Trainer/in: Prof. Dr. Karin Ikas

Zugeordnete Person Zuständigkeit
Ikas, Karin, Apl. Prof. Dr. verantwortlich
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien

Veranstaltungsart:
Hauptseminar ('Advanced Seminar') als Blockveranstaltung
Bem. zu Zeit und Ort

Sessions take place as follows:
Intro Session: Monday, 12 April 2021 (18-21 o’clock)
Block Session I: Saturday, 24 April 2021 (10-16 o’clock, ZOOM 10-13 o’clock)
Block Session II: Saturday, 15 May 2021 (10-16 o’clock, ZOOM 10-13 o’clock)
Block Session III: Saturday, 12 June 2021 (10-16 o’clock, ZOOM 10-13 o’clock)

Kommentar
“For Your Eyes Only” is the title and theme song of the 1981 spy film starring Roger Moore as James Bond, which, in turn, is the altogether 12th film in the James Bond Series produced by Eon Productions. It marked a significant change towards more credible film plotlines and more realistic geo-political issues, yet raised questions about Bond’s white (male) gaze, the limited role of the Bond girl and the audience’s viewing perspective. Now, 40 years later, the release of the 25th film in the James Bond Series entitled No Time to Die, has been postponed twice and rumors about the reshooting of scenes due to outdated electronic gadgets make headlines. Yet, is it only electronic and digital innovations that the producers should keep in mind in this context? How about modifications due to (recent) socio-political movements like Black Lives Matter with their continued call for anti-discriminative treatments of people of all wakes of life, irrespective of color, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc.? Whose ‘eyes’ and perspectives have the producers of the earlier as well as the later James Bond movies primarily focused on and transferred to the audience in the past and nowadays?

This seminar takes a critical look at these challenging issues in the James Bond film franchise with a particular focus on For His Eyes Only and the James Bond films of the New Millennium, starring Daniel Craig as fictional MI6 agent 007. We study heroism and villainy and analyze intersections with gender, class, place, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Furthermore, we discuss the popular cultural impact of the Bond films in past and present.

Participants are encouraged to add their voices to the ongoing debates and to contribute different media samples that are relevant to the topics being discussed and appropriate in light of academic and educational purposes.

Literatur
Primary and secondary works:
Participants need to familiarize themselves with the movies For Your Eyes Only (1981), Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2016) during the semester break.

A reader with relevant critical texts will be available at the local copy shop Script & Copy.
Voraussetzungen

Please note that the seminar will be taught online via Zoom and Moodle. All students must be registered for this class and also need to register with Moodle: https://moodle.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/moodle/

RichardTheBruce

April 25th

1964: 007 ロシアより愛をこめて (007 Roshia yoriaiwokomete, 007 Russia With More Love) released in Japan.

1969 [actual date unknown]: Bond on holiday is taken for a ride in Draco's Rolls Royce across Ponte 25 de Abril (25 April Bridge) near Lisbon, Portugal.

James Bond Locations
https://jamesbondlocations.blogspot.com/2016/05/ponte-25-de-abril-lisbon.html
18 May 2016
Ponte 25 de Abril - Lisbon



In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond is holidaying on the Portuguese riviera, in Estoril. As Bond is abducted by Draco's men at the Hotel Palacio and taken to Draco, Draco's Rolls Royce is seen driving across the famous Ponte 25 de Abril (25 April Bridge) just outside of Lisbon. The action is likely supposed to be set on the French Riviera, but all action was shot on location in Portugal. Not much is made to get the audience to believe that you are in France.


Ponte 25 de abril with the Cristo Rei statue in the bcakground



The bridge is called Ponte 25 de Abril, and is connecting the city of Lisbon to the municipality of Almada on the south bank of the Tejo river. Tejo river forms the large bay which banks Lisbon is situated on. The city is vaguely visible in the background as Bond is driven across the bridge.

Driving across this bridge, coming from Lisbon, is a great experience and definitely a must see location if you are visiting Lisbon.


The city of Lisbon seen in the background

"-And where is the party this time?
-You have an appointment...
-Business or pleasure?"

Another landmark that gives away this location in the film, is the statue of Christ that can be seen in the far background, as the Rolls Royce is driving out on the bridge. This monument, known as Cristo Rei in Portuguese, was inspired by the more famous statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro and was inaugurated in 1959 following the approval of Salazar. You have a magnificent view over both Ponte 25 de Abril and the city of Lisbon from the viewpoint below this statue in Almada, which is only a 20 min drive from central Lisbon. The view over Lisbon both from the bridge and from the viewpoint is beautiful.




Lisbon can be seen in the background on the right side of the bridge.

The 25 April bridge was inaugurated in 1966, and was thus almost brand new at the time of filming On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The bridge was originally called Salazar Bridge, named after the Portuguese prime minister and dictator António de Oliveira Salazar who ruled Portugal between 1932 and 1968. Following the carnation revolution on 25 April 1974, which ultimately led to a free and democratic Portugal, the name of the bridge was changed to Ponte 25 de Abril.

The bridge would also feature during one of the final scenes in the film as Bond and Tracy are driving away from their wedding reception towards Tracy's inevitable death.

2002: BOND 20 films Gustav Graves revealing his Icarus satellite.

2017: A Fleming-inspired competition to propose a 27th letter for the English alphabet closes this date.

Typography |

Could you be the designer behind the 27th
letter of the alphabet?

See the complete article here:

https://www.creativebloq.com/news/the-search-is-on-for-the-undiscovered-27th-letter-of-the-alphabet

By Dom Carter March 01, 2017 Typography

A competition conceived by Ian Fleming is looking for typographers to create a new letter design.

When he wasn't busy penning James Bond novels, Ian Fleming also experimented with typography. In fact, in 1947, while helping out at the typographical magazine Alphabet & Image, he hit on the idea of a competition that called for designers to create a 27th letter of the alphabet. Now, 70 years later, the contest is being run again in connection with The Book Collector.

The 2017 competition will follow Ian Fleming's original rules, namely that the experimental design must conform to the alphabet as known in English-writing countries, and that it must represent a recognised sound or combination of sounds. In terms of design, entrants must also demonstrate decorative, philological and typographical skill.

• A designer's guide to typography and fonts
• https://www.thebookcollector.co.uk/the-27th-letter

James Fleming, Ian's nephew, says: “I was intrigued to hear about the alphabet competition and I thought it was a good idea to give this another go. Creative heads don't need a professional qualification in order to enter. Anyone with an idea as to how the English language could be improved in a way that complies with the competition rules can take part.

"Last time submissions included '-sion', 'th' and 'st', but alternatives are yours to explore. Given that most people embrace the fast-moving world of social media, perhaps this time the new letter will become part of the alphabet."

Full rules and conditions can be found at The Book Collector, with the competition running from 15 March to 25 April 2017. The winner will be announced at the ABA Olympia Book Fair on 2 June, with a £250 cash prize up for grabs.
https://www.thebookcollector.co.uk/27th-letter-results

27th Letter results
https://www.thebookcollector.co.uk/27th-letter-results

2019: A BOND 25 press event in Jamaica reveals cast and plot details.

RichardTheBruce

April 26th

1941: Claudine Oger (Auger) is born--Paris, France.
(She dies 19 December 2019--Paris, France.)

Claudine Auger, James Bond’s First
French Co-Star, Dies at 78

See the complete article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/movies/claudine-auger-dead.html

“Thunderball” was her breakthrough, and she went on to appear
in movies with Alain Delon and Giancarlo Giannini. But
Hollywood stardom eluded her.

Claudine Auger in London in 1968. She was a star in Europe, but her American projects
were few and far between.Credit...Dove/Daily Express, via Getty Images

By Anita Gates | Published Dec. 22, 2019 | Updated Dec. 23, 2019

Claudine Auger, Sean Connery’s co-star in Thunderball and the first French actress to play James Bond’s love interest, died on Wednesday in Paris. She was 78.

Her death was confirmed by the Parisian agency Time Art, which represented her.

Ms. Auger (pronounced oh-JHAY) was 24 when Thunderball, the fourth film in the long-running Bond franchise, was released in 1965. Her character, Domino, is the mistress of an evil mastermind who has stolen two nuclear warheads — and killed her brother. Domino does not hold back when exacting revenge on her former lover. (A harpoon gun is involved.)

Because she spoke English with a heavy accent, Ms. Auger’s voice was dubbed by another actress. But because she was an excellent swimmer, she did her own underwater scenes in the film, which was shot largely in the Bahamas.

- - -

When, during a 1965 interview, the American gossip columnist Dorothy Manners announced, “Hollywood could use you,” Ms. Auger answered cheerfully, “Not as much as I can use Hollywood.” But a couple of decades later, she had reconsidered.

“French actresses have never had much success in Hollywood,” she observed in a 1986 Los Angeles Times interview, adding that Germans and Swedes had done better but that “it’s hard to explain why.”

Still, she was fond of Southern California. In the same interview, she said, “I always go to the end of Santa Monica Pier and throw a coin in the Pacific” at the end of a visit — to ensure her return.

She was born Claudine Oger in Paris on April 26, 1941, the daughter of an architect. At 17, she was crowned Miss France Monde and was first runner-up in the Miss World competition.

She had a modeling career and played an uncredited role in a 1959 Jean Cocteau film, “Le Testament d’Orphée” (“The Testament of Orpheus”). (Almost everyone in the film, with the exception of Cocteau himself, was uncredited.) After that experience, she studied drama at the Conservatoire de Paris.

Ms. Auger’s first credited film role was in Marcel Carné’s “Terrain Vague” (1960), or “Wasteland,” about a teenage street gang in Paris. Her final screen appearance was in a 1997 television movie version of Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le Noir” (“The Red and the Black”), playing Madame de Fervaques, an elegant widow who receives love letters from a younger man.

She and Pierre Gaspard-Huit, a director and writer 25 years her senior — he had cast her in her first uncredited film role, in the romance “Christine” (1958) — were married in 1959, when she was 18. They divorced a decade later. In 1984 she married Peter Brent, a British businessman, who died in 2008. They had a daughter, Jessica Claudine Brent, who survives her.

In a 1965 television interview, Ms. Auger spoke the words that became her most famous quotation. Asked the difference between acting in a James Bond movie and in classic theater by Molière, she insisted there was none. Acting was “un jeu,” and the two forms were “la même chose,” she said. A game. The same thing.

Claudine Auger (1941–2019)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000805/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

1965: James Bond Contra Goldfinger (James Bond vs. Goldfinger) released in Madrid, Spain.

1965: Thunderball films OO7 at Largo's Palmyra estate, Rock Point, Bahamas.

1974: Ivana Milicevic is born--Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1978: Stana Katic is born--Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

2005: The New York Post says Judi Dench says Pierce Brosnan will return as Bond. That's after The Sun reports Daniel Craig is cast.

Bond Watch: Dame Judi Dench hints at
Brosnan return

See the complete article here:

https://www.screendaily.com/bond-watch-dame-judi-dench-hints-at-brosnan-return/4022817.article

By Diana Lodderhose27 April 2005

The new James Bond film, Casino Royale, is scheduled to shoot at the end of 2005 - although it is still uncertain who will play 007 in the film.

With ongoing rumours circulating throughout the media world, it can be difficult to keep tabs on the latest information. Here, ScreenDaily.com alleviates some of the confusion by offering an up-to-date look at 007's status in the press.

April 26
Dame Judi Dench has let it slip that Pierce Brosnan will be returning to the Bond role for the new film. Dench, who was promoting her new film, Ladies in Lavender, told New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams that despite all of the rumours in the media, there will be no new Bond for Casino Royale.

She said: "Despite the fact that everyone on the face of the earth has been tested as his (Brosnan's) possible replacement, he'll be doing it again, and it'll be announced come summer."

Dench has played the role of M, James Bond's boss, for the last four Bond films.

April 18
Pierce Brosnan will not be returning to screens for the new Bond film Casino Royale.

Over the weekend, TheObserver newspaper reported that Brosnan is not one of the contenders for the new 007 picture.

"We haven't even started preproduction," a spokesperson told The Observer. "There is no James Bond yet cast. All we can confirm is that it definitely will not be Pierce Brosnan, the film will be called Casino Royale, it is being written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and it will be directed by Martin Campbell. If you want anything more, ring back in a couple of months."

A spokesperson for producers Eon Productions later confirmed to Screen Daily.com that Brosnan will not be playing Bond.

April 6
The Sun newspaper says that Road to Perdition and Layer Cake star Daniel Craig had been asked to takeover from Pierce Brosnan as the spy in three films.

April 5:
Reports of Pierce Brosnan returning for the role are floating around the internet. Despite the actor previously saying he will not play 007 again, sites such as Darkhorizons.com insist that Sony bosses are eager for him to star in one more film. There is speculation that Brosnan and Bond production outfit Eon are simply involved in hard negotiations or a 'poker game', similar to the one played out regularly between Cubby Broccoli and Roger Moore - who frequently announced he wouldn't return as Bond. Sony is said to be keen for Brosnan to return, as the company is not willing to take a chance with a new actor.

April 3:
The UK's Sunday Express and the Sunday Star report that "inside sources" reveal that Eon and Sony have reached an agreement for Clive Owen to be the next James Bond. The Express runs a picture of Owen with the roulette wheel from Croupier while the Star shows Owen wearing a tuxedo and smoking.

The Italian media runs similar stories suggesting Clive Owen as the next Bond.

2011: Hodder & Stoughton and Bentley Motors offer a pre-order of their limited special edition of Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver, to be published in May.

Bentley Motors Creates Luxury Limited Edition
New James Bond Book Carte Blanch - Web
Exclusive

See the complete article here:

http://www.superstreetonline.com/features/news/epcp-1104-bentley-luxury-limited-edition-james-bond-book-carte-blanche

Apr 29, 2011

Bentley Luxury Limited Edition James Bond Book Carte Blanche

To celebrate the release of Carte Blanche, the new James Bond book by Jeffery Deaver, on May 26 2011, publisher Hodder & Stoughton has partnered with Bentley Motors to create an exclusive Bentley special edition: the ultimate luxury edition of the highly anticipated new James Bond adventure. The 500 limited edition copies are available for pre-order from today, Tuesday 26 April 2011, exactly a month before publication date. Huge worldwide demand is anticipated for this new special edition after Bentley’s collaborative bespoke book for the previous Bond novel, Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks, sold out within days.

Ian Fleming always admired the stately beauty of the Bentley and, as a result, James Bond owned three Bentleys over the course of the 14 original Bond novels. In Carte Blanche, award-winning thriller writer Jeffery Deaver reunites Bond with this classic marque. In this contemporary adventure, the agent will be behind the wheel of the beautifully sculpted and sophisticated new Bentley Continental GT.

The design team at Bentley worked closely with Hodder & Stoughton to capture the spirit of Bond and Bentley. A team of seven designers submitted proposals for the edition and the final design came from Bentley Senior Designer Brett Boydell. He comments: “As a designer it doesn’t get much better than a brief of Carte Blanche! The design features radical concepts that we feel reflect the name of the book, the ideas inherent in the Bond legacy, and the design principles we are passionate about.”

This special edition links the legendary hero with the iconic automobile in the most spectacular way. Each copy of the special edition is custom-produced to Bentley’s exacting standards and arrives inside a stunning metal case. The result is a striking and unique collector’s item. The special edition is strictly limited to 500 copies worldwide at a price of £1,000 each. They will be available to pre-order worldwide through www.007carteblanchebentley.com. The editions will be delivered after publication date.

The Design:
The case of the Bentley special edition is inspired by the deserts of Dubai – one of the exotic locations Bond finds himself in within the new novel – and the new Bentley Continental GT, Bond’s car of choice in the book.

Like the exterior of the GT, the case is made from polished aluminum, giving it a seamless and aerodynamic shape. More sculpture than car, it evokes the GT’s signature outline, its metal skin making it look like the car has risen from the desert sand. To ensure the finished case meet Bentley’s renowned standards of quality, an automotive supplier was employed to create the case to automotive standards using a specially commissioned machine.

In deference to the title Carte Blanche, the book itself is bound in white Nappa leather, the same outstanding grade of leather used in a Bentley’s interior, mimicking the interior of the GT with its contrast of white leather trim and Pillar Box red edging. The title, author’s name and the familiar wings of the Bentley logo are carefully embossed into the front and foil-blocked onto the spine. The text is printed in two colors, black and red, on sumptuous ivory paper, with endpapers of a matching red leather. The pages are expertly cut and trimmed to reflect the handcrafted techniques of the Bentley construction process. As with the other details of the special edition, the colors are carefully selected from the Bentley range. The book sits on a base of black anodized aluminum, chosen not to mark the white leather.

In one last twist, playing on the idea of an agent being given Carte Blanche, is one of the most dramatic features of the design: a die-cut bullet hole that pierces pages of the book. Hidden within the pages is a single polished 9mm bullet, individually marked with a number distinct to each copy, making the edition truly unique.

Brett Boydell adds: “Bond destroys as well as he creates and saves. It was this element I needed to convey in my design. The reader has the excitement of finding the bullet housed in the centre of the pages with the text positioned so that the reading experience is undisturbed. I hope they find the book as exciting to hold and look at as the unfolding drama itself.”

2019: Bond Fan Events kicks off four days of Viva Vegas, Mr Bond!

BondFanEvents.com

2019: Viva Vegas, Mr Bond!
******
http://bondfanevents.com/2019-viva-vegas-mr-bond/
Locations – Lifestyle – Laughter – Viva Vegas, Mr Bond!, April 2019
**Bond With Fans!**
Join 2019’s Bond Fan Conference:
Viva Vegas, Mr Bond!

25-April Thursday
9 AM 007 Welcome Brunch, at ARIA
1:30 PM Tiffany? Tom Ford? The Shops at Crystals
2 PM Belvedere Cliffhangers, at Skybar
5 PM Group Gastropub, at Umami Burger and Biergarten
7 PM Sunset Sightseeing, at Stratosphere Las Vegas
9 PM – ? A View to a Kill from the 108th floor, at Airbar

Tour 40 Vegas Hot Spots from
Diamonds Are Forever and Ian Fleming!

26-April Friday
8:45 AM 007 Locations Tour, “Las Vegas is Forever”
1:30 PM Luncheon Break
2 PM 007 Locations Tour, “Nevada is Forever”
7:30 PM Raise a glass to The Brozza over dinner, at Rí Rá Irish Pub
9 PM – ? Let it Crumble, at Skyfall Lounge

Go Through the Gun Barrel with 007,
Fast and Louche!

27-April Saturday
10:30 AM Coffee Talk With Q, at The Luxor’s Atrium Starbucks
12 PM Green Eggs and Ham Luncheon, at Bruxie’s
1:30 PM Free Time with Fans, in The Silver City
5 PM Two Hundred on the Hard Way: Learn and Play Roulette, Hold ‘Em and Baccarat at The Palazzo
6 PM Dine Another Day, at Grand Lux Café
8:07 PM 007 Madmen Tour: Moonraker Gondoliers,
Mme Tussaud’s, Casino Royale, Party at The Paris
11 PM – ? We’ll Have Our Six (Vespers), at The Cosmopolitan

Locations – Lifestyle – Laughter

28-April Sunday
9 AM Brunch Like Bond, Champagne Unlimited, at Sterling Buffet
** Celebrating 22 Years of Bonding With Fans **

Viva Vegas, Mr Bond! is $455 U.S. per person, including four nights/five days at The Luxor Las Vegas (double occupancy)

Ask about our roommate matching service, to save money in a double, triple or quad room!

Tours alone price/reserve your own Las Vegas lodging: $95

Itinerary subject to change. Sign up today, Mr and Mrs Bond!

Viva Vegas, Mister Bond! is sponsored by Spybrary. http://spybrary.com/

Bonding fans together. Over 20 years of events and tours.

2019: Loop reports 500 Jamaicans will work on the new James Bond movie.

500 Jamaicans to work on James Bond
film

See the complete article here:

https://www.loopjamaica.com/content/500-jamaicans-work-james-bond-film

Loop News Created : 26 April 2019 | Jamaica News

Producers Michael G Wilson, left, and Barbara Broccoli, right,
pose for photographers with actor Daniel Craig during the photo call
of the latest installment of the James Bond film franchise,
currently known as Bond 25 in St Mary. (AP Photo)

Some 500 Jamaicans are expected to participate in the production of the 25th James Bond Film, which was announced on Thursday at the Ian Fleming property, GoldenEye in Oracabessa, St Mary.

The roles will include key production and technical personnel as well as extras and walk-ons.

Film Commissioner Renee Robinson has estimated that the economic impact of the film will be significant, with production expenditure multiplying throughout the economy – from hotel rooms to catering, in both goods and services.

“This will be a bumper year for the contribution of the creative economy to local GDP, and of course, we expect (and are ready for) more large scale productions, both local and international, to film on the island in the coming years,” Robinson said.

She added: It has been several months behind the scenes of scouting, meetings, negotiations, and planning – with our local production personnel working beside the international crews to confirm the location and ensure that production starts smoothly."

Actress Lea Seydoux, from left, director Cary Joji Fukunaga, actors
Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Naomie Harris and Lashana Lynch pose for photographers
during the photo call of the latest installment of the James Bond film franchise,
currently known as Bond 25, in Oracabessa, St Mary. (AP: Photo)

James Bond producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli confirmed at the film’s media launch, that the start of principal photography on the project begins on Sunday.

"We’re thrilled to return to Jamaica with Bond 25, Daniel Craig’s fifth instalment in the 007 series, where Ian Fleming created the iconic James Bond character and Dr No and Live And Let Die were filmed,” the producers said.

According to the film commissioner, the Bond film has added to the island’s recent uptick in the production of screen-based content, which she said was based on Jamaica’s rising profile and readiness for business with the global film industry.

The Jamaican film industry is undergoing a renaissance, having also seen recent success for local productions including Storm Saulter’s, “Sprinter” and Kia Moses’ short film, “Flight”; and Idris Elba’s directorial debut “Yardie”, according to Robinson.

Robinson

From Albert R. Broccoli’s EON Productions and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, the 25th James Bond Film is to be directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and stars Daniel Craig, who returns for his fifth film as Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007.

Craig will be joined by Naomie Harris and Lashana Lynch, both of Jamaican descent.

The 007 production will be based at Pinewood Studios in the UK, and on location in London, Italy, Jamaica and Norway.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer will release the 25th James Bond feature film domestically through their United Artists Releasing banner on April 8, 2020; through Universal Pictures International and Metro Goldwyn Mayer in the UK and internationally from April 3, 2020.

The filming of the Bond25 film was fully supported by Jamaica's Government, and is a collaborative effort of the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), JAMPRO/ Jamaica Film Commission, the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Fisheries (MICAF), the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport (MCGES), the Ministry of Tourism (MOT), the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB), the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service, and partners at UDC, NWA, JDF, JCF, Municipal Parish Councils, the Ministry of National Security, Firearm Licensing Authority, Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority, Jamaica Customs Agency, Airports Authority of Jamaica, Port Authority of Jamaica, Passport, Immigration & Citizenship Agency (PICA), and more.

2021: Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum host Lockdown Lectures: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming as a talk broadcast 7pm BST (2pm EST), followed by discussion with Christopher Moran. Recorded to be available on demand.

Lockdown Lectures: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming

See the complete article here:
Talk Broadcast: 7pm, 26 April 2021 - Followed by Live Q&A with Christopher Moran

https://www.sofo.org.uk/whats-on/lockdownlectureianfleming/

Uncover The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, best known as the author of the James Bond novels, with Dr. Christopher Moran. Christopher Moran is a specialist in the work of British and American secret services and has worked as historical consultant to the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. and is co-editor of the Journal of Intelligence History.

What role did Ian Fleming really play in British intelligence operations during WW2 and after? What impact did he have on US intelligence during the Cold War, and how was his fictional spy, James Bond, viewed by those conducting real spy work?

Reveal the answers to all this and more by watching the talk when it's broadcast at 7pm on 26 April 2021, and join in with the live Q&A session with Christopher Moran right after. See embeded Vimeo feed below (Google Chrome recommended for best viewing experience). An archived version of the Lecture, including highlights from the Q&A, will also be made available here shortly after the live event has ended.

If you enjoy the lecture, please consider a donation to the Museum -
we are currently unable to open to visitors under lockdown restrictions
and need your support now more than ever.

Thank you.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/536251555

RichardTheBruce

April 27th

1935: Nikki van der Zyl is born--Berlin, Germany.
(She dies 6 March 2021 at age 85--London, England.)

Nikki van der Zyl

See the complete article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikki_van_der_Zyl

Van der Zyl in 2013

Born: Monica van der Zyl - 27 April 1935 - Berlin, Germany
Died: 6 March 2021 (aged 85) - London, England, UK
Occupation Voice-over artist
Years active 1956–1980

Monica "Nikki" van der Zyl (27 April 1935 – 6 March 2021) was a German voice-over artist based in the United Kingdom, known for her dubbing work on the James Bond film franchise.

Early life
Nikki van der Zyl was born on 27 April 1935 in Berlin, the daughter of Anneliese and Rabbi Dr. Werner van der Zyl.

Career
As a voice-over artist, she provided the voice of the characters of Honey Rider (Ursula Andress) and Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson), as well as several other minor female characters, in Dr. No. Van der Zyl also provided dialogue coaching to Gert Fröbe, whose English was limited, for the movie Goldfinger and continued to work as a voice-over artist for the series until Moonraker. She worked as an artist, poet and public speaker.

In January 2013, van der Zyl published her book, For Your Ears Only, which was translated into German for a 2015 release in Germany. In November 2013, an exhibition called "Night Flight to Berlin" opened in the Museum Pankow in Berlin and ran until April 2014. The exhibition highlighted stages in van der Zyl's life from her childhood days to the Bond films and her work as a barrister and political correspondent in London.[citation needed]

On 20 September 2014, she was a special guest star at a 50th anniversary screening of Goldfinger in Braunschweig, Germany where she was awarded Honorary Membership of the James Bond Club Deutschland e.V. for her contribution to the James Bond film series.
https://www.thebondbulletin.com/goldfinger-screening-in-braunschweig-a-glamorous-anniversary-event/

Death
Van der Zyl died on 6 March 2021 in London, aged 85.

Filmography

James Bond films
Dr. No (1962; dubbed Ursula Andress, Eunice Gayson and all other female voices except Lois Maxwell, Zena Marshall, Yvonne Shima and Michel Mok)
From Russia with Love (1963; dubbed Eunice Gayson and female hotel clerk in Istanbul)
Goldfinger (1964; dubbed Shirley Eaton and Nadja Regin, was also on-set English-language vocal coach to Gert Fröbe)
Thunderball (1965; dubbed Claudine Auger)
You Only Live Twice (1967; dubbed Mie Hama)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969; dubbed Virginia North)
Diamonds Are Forever (1971; dubbed Denise Perrier)
Live and Let Die (1973; partially dubbed Jane Seymour)
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974; dubbed Francoise Therry)
Moonraker (1979; dubbed Corinne Cléry and Leila Shenna)

Other films
Man in the Moon (1960, revoiced Shirley Anne Field)
The Savage Innocents (1960, revoiced Yoko Tani)
La Fayette (1961, revoiced Claudia Cardinale)
Call Me Bwana (1963, revoiced Anita Ekberg)
You Must Be Joking! (1965, revoiced Gabriella Licudi)
The Ipcress File (1965, revoiced Sue Lloyd)
She (1965, revoiced Ursula Andress)
The Blue Max (1966; revoiced Ursula Andress)
Funeral in Berlin (1966, revoiced Eva Renzi)
Modesty Blaise (1966, revoiced Monica Vitti)
One Million Years B.C. (1966, revoiced Raquel Welch)
Prehistoric Women (1967, revoiced various characters)
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967, revoiced Susan Denberg)
Deadlier Than the Male (1967, revoiced Sylva Koscina)
The Jokers (1967, revoiced Gabriella Licudi)
Hannibal Brooks (1969; revoiced Karin Baal)
Krakatoa, East of Java (1969, revoiced Jacqui Chan)
Fräulein Doktor (1969, revoiced Suzy Kendall)
Scars of Dracula (1970; revoiced Jenny Hanley)
You Can't Win 'Em All (1970, revoiced Michèle Mercier)
Gawain and the Green Knight (1973, revoiced Ciaran Madden)
The Cherry Picker (1974; revoiced Lulu)

Nikki Van der Zyl

(1935–2021)
Actress | Additional Crew | Stunts
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0886424/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

1959: Sheena Easton is born--Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland.

1963: Dr. No released in Malta.
1964: Moscou Contra 007 (Moscow vs. 007) released in Brazil.

1965: Thunderball films a henchman thrown to the sharks by SPECTRE.

1974: Joseph Millson is born--Berkshire, England.

1985: Ivar Felix Charles Bryce dies at age 78--Birdbrook, Braintree District, Essex, England.
(Born 10 June 1906--London, England.)

Ivar Bryce

See the complete article here:

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbryceI.htm

Ivar Bryce was born in 1906. His father had made a fortune trading guano, the phosphate-rich deposit of fish-eating seabirds which had been widely used as a natural fertilizer. His mother was a painter and a published author of detective novels.

In 1917 Bryce met Ian Fleming and his brothers on a beach in Cornwall: "The fortress builders generously invited me to join them, and I discovered that their names were Peter, Ian, Richard and Michael, in that order. The leaders were Ian and Peter, and I gladly carried out their exact and exacting orders. They were natural leaders of men, both of them, as later history was to prove, and it speaks well for them all that there was room for both Peter and Ian in the platoon."

Bryce was sent to Eton College where he resumed his friendship with Fleming. Bryce purchased a Douglas motorbike and used this vehicle for trips around Windsor. He also took Fleming on the bike to visit the British Empire Exhibition in London. They also published a magazine, The Wyvern, together. Fleming used mother's contacts to persuade Augustus John and Edwin Lutyens, to contribute drawings. The magazine also published a poem by Vita Sackville-West. The editors showed their right-wing opinions by publishing an article in praise of the British Fascisti Party. It argued that its "primary intention is to counteract the present and every-growning trend towards revolution... it is of the utmost importance that centres should be started in the universities and in our public schools".

During the Second World War Bryce worked for William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination (BSC), a unit that was based in New York City. According to Thomas E. Mahl, the author of Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998): "Bryce worked in the Latin American affairs section of the BSC, which was run by Dickie Coit (known in the office as Coitis Interruptus). Because there was little evidence of the German plot to take over Latin America, Ivar found it difficult to excite Americans about the threat."

Nicholas J. Cull, the author of Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American Neutrality (1996), has argued: "During the summer of 1941, he (Bryce) became eager to awaken the United States to the Nazi threat in South America." It was especially important for the British Security Coordination to undermine the propaganda of the American First Committee that had over a million paid-up members. Bryce recalls in his autobiography, You Only Live Once (1975): "Sketching out trial maps of the possible changes, on my blotter, I came up with one showing the probable reallocation of territories that would appeal to Berlin. It was very convincing: the more I studied it the more sense it made... were a genuine German map of this kind to be discovered and publicised among... the American Firsters, what a commotion would be caused."

William Stephenson approved the idea and the project was handed over to Station M, the phony document factory in Toronto run by Eric Maschwitz, of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It took them only 48 hours to produce "a map, slightly travel-stained with use, but on which the Reich's chief map makers... would be prepared to swear was made by them." Stephenson now arranged for the FBI to find the map during a raid on a German safe-house on the south coast of Cuba. J. Edgar Hoover handed the map over to William Donovan. His executive assistant, James R. Murphy, delivered the map to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The historian, Thomas E. Mahl argues that "as a result of this document Congress dismantled the last of the neutrality legislation."

Ivar Bryce

Nicholas J. Cull has argued that Roosevelt should not have realised it was a forgery. He points out that Adolf A. Berle, the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, had already warned Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State that "British intelligence has been very active in making things appear dangerous in South America. We have to be a little on our guard against false scares."

Bryce wrote to Walter Lippmann in March 1942. He sent him a book by Hugo Artuco Fernandez that had been written at the behest of British intelligence. "I am sending you a copy of my friend Artuco's book, which I think will interest you... Some of it sounds rather alarming and exaggerated but it is much more accurate than most books on South America.... If you felt at all inclined to write anything about the dangers to South America, I could give you any number of facts which have never been published, but which my friends here would like to see judiciously made public at this point."

Bryce was based in Jamaica (his wife Sheila, owned Bellevue, one of the most important houses on the island), during the Second World War, where he ran dangerous missions into Latin America. Ian Fleming, who was personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence, visited Bryce in 1941. Fleming told him that: "When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica. Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books."

In 1945 Bryce helped Fleming find a house and twelve acres of land just outside of Oracabessa. It included a strip of white sand on a lovely part of the coast. Fleming decided to call the house, Goldeneye, after his wartime project in Spain, Operation Goldeneye. Their former boss, William Stephenson, also had a house on the island overlooking Montego Bay. Stephenson had set up the British-American-Canadian-Corporation (later called the World Commerce Corporation), a secret service front company which specialized in trading goods with developing countries. William Torbitt has claimed that it was "originally designed to fill the void left by the break-up of the big German cartels which Stephenson himself had done much to destroy."

In 1950 Bryce married Josephine Hartford. Her grandfather, George Huntington Hartford, was the founder of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Josephine was the daughter of Princess Guido Pignatelli and Edward V. Hartford, who was an inventor and president of the Hartford Shock Absorber Company. A former concert pianist she was one of the leading racehorse owners in the United States.

Bryce joined with Ernest Cuneo and a group of investors, including Ian Fleming, to gain control of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). Andrew Lycett has pointed out: "With the arrival of television, its star had begun to wane. Advised by Ernie Cuneo, who told him it was a sure way to meet anyone he wanted, Ivar stepped in and bought control. He appointed the shrewd Cuneo to oversee the American end of things... and Fleming was brought on board to offer a professional newspaperman's advice." Fleming was appointed European vice-president, with a salary of £1,500 a year. He persuaded James Gomer Berry, 1st Viscount Kemsley, that The Sunday Times should work closely with NANA. He also organized a deal with The Daily Express, owned by Lord Beaverbrook.

Bryce became a film producer and helped to finance The Boy and the Bridge (1959). The film lost money but Bryce decided he wanted to work with its director, Kevin McClory, again and it was suggested that they created a company, Xanadu Films. Josephine Hartford, Ernest Cuneo and Ian Fleming became involved in the project. It was agreed that they would make a movie featuring Fleming's character, James Bond.

The first draft of the script was written by Cuneo. It was called Thunderball and it was sent to Fleming on 28th May. Fleming described it as "first class" with "just the right degree of fantasy". However, he suggested that it was unwise to target the Russians as villains because he thought it possible that the Cold War could be finished by the time the film had been completed. He suggested that Bond should confront SPECTRE, an acronym for the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Revolution and Espionage. Fleming eventually expanded his observations into a 67-page film treatment. Kevin McClory now employed Jack Whittingham to write a script based on Fleming's ideas.

The Boy and the Bridge was a flop at the box-office and Bryce, on the recommendation of Ernest Cuneo, decided to pull-out of the James Bond film project. McClory refused to accept this decision and on 15th February, 1960, he submitted another version of the Thunderball script by Whittingham. Fleming read the script and incorporated some of the Whittingham's ideas, for example, the airborne hijack of the bomb, into the latest Bond book he was writing. When it was published in 1961, McClory claimed that he discovered eighteen instances where Fleming had drawn on the script to "build up the plot".

President John F. Kennedy was a fan of Fleming's books. In March 1961, Hugh Sidey, published an article in Life Magazine, on President Kennedy's top ten favourite books. It was a list designed to show that Kennedy was both well-read and in tune with popular taste. It included Fleming's From Russia With Love. Up until this time, Fleming's books had not sold well in the United States, but with Kennedy's endorsement, his publishers decided to mount a major advertising campaign to promote his books. By the end of the year Fleming had become the largest-selling thriller writer in the United States.

This publicity resulted in Fleming signed a film deal with the producers, Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, in June 1961. Dr No, starring Sean Connery, opened in the autumn of 1962 and was an immediate box-office success. As soon as it was released Kennedy demanded a showing in his private cinema in the White House.

Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham became angry at the success of the James Bond film and believed that Bryce, Ian Fleming and Ernest Cuneo had cheated them out of making a profit out of their proposed Thunderball film. The case appeared before the High Court on 20th November 1963. Three days into the case, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. McClory's solicitor, Peter Carter-Ruck, later recalled: "The hearing was unexpectedly and somewhat dramatically adjourned after leading counsel on both sides had seen the judge in his private rooms." Bryce agreed to pay the costs, and undisclosed damages. McClory was awarded all literary and film rights in the screenplay and Fleming was forced to acknowledge that his novel was "based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and the author."

Fleming encouraged Bryce to write his memoirs and gave him some advice on how to deal with the process. "You will be constantly depressed by the progress of the opus and feel it is all nonsense and that nobody will be interested. Those are the moments when you must all the more obstinately stick to your schedule and do your daily stint... Never mind about the brilliant phrase or the golden word, once the typescript is there you can fiddle, correct and embellish as much as you please. So don't be depressed if the first draft seems a bit raw, all first drafts do. Try and remember the weather and smells and sensations and pile in every kind of contemporary detail. Don't let anyone see the manuscript until you are very well on with it and above all don't allow anything to interfere with your routine. Don't worry about what you put in, it can always be cut out on re-reading; it's the total recall that matters." Bryce's autobiography, You Only Live Once, was published in 1975.

Ivar Bryce died in 1985.

Ivar Bryce
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2374542/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

Trivia

His wife Jo had a mansion on the New York / Vermont border which is the setting for two of Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, "For Your Eyes Only" and The Spy Who Loved Me.

The Diamonds Are Forever James Bond novel is co-dedicated to Ivar Bryce (as "i.f.c.b") along with two other friends of Ian Fleming.

After Ian Fleming visited Jamaica in 1944 and decided he wanted to live there, Bryce home-hunted the island to find him a residence and discovered "Goldeneye" for him.

Ian Fleming named his James Bond character's CIA agent friend after Ivar Bryce's middle name, Felix. His surname was named after another of Fleming's friends, Tommy Leiter.

Is played by actor Patrick Ryecart in Goldeneye (1989).

Was involved in the early stages of the development of the James Bond movie Thunderball (1965).

He was married to A&P Supermarket heir Huntington Hartford's sister, Josephine Hartford. Huntington Hartford was the original owner and developer of Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

Bryce and Fleming leave court after settling with McClory.

2005: Miramax Books publishes Charlie Higson's Young Bond novel Silverfin. His first!

2017: Sadanoyama Shinmatsu dies at age 79--Tokyo, Japan.
(Born 18 February 1938--Nagasaki, Japan.)

Sadanoyama_Shinmatsu

See the complete article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadanoyama_Shinmatsu

Sadanoyama celebrates his first tournament victory in May 1961

Personal information

Born Shinmatsu Sasada, February 18, 1938 - Nagasaki, Japan
Died April 27, 2017 (aged 79)
Height 1.82 m (5 ft 11 1⁄2 in)
Weight 129 kg (284 lb)

Career

Stable Dewanoumi
Record 591-251-61
Debut January, 1956
Highest rank Yokozuna (January, 1965)
Retired March, 1968
Championships 6 (Makuuchi)
Special Prizes Fighting Spirit, Outstanding Performance, Technique
Gold Stars 2 (Wakanohana I, Azumafuji)
* Up to date as of August 2012.

Sadanoyama Shinmatsu (佐田の山 晋松, born Shinmatsu Sasada, February 18, 1938 – April 27, 2017) was a former sumo wrestler from Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. He was the sport's 50th yokozuna. After his retirement he was the head coach of Dewanoumi stable and served as head of the Japan Sumo Association.

Career
Born in Arikawa, Minamimatsuura District, he made his professional debut in January 1956, and reached sekitori status four years later upon promotion to the jūryō division in March 1960. He made his top makuuchi division debut in January 1961. Sadanoyama won his first tournament title in only his third tournament in the top division, from the rank of maegashira 13. The achievement of winning a tournament from the maegashira ranks is sometimes seen as a jinx on subsequent success in sumo, but Sadanoyama disproved that theory by going on to reach ōzeki in March 1962 after winning his second title, and then yokozuna in January 1965 after capturing his third championship.

Sadanoyama's handprint on a Ryōgoku monument

He made a cameo appearance in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, as himself.

Although more attention was focused on yokozuna Taihō and Kashiwado, with their rivalry referred to as the Hakuho era after a combination of their shikona, Sadanoyama in fact ended up winning more tournament championships than Kashiwado.

Sadanoyama announced his retirement suddenly in March 1968, despite having won the previous two tournaments, two days after a surprise loss to a new maegashira, the Hawaiian born Takamiyama. It has been suggested that the shock of losing to a foreigner may have prompted a premature retirement.

Retirement from sumo
Sadanoyama remained in the sumo world after his retirement, as an elder. Having married the daughter of the previous stable boss, former maegashira Dewanohana Kuniichi, he became head coach of the Dewanoumi stable. One of the most powerful heya in sumo, he produced a string of top division wrestlers, including Mienoumi, Dewanohana Yoshitaka, Washūyama, Ōnishiki, Ryōgoku, Oginishiki and Mainoumi. In February 1992 he became head of the Japan Sumo Association. He was chosen ahead of his contemporaries Taihō and Kashiwado partly because he was in better health than either of them. He changed his toshiyori name to Sakaigawa in 1996, handing over the Dewanoumi name and the day-to-day running of his stable to the former Washūyama. He did not run for re-election in 1998, after it became clear he lacked enough support, and was replaced by former ōzeki Yutakayama from the rival Tokitsukaze faction. He subsequently became head of the judging department, an unusual move for a former head of the Sumo Association. He stood down as an elder in 2003 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of sixty five.

Death
He died in a Tokyo hospital of pneumonia on April 27, 2017 at the age of 79.

Fighting style
Sadanoyama was known for employing pushing and thrusting techniques such as tsuppari (a series of rapid thrusts to the chest) and regularly won by such kimarite as oshi dashi (push out) and tsuki dashi (thrust out). However he was also good on the mawashi where he preferred a migi-yotsu (left hand outside, right hand inside) grip, and often won by yori kiri (force out) and uwatenage (overarm throw).

Career record
The Kyushu tournament was first held in 1957, and the Nagoya tournament in 1958.

Sadanoyama (1938–2017)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1889384/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

Trivia: A professional sumo wrestler, Sadanoyama was the 50th Yokozuna at the time of filming You Only Live Twice.

http://www.sumoforum.net/forums/topic/36512-dewanoumi-sakaigawa-rijicho-sadanoyama-passed-away/

RichardTheBruce

April 28th

1905: Charles Kenneth Gould (Charles K. Feldman) is born--New York City, New York.
(He dies 25 May 1968 at age 63--Los Angeles, California.)

Charles K. Feldman

See the complete article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_K._Feldman

Charles K. Feldman (April 26, 1905 – May 25, 1968) was a Hollywood attorney, film producer and talent agent who founded the Famous Artists talent agency.

According to one obituary, Feldman disdained publicity. "Feldman was an enigma to Hollywood. No one knew what he was up to – from producing a film to packaging one for someone else."

Charles K. Feldman
Born Charles Kenneth Gould, April 26, 1905, New York City, U.S.
Died May 25, 1968 (aged 63), Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Alma mater University of Michigan
Occupation Producer and celebrity agent
Notable work: The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire; The Seven Year Itch
Spouse(s) Jean Howard (1935 m.–1947 div.); Clotilde Barot(April 1968 m.–death)

Early life
Charles Kenneth Gould was born to a Jewish family in New York City on April 26, 1905. His father was a diamond merchant who immigrated to New Jersey. Both of his parents, however, died of cancer and he was orphaned at age six, along with his five siblings. He was taken in by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Feldman at age seven. Feldman was from Bayonne, New Jersey and was a furniture-store owner. A few years later, the Feldmans moved permanently to California.

Career
Charles Feldman studied at the University of Michigan and later became a lawyer, earning his degree from the University of Southern California. He earned money to put himself through college by working as a mail carrier and a cameraman in a movie studio. He became a lawyer for talent agencies, and by age 30, he had become known as a Hollywood attorney; however, he became an agent instead.

Agent
In 1932, Feldman left his job as a lawyer and co-founded with Adeline Schulberg, the Schulberg-Feldman talent agency which was soon joined by Schulberg's brother Sam Jaffe and Noll Gurney.] In 1933, Schulberg left to form her own agency and the company was renamed the Famous Artists Agency. Feldman combined his background as a lawyer with his celebrity connections to help find and contract jobs. Among his first clients were Charles Boyer and Joan Bennett. Feldman's Famous Artists was bought by Ted Ashley's Ashley-Steiner agency in 1962 and renamed Ashley-Famous.

Feldman began using new tactics in his field. He would buy story ideas contract them to unemployed writers to make into a screenplay. He would also negotiate one-picture deals for a star, not a long-term studio contract, as was the custom. This way clients could work at multiple studios simultaneously. Feldman also combined several clients into one package and sold them to a producer or studio as one unit. Another tactic was the use of overlapping nonexclusive contracts with clients like Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert, demonstrating flexible alternatives to the so-called iron-clad studio contract in the classical Hollywood era.

In 1942, Feldman was in charge of the Hollywood Victory Caravan for Army and Navy Relief. As an agent, he became friends with celebrities like Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, and John Wayne, among others.

Packaging
In June 1942, Feldman signed Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott and John Wayne and presented them to Universal for Pittsburgh along with the script and director as a "package".

This idea was the beginning of Hollywood's "package deal." One of his greatest successes was The Bishop's Wife which was produced in 1948. He bought the rights to the book by Robert Nathan for $15,000 and sold the screen play for $200,000.

Feldman held considerable sway in the making of some films. It was Feldman who suggested to Jack Warner (as a friend) that he recut Howard Hawks's Big Sleep (1946) and add scenes to enhance Lauren Bacall's performance,[14] which he felt was more or less a "bit part" in the 1945 cut.

Charles K. Feldman Productions
He later produced his own movies instead of selling the screenplays[7] and created the Charles K. Feldman Productions in 1945.

In 1947, he announced a deal where his company would help make three films at Republic Pictures, Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948), Lewis Milestone's The Red Pony (1949) and Ben Hecht's The Shadow. At Republic he also helped produce Moonrise (1948). The Shadow was never produced.

This company produced A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) where Feldman had to fight to protect the script from censorship.

He later produced The Seven Year Itch (1955) It stars Marilyn Monroe of whom he was the agent from 1951 to 1955.

In 1956, he sold six books to 20th Century Fox including Heaven Knows Mr Allison, The Wayward Bus, Hilda Crane and Bernadine.

In 1960, Feldman acquired the film rights to Casino Royale following the death of Gregory Ratoff who purchased film rights to the property from Ian Fleming in 1955.

A 1967 profile on Feldman said "he still sounds much like an agent when he talks."

Personal life and death
In 1935 Feldman married actress Jean Howard. They fought frequently, and divorced in 1947; however, they remained good friends and even continued to share a house for some time. He also gave up gambling in 1947. Throughout his life, his biological siblings often sent him letters asking for money. Although he preferred to not have contact with them, he did send money and old clothes. He married Clotilde Barot on April 14, 1968 just six weeks before he died of pancreatic cancer. He died May 25, 1968, although no funeral was held for him. C. K. Feldman was interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood.

Filmography

The Lady Is Willing (1942) – producer
The Spoilers (1942) – executive producer
Pittsburgh (1942) – executive producer
Follow the Boys (1944) – producer
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) – executive producer
Red River (1948) – executive producer
Moonrise (1948) – producer
Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948) – executive producer
The Red Pony (1949) – executive producer
The Glass Menagerie (1950) – producer
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) which was nominated for an Academy Award – producer
The Seven Year Itch (1955) – producer
North to Alaska (1960) – producer
Walk on the Wild Side (1962) – producer
The 7th Dawn (1964) – producer
What's New Pussycat? (1965) – producer
The Group (1966) – executive producer
The Honey Pot (1967) – executive producer
Casino Royale (1967) – producer

Unmade Projects
Mr Shadow (1950) – about twin magicians
Once There Was a Russian (1956)
Cold Wind and the Warm (1958)
Mary Magdelene starring Capucine (1962)
Voyage Out, Voyage In from a story by Irwin Shaw (1962)
Fair Game (1962) from a story by Sam Locke
Eternal Fire (1965)
Lot's Wife (1965) from a script by I.A.L. Diamond starring Leslie Caron and Warren Beatty
Take the Money and Run – announced for Feldman in 1965 and was directed by Woody Allen after his death

Charles K. Feldman (1904–1968)

Producer | Miscellaneous Crew | Actor
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0271012/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_2

1957: Publisher Rupert Hart-Davis repeats gossip criticizing the Fleming Effect.

Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, Philip Waller, 2007.

Footnote 23 Margaret Lane, Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon (1938), 245-6, Cf. the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis reporting the gossip about Ian Fleming's James Bond stories on 28 April 1957;

'that when Ian Fleming mentions any particular food, clothing or cigarettes in his books, the makers reward him with presents in kind. "In fact", said my friend, "Ian's are only modern thrillers with built-in commercials" ' (Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, 290).

1967: Charles K. Feldman premieres Casino Royale in New York at the Capitol and Cinema I.

1987: Tonia Sotiropoulou is born--Athens, Greece.

1999: The Dean of Special Effects John Stears dies at age 64--Los Angeles, California.
(Born 25 August 1934--Uxbridge, Hillingdon, Middlesex, England.)

Obituary: John Stears

See the complete article here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-john-stears-1107368.html

Tom Vallance | Monday 19 July 1999 00:02

WINNER OF two Academy Awards, for his work on Thunderball and Star Wars, John Stears was one of the film industry's top men for special visual effects and many of his innovations are incorporated into the work of today's film-makers.

For the early James Bond films, he served as the real-life incarnation of the ingenious "Q", creating such gadgets and vehicles as the Aston Martin of Goldfinger which has been described as "the most famous car in the world". For Star Wars he worked with the production designer John Barry to conceive the unforgettable robots C3PO and R2-D2, and among his other memorable achievements were the flying car of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the model work for the British film about the Titanic, A Night to Remember, and the explosive demolition work in The Guns of Navarone.

Born in 1934, Stears studied at Harrow College of Art and Southall Technical School before working as a draughtsman with the Air Ministry. He served as a dispatch rider during his National Service, then joined a firm of architects where he was able to utilise his passion for model-making by constructing scale models of building projects for clients.

The firm also specialised in model aircraft, and when Rank's special effects expert Bill Warrington saw some of Stears's work he commissioned him to build model aircraft for Lewis Gilbert's screen version of the life of the pilot Douglas Bader, Reach for the Sky (1956).

Signed to a contract by the Rank Organisation, Stears worked with Warrington and Gilbert on three more true-life stories, creating model boats and planes for A Night to Remember (1958), in which Kenneth More, who had played Bader, was Second Officer Lightoller of the Titanic, Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), which starred Virginia McKenna as the British shop assistant Violette Szabo who became a resistance heroine, and Sink the Bismarck! (1960), with Kenneth More as an Admiralty captain intent on destroying Germany's prize battleship. Other Rank films included The One That Got Away (1957), Sea Fury (1958) and Gilbert's HMS Defiant (1962).

Having acquired a reputation impressive enough for him to freelance, Stears was hired to both build and destroy gun miniatures for J. Lee Thompson's exciting transcription of the Alistair MacLean adventure tale The Guns of Navarone (1961), then he created effects for two Disney films, In Search of the Castaways (1962) and the fantasy Three Lives of Thomasina (1962).

The producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman then asked Stears to work with them on a production which was to prove momentous in starting one of the most successful series in cinema history. It was the team's first adaptation of one of Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, Dr No (1962), and Stears's work on the film's finale, the destruction of Dr No's Jamaican hideout, still impresses today.

Aware of the importance of Stears's contribution to the film's success, Broccoli and Saltzman made him head of their special effects department for their next Bond production, From Russia With Love (1963), for which he both created and flew the first remote- controlled helicopter used in a film, and constructed the bizarre knife- toed boots for the Soviet spy Rosa Klebb. Still only 29 years old, Stears confessed later that he was having the time of his life and he described his job as "not really work but the chance to play . . . using other people's money!"

The next Bond film, Goldfinger (1964), included three of Stears's favourite creations, the lethal laser ray which nearly bisects Bond, the steel-rimmed bowler employed as a deadly frisbee by the villain Oddjob, and the famous Aston Martin. In the book, Fleming's hero drives a DB3, but Stears wanted to use the not yet available DB5, a sleekly photogenic model, and he persuaded the manufacturers to provide him with a prototype, which the effects wizard fitted with bullet-proof glass, a fog maker, revolving number plates, road slicker, machine guns and a passenger ejector seat. "I was never certain we would make the seat work," said Stears, "but in the end we did the stunt in one take."

The fourth Bond film Thunderball (1965) was one of the weaker dramatically but Stears did not disappoint, his effects including a rocket-firing motor cycle, an underwater flying saucer, large-scale models of a Vulcan bomber which he then sank in the waters of the Bahamas, and a life-size replica of the villain's yacht which he blew to pieces.

His work on the film brought him his first Oscar for Best Visual Effects. His old friend Lewis Gilbert directed the next Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967), which included a flying machine that gobbles up a space capsule in outer space, after which Stears had a break from Bond when he worked on Broccoli's production Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) with its flying car.

If asked to pick a favourite Bond film, Stears used to say that the one he most enjoyed working on was On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), partly because he admired its star George Lazenby, who insisted on performing many of his own stunts. It was the start of a lifelong friendship between the two men, both mechanically minded motor bike enthusiasts. For the film, the most challenging moment came when Stears had to set off an avalanche on cue.

In 1970 Stears set up his own company, and worked on such films as Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973) and Douglas Hickox's Theatre of Blood (1973) in which a ham actor (Vincent Price) murders hostile critics by recreating death scenes from Shakespeare's plays. He returned to Bond for a final time to create effects including Scaramanga's flying car in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), which featured Roger Moore as Bond.

In 1976 Stears had a call from George Lucas, who had been a great admirer of the Bond films and wanted to know if he was interested in creating mechanical and electrical effects for a film he had written, Star Wars. It was the opportunity to create things that had never been attempted before and Stears enthusiastically accepted.

The phenomenal hit that resulted brought Stears his second Oscar and featured such innovations as Luke Skywalker's Land-speeder, ostensibly a hover-car but actually a four-wheeled vehicle to which Stears had fitted mirrors angled to reflect the Tunisian desert and thus create the illusion that the craft was skimming over the ground. The Lightsabers, the Death Star with its threatening cannons, the robots both manually and remote- controlled, and the metallic suit for C3PO were other Stears creations, along with countless explosions, including the final destruction of the Death Star.

Stears worked again with the first Bond, Sean Connery, on Peter Hyams's Outland (1981), set on a 21st-century planet where space marshal Connery finds himself fighting a lone battle against wholesale corruption.

Subsequent films included The Bounty (1984), an intriguingly unconventional depiction of the famous mutiny, with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, and a thriller for which Stears was aptly called in as a special consultant since it featured a special effects expert as its hero, F/X: murder by illusion, in which Bryan Brown played an effects man hired to make a faked assassination appear real, only to find that he is himself the victim of a Mafia plot and has to bring all his ingenuity into play to defend himself. A modest success at the time of its release, it is now considered a cult movie.

In 1988 Stears hoped to produce a film but was unable to obtain sufficient financial backing, and in 1993, after producing effects for the Charlie Sheen vehicle Navy SEALS, he retired to California with his wife Brenda, whom he married in 1960, and two daughters. For most of his life he had lived on an estate in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where he reared cattle and where his wife ran the Livy Borzoi Kennels, breeding Borzoi show dogs.

In California he continued to indulge his passion for building and flying model aircraft - his wife stated that at the time of his death there were a dozen aircraft in their garage, the latest a Fiat on which Stears had worked for three years and which had a 15-foot wing span. A supremely fit man until suffering a stroke two days before his death, he would ride his 1927 McEvoy motor bike, complete with sidecar built by himself, down to Malibu every Sunday along with his neighbour George Lazenby where they would join around 200 other bike enthusiasts at a beach-front cafe.

He returned to films with last year's The Mask of Zorro, staging the explosions for the film's early action sequences, but left midway through production after artistic disagreements, and at the time of his death was working on a screenplay set in the First World War and seen from the point of view of German aircraft designers.

John Stears, special effects designer: born 25 August 1934; married 1960 Brenda Livy (two daughters); died Malibu, California 28 April 1999.

John Stears (1934–1999)

Special Effects | Visual Effects | Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0824210/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

2006: Casino Royale completes filming the torture scene.

2008: Quantum of Solace films the Tosca opera at Bregenz, Austria.

2019: No Time To Die begins principle photography at Port Antonio, Jamaica, with Daniel Craig, director Cary Fukunaga, Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Ana de Armas, Naomie Harris, Lashana Lynch.

RichardTheBruce

April 29th

1917: Milton Rutherford Reid is born--Bombay, India.
(He dies 1987--Bangalore, Karnataka, India.)

THE LIFE CAREER AND DISAPPEARANCE OF MILTON REID

See complete article here:

http://theblackboxclub.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-life-career-and-of-disappearance.html

Sometimes you’ll be watching a film and a minor supporting player will suddenly appear and command your attention in a way that is more powerful and immediate than the leading actors. It could a physical gesture they make or a line of dialogue uttered in an unusual way or simply the look of their face or body or both. Milton Reid is one of those actors. His credit is likely to be down toward the bottom of the cast list with the designated role of “The Executioner” or “The Bodyguard” or “The Club Bouncer” or “The Big Pirate” but it’s his mug that will stick in your memory long after the film fades. He appears to be of Asian descent though one biographical reference intimated that his unusual features were the result of Turner syndrome which is incorrect because that rare genetic disorder only affects about 1 out of every 2,500 FEMALE births. But it’s possible that his exotic look was the result of something other than being the son of an Irish father and Indian (as in Bombay) mother.

Strangely enough, my introduction to this imposing character actor wasn’t in a movie but in a series of trading cards issued by Universal in 1963 known as “Spook Stories” which stuck silly captions on stills from the studio’s horror films (here’s a link to an article on Monster trading cards –There were two images of Mr. Reid from the 1962 Hammer film NIGHT CREATURES that conjured up all kinds of crazy scenarios in my mind of who this character was. (The original British title of NIGHT CREATURES was CAPTAIN CLEGG which was a remake of the 1937 British feature; Walt Disney remade it in 1963 for television where it was broadcast in three parts on “The Wonderful World of Disney” as “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh” and Patrick McGoohan played “The Scarecrow” aka Dr. Syn.)

When I finally caught up with NIGHT CREATURES years later Mr. Reid does indeed pop out of the screen during his brief scenes as “The Mulatto,” a huge mountain of a man whose tongue is cut out because of his treachery to the pirate Captain Clegg. He is later used by the relentless Captain Collier (Patrick Allen) to sniff out the incognito Clegg who is behind a smuggling operation in the village of Dymchurch. The film is a rousing and highly atmospheric period thriller with some wonderful visuals (the appearance of the marsh phantoms), and spirited performances (Peter Cushing, Patrick Allen and Oliver Reed have fun with their roles). But Milton Reid’s larger than life presence is mesmerizing. He’s like a caged wild animal here, grunting, growling and desperate, and though his part is relatively small, it’s of crucial importance to the story and leads to Clegg’s undoing.

NIGHT CREATURES, however, is probably an exception to most of the films Reid made where his on-screen time was barely more than that of an extra. And he rarely had dialogue because with a face and body like that who needs it? But even in one scene appearances or minor supporting roles you couldn’t miss the guy. He stands out the way Tor Johnson does in the Ed Wood films. You can’t look at anything else. You might not have known his name but you’ve probably seen him many times – he was the Japanese executioner in THE CAMP ON BLOOD ISLAND (1958), the big pirate in Walt Disney’s SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON (1960), a guard working for DR. NO (1962), the strong man in BERSERK! (1967), the mute dog handler in THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971) which will be shown on TCM’s Underground franchise on 3/28, Biederbeck’s man servant in DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN (1972), he played Sabbala in THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977) and Sandor in THE SPY WHO LOVED MEdr np (1977).

According to a biography for Reid posted on IMDB by Jim Marshall, Reid was born in Bombay, India in 1917. He moved to London in 1936, married fashion illustrator Bertha Lilian Guyett in 1939 and made his first film appearance in the British propaganda film THE WAY AHEAD in 1944. Then the bio gets extremely interesting: “After the war he trained as a wrestler, turning professional in 1952, firstly as a Tarzan-like character called Jungle Boy wearing leopard skin trunks. He also continued to play small parts in films, usually as a tough guy or bodyguard, often as a cruel henchman such as the Japanese executioner in THE CAMP ON BLOOD ISLAND (1958). His break-through came in 1959 when he was required to shave his head for the role of Yen the pirate in FERRY TO HONG KONG. He remained shaven-headed for the rest of his career, also changing his wrestling image to that of “The Mighty Chang,” an oriental giant. On stage he played in pantomime at the London Palladium as the Slave of the Lamp…However, most people remember Milton Reid as the bodyguard sorting out pretty girls for his boss in a long-running pipe tobacco commercial. In 1964 Milton challenged “The Great Togo” (aka Harold Sakata) to a wrestling contest to decide who would play the coveted role of Odd-Job in G0LDFINGER. Unfortunately, Milton had already been killed off in the first Bond movie Dr No (1962), so the producers were forced to pick Sakata and the “eliminator contest” wasn’t needed.”

Reid’s film career began to wind down in the late seventies and some of his last roles were in such sleazy softcore features as CONFESSIONS FROM THE DAVID GALAXY AFFAIR (1979) and QUEEN OF THE BLUES (1979), his final credited screen appearance. According to a poster on the britmovie.co.uk forums, there is an article on Reid in the book KEEPING THE BRITISH END UP, a survey of British softcore sex comedies. However, Reid’s story becomes much more unusual after 1979. Jim Marshall’s IMDB bio states that “Milton decided to try his luck in “Bollywood” and in 1980 returned to India. However, various problems arose and in 1981 he was arrested by Indian police for “trespassing, damaging furniture and disconnecting a telephone.” The trouble started when he visited his mother and sister in Bangalore, and there was a dispute with tenants at his sister’s bungalow. Police also complained of violence and abuse when they tried to detain him, and there were accusations of a manservant being assaulted. The following year Milton was stated by some reference works to have died from a heart attack, but that was incorrect. The actor’s son (same name) was still receiving correspondence sent by his father from Bangalore up to December 1986. Significantly, nothing was heard after that date, and the present assumption is that Milton Reid died in obscurity somewhere in India during the early part of 1987, although no death certificate or confirmation has been received by the family. Sadly, Bertha died in England in 1997, at the age of 90, still not knowing what had become of her husband. However, research continues.”

Despite the above information, some internet biographical sources have maintained that Reid died of a heart attack in London in 1982 but offer no explanation or evidence of their research. Reid’s grandson, Ian Reid, in fact, has challenged this fact in a web posting that read “I would be very interested to find out where the information about his death came from as this does not agree with how my family and I believe his life came to an end. His death and the location of his death are in fact a mystery. Therefore I would be interested to hear about any proof that backs up the claim that he died in London of a heart attack in 1982.”

We may never know what happened to “The Mighty Chang” but at least we can marvel at his unique presence in more than fifty films.

IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

Filmography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Reid#Filmography
Undercover Girl (1958) - Mac, thug with beard
The Camp on Blood Island (1958) - Japanese Executioner (uncredited)
Blood of the Vampire (1958) - Executioner
Ferry to Hong Kong (1959) - Yen, Sing-Up's Partner

Swiss Family Robinson (1960) - Big Pirate
The Terror of the Tongs (1961) - Guardian (uncredited)
Visa to Canton (1961) - Bodyguard
The Wonders of Aladdin (1961) - Omar
Captain Clegg (1962) - Mulatto
Dr. No (1962) - Dr. No's Guard (uncredited)
Panic (1963) - Dan
55 Days at Peking (1963) - Boxer (uncredited)
The Ten Gladiators (1963) - Baldhead Wrestler
A Stitch in Time (1963) - The Mighty Chang in Photograph (uncredited)
Desperate Mission (1965) - To-go
Deadlier Than the Male (1967) - Chang
Casino Royale (1967) - Temple Guard (uncredited)
Berserk! (1967) - Strong Man
The Mini-Affair (1967) - Fisherman
Great Catherine (1968) - Henchman (uncredited)
The Assassination Bureau (1969) - Elevator victim Leonardi (uncredited)
Target: Harry (1969) - Kemal
The Best House in London (1969) - Henchman (uncredited)

Rekvijem (1970) - Officer
The Nameless Knight (1970) - Dev (uncredited)
The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) - Dog Handler (uncredited)
Carry on Henry (1971) - Executioner (uncredited)
The Horsemen (1971) - Aqqul (uncredited)
Au Pair Girls (1972) - The Guard
Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972) - Manservant - Cheng
The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) - Japanese Restaurant Owner
Adventures of a Private Eye (1978) - Bodyguard
Come Play with Me (1977) - Tough
The People That Time Forgot (1977) - Sabbala
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) - Sandor
No. 1 of the Secret Service (1977) - Eye Patch
Terror (1978) - Club Bouncer
What's Up Superdoc! (1978) - Louie
Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (1979) - Eddie
Arabian Adventure (1979) - Jinnee
Queen of the Blues (1979) - Ricky
Arabian Knights (1979) - Servant

Westcountry Tales (1981) - The Monster
Mard (1985) - Villain (uncredited)
Kala Dhanda Goray Log (1986) - (final film role)

[/quote]

Milton Reid (I) (1917–1987)
Actor | Miscellaneous Crew

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0426363/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

1963: Agent 007... med rätt att döda (Agent 007 ... with the right to kill) released in Sweden.

1967: Bosley Crowther reviews Feldman's Casino Royale in the New York Times.

Screen: Population Explosion Victims: Secret Agents Abound in 'Casino
Royale ' Impesonators of Bond at Two Theaters

See the complete article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/1967/04/29/archives/screen-population-explosion-victimssecret-agents-abound-in-casino.html

By BOSLEY CROWTHER | APRIL 29, 1967

MORE of the talent agent than the
secret agent is flamboyantly evident
in Charles K. Feldman's "Casino
Royale," which opened at the
Capitol and Cinema I yesterday—and
that despite the fact that the
screen is crawling with secret
agents of all sexes and sorts. It is
absolutely teeming with wild
impersonators of James Bond,
ranging from David Niven to
Woody Allen and from Ursula
Andress to Deborah Kerr. It clatters
and bangs with 007's trying to pull
the all-time double-oh-cross on all
future aspirants to Bond-olatry. But
it is still the triumph of the talent
agent, which Mr. Feldman used to
be.That is because he has made it
on the premise that the more
writers and directors he could put to
work and the more actors he
could cram into his picture, the
more impressive, if not the better, it would be, and the more energy and
noise would be projected by the sheer human multiplicity. As a
consequence, he had twice as many writers working on the script as the
three that are named in the credits. He had six directors shooting
segments of it — and so conglomerate are their efforts that you have to
consult the program to tell where one left off and another began. And he
has a cast of so many, at least 14 of whom are ranking stars, that the
screen appears to be a demonstration of the population explosion at its
peak. Furthermore, since he wasn't paying (Columbia Pictures was), he
spared no expense in buying the most elaborate and fantastic sets and the
finest outdoor locations in London, Scotland and points east and
west to enclose his completely Brobdingnagian burlesque on the crazy
cult of Bond. You would think, with so much going for him, that he
would harvest a residue of fun—and he does, especially in the
beginning, when a quartet of representatives of Britain, the United
States, France and the Soviet Union call upon the aging Sir James Bond
to come out of retirement and help combat the growing power of
Smersh, which has been killing off secret agents more rapidly than the
automobile. It really gets off to a fast start as Sir James, whom David
Niven plays as though he were a clubmate of the latter-day urbane
Sherlock Holmes, goes to Scotland to see the widow of the untimely
murdered M, head of British Intelligence, and finds her running a
buzzing hive of female spies. With Miss Kerr playing this fuzzy lady and
Mr. Huston directing this phase (as well as playing M in the first scene),
it looks as though the film is grandly launched. And it continues to clip
along nicely as Peter Sellers, who is supposed to be the world's great
authority on baccarat, is recruited to simulate Bond and confront the
demon baccarat ace of the evil system, performed stupendously by
Orson Welles. The game between these two in the Casino Royale, which
is the only thing in the Ian Fleming novel of the same name translated
to the film, is a jolly tangle of two notoriously able scene-stealers.But all
of Mr. Feldman's scriptwriters and fortune tellers have so cluttered the
rest of the film with wild and haphazard injections of "in" jokes and
outlandish gags — such as having Joanna Pettet play the illegitimate
daughter of Mata Hari and Sir James, or Woody Allen come on as Sir
James's nephew, Jimmy Bond, for one of his interminable surrealistic
monologues—that it becomes repetitious and tedious. And since it's
based more on slapstick than wit, with Bond cliché piled upon cliché, it
tends to crumble and sprawl. It's the sort of reckless, disconnected
nonsense that could be telescoped or stopped at any point. If it were
stopped at the end of an hour and 40 minutes instead of at the end of 2
hours and 10 minutes, it might be a terminally satisfying entertainment
instead of the wearying one it is.

2008: Julie Ege dies at age 64--Oslo, Norway.
(Born 12 November 1943--Sandnes, Norway.)

Julie Ege: 'Sex Symbol of the 1970s'

See the complete article here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/julie-ege-sex-symbol-of-the-1970s-820386.html

Saturday 3 May 2008

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, British cinema-goers, and British men in general, had a weakness for Scandinavian women. For a time, the Norwegian actress and model Julie Ege was as ubiquitous as Sweden's Britt Ekland.

In 1969, Ege's stunning looks caught the eye of the film producer Albert Broccoli, who cast her in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the only James Bond film to feature George Lazenby as the lead. In 1971, Ege was Voluptua to Frankie Howerd's Lurcio in the first Up Pompeii film, based on the titter-heavy sitcom of the same name. Having starred in Creatures the World Forgot, another Hammer "cave girl" film in the vein of the Raquel Welch vehicle One Million Years BC, Ege was touted as the "Sex Symbol of the 1970s" by Sir James Carreras, head of Hammer Film Productions, and his son Michael.

Despite further appearances in sci-fi and horror hokum like The Final Programme (1973), Craze, Dr of Evil (aka The Mutations) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (all in 1974), she was typecast as a glamour girl, in comedies such as The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins (1971) and Not Now Darling (1973), both with Leslie Phillips, as well as Percy's Progress (1974) and The Amorous Milkman (1975).

Born in Sandnes, on the south-west coast of Norway, in 1943, she was a bit of a tomboy but blossomed into a teenager obsessed with Hollywood stars. Spotted by local photographers, Ege appeared in advertisements for "anything from dresses to sardines", she later recalled. Following a short-lived marriage to a major in the Norwegian army, she moved to Oslo, won a beauty contest and took part in the Miss Universe pageant in Florida in 1962. She then remarried and undertook various modelling assignments, including an appearance in Penthouse magazine.

In 1967, she made her acting début playing a German masseuse in Stompa til Sjøs ("The Sky and the Ocean"), a low-budget Norwegian film, and also had an uncredited part in Robbery, a British gangster picture about the Great Train Robbery. She settled in London, registered with various model agencies, and sent her picture to Broccoli. The Bond producer signed Ege to play the Scandinavian Girl, one of the 10 women of different nationalities being brainwashed by Blofeld, the villain portrayed by Telly Savalas in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (the English Girl was played by Joanna Lumley). Ege spent nearly three months on location at Piz Gloria, the revolving restaurant on top of the Schilthorn in Switzerland, but was disappointed to see that, in the finished film, she only appeared on screen for a few moments.

In 1970, Ned Sherrin gave her a role opposite Marty Feldman in the comedy Every Home Should Have One. "It was my first real part with dialogue. They wanted me to look and sound like a Scandinavian nanny so I gave them just that. It was really difficult," Ege joked. She had spent time as an au pair in London in the early Sixties. "Once the film opened, all the newspapers carried a photo of me with the caption 'Every Home Should Have One'. I was famous overnight and was not prepared for all the decision-making so crucial at that moment," she admitted.

Ege's subsequent career moves bore out this claim. She turned down the chance to appear with Peter Sellers in the saucy comedy There's a Girl in My Soup and signed up with Hammer to do Creatures the World Forgot. The shooting on location in Africa turned out to be something of an ordeal for Ege who had recently given birth to her first daughter. "They made me wear this awful wig and my bikini was a far cry from the one Raquel Welch wore," she recalled. "I had dirt smeared all over me. My newborn child was back in England and after a few days I got homesick."

Ege then undertook a gruelling publicity schedule which included appearances on the Johnny Carson and David Frost chat-shows and a special edition of The Money Programme documenting the amount of money Hammer was investing in her. However, Creatures the World Forgot was slated by the critics and her career lost momentum after she passed on Hammer's Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde in 1972. "I was by then very reluctant about doing nudity," she said. "Many people think I did so much nudity in my films. I did a short scene in Every Home Should Have One, and two bathtub scenes in Not Now Darling and Mutations."

Ege was happier doing comedies, including playing "the sexy wife of a mad scientist" (Donald Sinden) in Rentadick (1972), even if the project went so awry that Graham Chapman and John Cleese, the film's original writers with John Fortune and John Wells, asked for their names to be removed from the credits. In 1972, she also had cameos in The Alf Garnett Saga and in Go For a Take with Reg Varney of On the Buses fame. "They needed a pretty girl with a good attitude to play these parts," she said. "It was all a laugh and I have never seen these films since."

In the Seventies, Ege lived for several years with the Beatles associate Tony Bramwell and recorded a version of "Love", a John Lennon composition originally featured on the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album in 1970. She subsequently went back to Norway and took up photography before training as a nurse in the Eighties. She was delighted when one of her patients presented her with a video copy of The Amorous Milkman.

Over the last decade, Ege was amazed by the renewed interest in her films. "There I was on the front cover of so many newspapers as the forgotten diva of British horror and comedy films," she said in 2004, two years after publishing her autobiography, Naken ("Naked"), in Norway. In 1999, she visited Britain and took part in a reunion of Hammer alumni. In 2005, she featured in the BBC documentary Crumpet! A Very British Sex Symbol, presented by the former Daily Sport editor Tony Livesey. "To be honest, I was never really that proud of my performance in films," she said, "but I gave it my best and enjoyed the work very much."

Pierre Perrone

Julie Ege, model, actress and nurse: born Sandnes, Norway 13 November 1943; twice married (two daughters); died Oslo 29 April 2008.

Filmography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Ege#Filmography
Robbery (1967) – Hostess (uncredited)
Stompa til Sjøs! (1967)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) – The Scandinavian girl

Every Home Should Have One (1970) – Inga Giltenburg
Up Pompeii (1971) – Voluptua
Creatures the World Forgot (1971) – Nala – The Girl
The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins (1971) – Ingrid (segment "Gluttony")
Go for a Take (1972) – April
Rentadick (1972) – Utta Armitage
The Alf Garnett Saga (1972) – Herself
Not Now, Darling (1973) – Janie McMichael
Kanarifuglen (1973) – Kari, flyvertinne
The Final Programme (1973) – Miss Dazzle
Craze (1974) – Helena
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) – Vanessa Buren
Percy's Progress (1974) – Miss Hanson
Den siste Fleksnes (1974) – Herself
The Mutations (1974) – Hedi
Bortreist på ubestemt tid (1974) – Christina
The Amorous Milkman (1975) – Diana
De Dwaze Lotgevallen von Sherlock Jones (1975) – Sondag's secretaresse

Fengslende dager for Christina Berg (1988) – Krags hustru

Julie Ege (1943–2008)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0250774/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
Actress

2008: Quantum of Solace films the chase through the opera house at Bregenz, Austria.

2012: Skyfall stops filming the pre-titles sequence to allow principal cast and crew to attend a press conference at the Ciragan Palace in Istanbul. (Then resumes the same day.)

https://filmreviewonline.com/2012/05/02/skyfall-bond-23-istanbul/

2017: Robert Davi receives a lifetime achievement award at the 12th Annual Sunscreen Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Robert Davi will be awarded
https://www.007travelers.com/uncategorized/robert-davi-will-be-awarded/

Robert Davi, best known for his role as Bond villain Franz Sanchez in "Licence to Kill" (1989), will be awarded lifetime achievement award today, 29th of April 2017 at 12th Annual Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, where his documentary, "Davi's Way" will be screened.

Source: Everything Sinatra (Facebook)

2021: Frank McRae dies at age 77--Santa Monica, California.
(Born 18 March 1941--Memphis, Tennessee.)

May 5, 2021

Frank McRae, Actor in ‘Licence to Kill’ and
‘Last Action Hero,’ Dies at 80

See the complete article here:

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/frank-mcrae-dead-actor-last-action-hero-1234967488/

Haley Bosselman

Courtesy of Universal/Everett Collection

Frank McRae, the actor who appeared in films such as “Licence to Kill” and “Last Action Hero,” has died. He was 80.

McRae died in Santa Monica, Calif. on April 29 as a result of a heart attack, his daughter-in-law confirmed to Variety.

The NFL player-turned-actor was born in Memphis, Tenn. A star athlete in high school, he went on to Tennessee State University as a double major in drama and history. McRae had a brief career as a professional football player and was the defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears and Los Angeles Rams.

Making the pivot to a new kind of stage, McRae found his calling in the entertainment industry. In his 30-plus years as a character actor, he appeared in over 40 movies. Standing at approximately six-and-a-half feet tall, McRae took advantage of scooping up tough guy roles in movies like “Hard Times,” “Big Wednesday” and “F.I.S.T.” with Sylvester Stallone. McRae would go on to appear in three more films with Stallone in the ’70s and ’80s, including “Paradise Alley,” “Lock Up” and “Rocky II.”

In the 1973 gangster film “Dillinger,” McRae played Reed Youngblood, a grinning inmate who helps Warren Oates’ titular John Dillinger escape. According to IMDb, he got the role by standing in a production executive’s parking space until granted a meeting. McRae also appeared in the 1989 James Bond film “Licence to Kill” as Sharkey, a close friend of Bond (Timothy Dalton) and Felix Leiter (David Hedison).

Not to be tied down to just playing tough guys and authority figures — he played a police captain four separate times from 1982 to 1983 — McRae was also featured in comedies like “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Batteries Not Included” and “Used Cars.” He even parodied his own role in “48 Hours” with a performance in 1993’s “Last Action Hero” alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger.

McRae is survived by his son Marcellus and his grandchildren Camden, Jensen and Holden. Donations in his memory can be made to Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an orphan elephant rescue and wildlife rehabilitation program in Kenya.

Frank McRae (I) (1941–2021)

Actor
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0574433/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

RichardTheBruce

April 30th

1945: Adolph Hitler commits suicide in the Führerbunker using a gold-plated Walther PP handgun.

1963: From Russia With Love conducts nighttime filming at the Sehzade Mosque, Istanbul.
1964: De Rusia con amor released in Argentina.

Pepe Sanchez, el segundo episodio (Wood - Vogt)
ariel_arq | 26 sep. 2012
https://www.taringa.net/+comics/pepe-sanchez-el-segundo-episodio-wood-vogt_upzsq
Hola de Nuevo, seguimos con mas del Genial Robin Wood, esta vez con el segundo episodio del inefable Pepe Sánchez, titulado "De Rusia con amor... tadela".

Si todavía no leiste el primero, podés hacerlo Acá

Un detalle... fíjense el "guiño" que le hacen en la historieta al genial Nippur.

Enjoy
https://issuu.com/vernemo/docs/de_rusia_con_amor-tadela_pepe_sanchez

1969: On Her Majesty's Secret Service films the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. James Bond in Estoril, Portugal.

1988: Ana de Armas is born--Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba.

2015: The BOND 24 production releases an on set photo of Dave Bautista as Hinx to the press.

2021: Opening Day Dining in the Street 007 James Bond Theme Night at The Handsome Cab, York, Pennsylvania.

Opening Day Dining in the Street 007 James
Bond Theme Night
Fri Apr 30 2021 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm UTC-04:00
The Handsome Cab | York

See the complete article here:

https://stayhappening.com/e/opening-day-dining-in-the-street-007-james-bond-theme-night-E2ISTJTUJN7

Publisher/Host
The Handsome Cab

The Handsome Cab, 106 N George St, York, United States

RichardTheBruce

May 1st

1929: Rik Van Nutter is born--Los Angeles, California.
(He dies 15 October 2005 at age 76--West Palm Beach, Florida.)

Rik Van Nutter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rik_Van_Nutter
Born: Frederick Allen Nutter - May 1, 1929 - Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Died: October 15, 2005 (aged 76) - West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.

Nationality American
Years active 1959-1979
Spouse(s) Anita Ekberg (1963-1975)

Rik Van Nutter (May 1, 1929 – October 15, 2005) was an American actor who appeared in many minor films and the James Bond picture Thunderball.

Career

He is best known for playing the third version of Felix Leiter in the James Bond film Thunderball (1965). He also had a role alongside Peter Ustinov in Romanoff and Juliet (1968), and his later films included Foxbat (1977) with Henry Silva and Vonetta McGee and the Jim Brown WW2 adventure Pacific Inferno (1979).

Personal life
Van Nutter was married to film actress Anita Ekberg from 1963 until 1975. They lived in Spain and Switzerland and started a shipping business together.

Death
Van Nutter died on October 15, 2005 at the age of 76.

Filmography

Year Title Role Notes
1959 Guardatele ma non toccatele Charlie
1959 Uncle Was a Vampire Victor Uncredited
1960 Space-Men Ray Peterson (IZ41)
1960 The Passionate Thief
1960 Some Like It Cold German Officer
1961 Romanoff and Juliet Freddie
1962 Tharus Son of Attila Oto
1965 The Revenge of Ivanhoe Ivanhoe
1965 Aventuras del Oeste Buffalo Bill Cody
1965 Thunderball Felix Leiter
1966 A Stroke of 1000 Millions Fraser
1967 Dynamite Joe Agent Joe Ford
1977 Foxbat Crays
1979 Pacific Inferno Dennis (final film role)

1945: Rita Coolidge is born--Lafayette, Tennessee.
1946: Joanna Lumley is born--Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir India.

1963: From a hospital bed in London Ian Fleming comments to wife Ann he is working on a children's book.

She replies: "Oh! those poor kids ...you'll frighten them to death with James Bond Jr.!"

1967: Roger Ebert reviews Casino Royale in The Chicago Sun-Times.

Casino Royale

See the complete article here:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/casino-royale-1967

| Roger Ebert | May 1, 1967 | 7

Cast

Peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble
Ursula Andress as Vesper Lynd
David Niven as Sir James Bond
Joanna Fetter as Mata Bond
Orson Welles as Le Chiffre

Directed by

Ken Hughes
John Huston
Val Guest
Robert Parrish
Joe McGrath

Screenplay by

Wolf Mankowitz
John Law
Michael Sayers

Production: Famous Artists, Ltd.,
Action, Adventure, Comedy, Foreign
Rated NR | 131 minutes

At one time or another, "Casino Royale" undoubtedly had a shooting schedule, a script and a plot. If any one of the three ever turns up, it might be the making of a good movie.

In the meantime, the present version is a definitive example of what can happen when everybody working on a film goes simultaneously berserk.

Lines and scenes are improvised before our very eyes. Skillful cutting builds up the suspense between two parallel plots -- but, alas, the parallel plots never converge. No matter; they are forgotten, Visitors from Peter O'Toole to Jean-Paul Belmondo are pressed into service. Peter Sellers, free at last from every vestige of' discipline goes absolutely gaga,

This is possibly the most indulgent film ever made. Anything goes. Consistency and planning must have seemed the merest whimsy. One imagines the directors (there were five, all working independently) waking in the morning and wondering what they'd shoot today. How could they lose? They had bundles of money, because this film was blessed with the magic name of James Bond.

Perhaps that was the problem. When Charles Feldman bought the screen rights for "Casino Royale" from Ian Fleming back in 1953, nobody had heard of James Bond, or Sean Connery for that matter. But by the time Feldman got around to making the movie, Connery was firmly fixed in the public imagination as the redoubtable 007. What to do?

Feldman apparently decided to throw all sanity overboard instead of one Bond, he determined to have five or six. The senior Bond is Sir James Bond (David Niven). He is called out of retirement to meet a terrible threat by SMERSH.

Unfortunately, the threat is never explained. Other Bonds are created on the spot. Peter Sellers is the baccarat-playing Bond. He meets Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) in a baccarat game. Why? The movie doesn't say.

The five directors were given instructions given only for their own segments, according to the publicity, and none knew what the other four were doing. This is painfully apparent.

There are some nice touches, of course. Woody Allen rarely fails to be funny, and the massive presence of Welles makes one wish Le Chiffre had been handled seriously.

But the good things are lost, too often, in the frantic scurrying back and forth before the cameras. The steady hand of Terence Young, who made the original Bond films credible despite their gimmicks, is notably lacking here.

I suppose a film this chaotic was inevitable. There has been a blight of these unorganized comedies, usually featuring Sellers, Allen, and-or Jonathan Winters, in which the idea is to prove how zany and clever everyone is when he throws away the script and goes nuts in front of the camera.

In comedy, however, understatement is almost always better than excess.

Sellers was the funniest comedian in the movies when he was making those lightly directed low-budget pictures like "I'm All Right, Jack." Now he is simply self-infatuated and wearisome. And so are the movies he graces.

One wishes Charlie Feldman had sat down one bright morning, early in the history of this film, and announced that everyone simply had to get organized.

1971: Diamonds Are Forever films at the Techtronics Plant (Johns Manville Gypsum Plant).

1985: George Pravda dies at age -- London, England.
(Born 19 June 1916-Prague, Czechia.)

George Pravda (1918–1985)
Actor

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0695590/

1987: This month Jonathan Cape publishes No Deals, Mr. Bond by John Gardner.

Between the Danish island of Bornholm and
the Baltic coast of East Germany a nuclear
submarine of the Royal Navy surfaces under
the cloak of darkness. James Bond and two
marines slip quietly from the forward hatch
into their powered inflatable and set off for a
lonely beach where they are to collect two
young women who have to get out in their
socks. Planed to seduce communist agents to
run for cover in the West, they have been
rumbled by the other side. Bond little knows
that this routine exercise is but the prelude to a
nerve-racking game of bluff and double-bluff,
played with consummate skill by his own chief
M against the East German HVA and the élite
branch of the KGB, formed out of Bond's old
adversary SMERSH.

Over a plain lunch in the sober dining room
in Blades, Bond learns of M's predicament. he
cannot tell the police what he knows about the
series of grisly murders of young women,
found with their tongues removed, which
occupy the day's headlines. Two of his
undercover 'plants' have gone; Bond must find
three others and conduct them to safety before
they meet a similar fate. The first he spirits
away from her Mayfair salon just as the next
strike is made, taking her with him to the Irish
Republic in pursuit of the second. But the
urbane HVA boss, Maxim Smolin, is ahead of
him this time, despite the astute ministrations
of the Irish police. The KGB is soon on the
scene, but nothing is at all what is seems, and
Bond finds he needs all his wits to negotiate the
labyrinth of double-crossing that is to lead him
to a bewildering showdown in a remote corner
of the Kowloon province of Hong Kong.

There, with only the trusted belt of secret
weapons specially devised by Q branch, he has
to fight a terrifying duel in the dark, with all
the cards in the hands of his opponents. No
Deals, Mister Bond is the sixth and by far the
best of John Gardner's OO7 adventures.

1992: Marvel Comics releases James Bond Jr. #5 Dance of the Toreadors.
Mario Capaldi, penciller. Dan Abnett, writer.

James Bond Jr. #5 Dance of the Toreadors

https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/comic/7836929/james-bond-jr-5
Released May 1st, 1992 by Marvel Comics

S.C.U.M. plans to take control of a nuclear power plant in England and blackmail the country out of one million pounds. Based on the TV episode of the same title aired 11-05-91.

Creators
Dan Abnett, Writer
Mario Capaldi, Penciller
Bambos Georgiou, Inker
Euan Peters, Colorist
Stuart Bartlett, Letterer

James Bond Jr Episode 26 Dance of the Toreadors


Also in Swedish:

1993: Dark Horse Comics releases James Bond 007: A Silent Armageddon #2.
John M. Burns, artist. Simon Jowett, writer.

James Bond 007: A Silent Armageddon #2

https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/92-437/James-Bond-007-A-Silent-Armageddon-2

Omega, the most powerful computer in the world, is the prize coveted by agents of CERBERUS -- a prize they will kill to possess. With Omega under CERBERUS' control, they will have access and control of a worldwide communications system. What will Bond do to prevent this silent coup, especially when Omega seems to be evolving a consciousness of its own?

Creators
Writer: Simon Jowett
Artist: John M. Burns
Letterer: Ellie de Ville
Editor: Dick Hansom & Jerry Prosser
Cover Artist: John M. Burns
Genre: Action/Adventure
Publication Date: May 01, 1993
Format: FC

1995: Dark Horse Comics releases James Bond 007: Quasimodo Gambit #3.
Gary Caldwell, artist. Don McGregor, writer.

James Bond 007: Quasimodo Gambit #3

https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/92-472/James-Bond-007-Quasimodo-Gambit-3

It's the shortest day of the year in the heart of the Big Apple and, for some, the last day. Maximillian "Quasimodo" Steel has found The Truth and all who stand in his way are targets. Her Majesty's finest, James Bond, is ready to stop him any way possible, but there's a final wild card in this deck and no one may live to see the light of tomorrow!

Creators
Writer: Don McGregor
Artist: Gary Caldwell
Letterer: Elitta Fell
Editor: Edward Martin III & Robert Conte
Cover Artist: Christopher Moeller
Genre: Action/Adventure
Publication Date: May 01, 1995
Format: FC

2008: John Murray publishes Samantha Weinberg's The Moneypenny Diaries: The Final Fling.

2019: A rotating selection of new [Bond] works from The Playboy Paintings ends this date.

‘Bond, James Bond’

https://frameexpeditions.com/bondjamesbond
A rotating selection of new works from The Playboy Paintings. 25 April 2018 - 1 May 2019

Exhibitions

Meet the Artist Inspired by Vintage
James Bond Movie Posters

See the complete article here:

https://airows.com/creative/jarren-frame-artist-inspired-by-vintage-james-bond-movie-posters

Jared Paul Stern | Jun 4, 2019

Jarren Frame is one to watch. The young South African-born painter's first solo show in New York City – titled 'Bond, James Bond' – sold out thanks to subject matter we'd like to see more of in the art world.

Jarren Frame

Exhibited at a loft in Soho, the 'Playboy Paintings' as Frame refers to them consist of 33 acrylic on wood paintings featured the 'recontextualization' of vintage James Bond movie poster art of the sort seen in foreign countries, with an additional nod to the cool illustrations seen in Playboy in the 1960s and '70s.

Jarren Frame

Frame first got the idea for them during a trip to Sardinia, where scenes from the 1977 classic The Spy Who Loved Me starring Roger Moore and a certain Lotus Esprit Turbo was shot. With iconic 007 imagery in mind, he created large scale reinterpretations in his own signature style.

Jarren Frame

“What I sought to do with the Playboy Paintings was neutralize some of the shame around sex and masculinity," Frame says. “As an artist, I render myself vulnerable to the risk of showing my impulses and being a channel for what I feel is going on in society at that moment, liberating myself from any self-judgement in what I’m creating.”

Jarren Frame

"'Bond, James Bond’ was created on such an impulse," he adds, noting that the key elements he had in mind were "fun, sex and champagne." A perfect formula as far as we're concerned, and the fun element is certainly something the modern-day brooding Bond could do with a bit more of.

Jarren Frame

Some of the paintings from the Bond series were acquired by boldface names such as Alex Pall of The Chainsmokers, socialite heir Barron Hilton, hip hotelier Jason Pomeranc and nightclub impresario Jason Strauss, and Frame's work is currently featured in high profile spots such as the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, Casa Apicii and Casa Malca Tulum, The Gramercy Park Hotel, and The Bowery Hotel.

Jarren Frame

Having had his fill of Bond for now, Frame is currently working on an ambitious new series of paintings that aim to 'frame the human experience' through the deconstruction of portraiture and historical narrative into the abstraction of line graphs, inspired by the daily information and data overload we.

We realize these artist types have to follow their creative impulses and all, but here's hoping Frame will turn his hand to more Playboy-style paintings in the near future. Until then we're saving some wall space and working on our martini game.

Jared Paul Stern

All products are independently selected by our team. Things you buy through our links may earn us a commission.

RichardTheBruce

May 2nd

1932: Bruce Glover is born--Chicago, Illinois.

1966: 007 contra Goldfinger released in Uruguay.

1967: CTS Studios in Bayswater, London, records the title song "You Only Live Twice" with a 60 piece orchestra.

1996: Hodder & Stoughton publish COLD, the final Bond novel by John Gardner. [Retitled Cold Fall in the US.]

In this white-knuckle 007 thriller,
John Gardner leads master spy
James Bond on a four-year search
for terrorists in the skies - and into
a deadly nest of doomsday killers.

The night that Flight 229 is torn apart
at Washington's Dulles Airport, killing
all 435 passengers aboard, a mission
begins that will become an obsession
for James Bond.

Who is responsible for destroying the
aircraft? Was it a straightforward act
of terrorism against a British-owned
symbol? An assassination aimed at
only one person? A ruthless attempt
to put the airline out of business? For
Bond, only one of the victims matters:
Principessa Sukie Tempesta.

The search for Sukie's killers will
turn out to be the most complex and
demanding assignment of Bond's
career. Across continents and through
ever-changing labyrinths of evil, he
follows the traces of clues into the
centre of a fanatical society more
deadly than any terrorist army. Its
code name is COLD: the Children of
the Last Days. What he finds there
could very well spell his own last days.

Once again John Gardner has
propelled James Bond squarely into
the path of high adventure, danger
and non-stop excitement.

JOHN GARDNER was educated in
Berkshire and at St John's College,
Cambridge. He has had many
fascinating occupations and was,
variously, a Royal marine officer,
a stage magician, theater critic,
reviewer and journalist.

As well as his James Bond
novels, most recently GoldenEye
and SeaFire, Gardner's other fiction
includes the acclaimed Secret
Generations trilogy and, most
recently, Confessor.

2002: Hodder & Stoughton publish Raymond Benson's sixth and final Bond novel The Man With the Red Tattoo.

In Raymond Benson's gripping new
James Bond novel, Bond returns to
Japan to face the terrifying threat of a
deadly biological weapon.

When a British businessman and his
family are killed in Japan by a virulent
form of West Nile disease, James
Bond suspects a mass assassination.
Investigating with the help of beautiful
Japanese agent Reiko Tamura and
his old his old friend Tiger Tanaka, Bond
searches for the killers and the one
surviving daughter, Mayumi.

Bond's discoveries lead him to
believe that two powerful factions
controlled by the mysterious terrorist
Goro Yoshida are playing God.
Between them they have created the
perfect weapon, one small and
seemingly insignificant enough to
strike anywhere, unnoticed.

With an emergency G8 summit
meeting just days away, Bond has
his work cut out for him discovering
when - and how - the next attack
will occur. It's a race against time as
Bond controls both man and nature
in a desperate bid to stop the release
of a deadly virus that could destroy
the Western world.

Raymond Benson is the author of Zero
Minus Ten, The Facts of Death, High
Time to Kill, Doubleshot, Never Dream
of Dying, and the novelizations of the
films Tomorrow Never Dies and The
World Is Not Enough. His Bond short
stories have been published in Playboy
and TV Guide magazines. His first
book, The James Bond Bedside
Companion, were nominated for an
Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best
Biographical/Critical Work and is
considered by 007 fans to be a
definitive work on the world of James
Bond. A Director of The Ian Fleming
Foundation, he is married and has one
son and is based in the Chicago area.

Praise for Raymond Benson



'Welcome back, Mr Bond. We've been waiting for you . . . Benson has
gone back to Bondian basics in a fast-moving world of bedrooms,
firm breasts, betting and bruises.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

'Spectacular chases, gory killings and a spot of sado-masochism . .
addicts of the genre will love it.' THE TIMES

2008: Original confirmed release date for BOND 22, back at an earlier time when negotiations pursued director Roger Mitchell.

RichardTheBruce

May 3rd

1972: Bruce Cabot dies at age 68--Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California.
(Born 20 April 1904--Carlsbad, New Mexico.)

Bruce Cabot, Film Actor, Dies; Playes the Hero in 'King Kong'

See the complete article here:

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 operations officer, Mr. Cabot cut down on his movie‐making. He spent much time in Europe during 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.”

The article as it originally appeared.
May 4, 1972, Page 48

Bruce Cabot (1904–1972)
Actor | Soundtrack

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0127677/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

https://youtu.be/YSX5Nz7aV7c

1997: Tomorrow Never Dies films Bond meeting Wai Lin.

2001: Hodder & Stoughton publishes Raymond Benson's Never Dream of Dying in the UK. Cover by Steve Stone.

NEVER
DREAM OF
DYING

After a moment's silence came the voice. "Here we are
again, Mister Bond. We seem to meet under the most
unusual circumstances."

Bond shot toward the voice, but then he heard
Cesari laugh behind him. Bond twisted again and fired.
There was silence and then the voice came from yet
another place in the dark.

"You're in my habitat now, Mister Bond," Cesari
said. "You can't see a thing, can you?"

Bond could hear Cesari's voice moving. He fired the
gun into the darkness again, but the laugh came from
a different direction.

Then the club struck him hard on the right shoulder
blade.

:"Have you had any strange dreams lately, Mister
Bond" Cesari asked as Bond fell to the ground in
agony. "You know what they say . . . never dream of
dying. It just might come true."

In Raymond Benson's chilling new James Bond
novel, 007 comes face to face at last with the
most cunning criminal mastermind he has ever
fought--the blind genius behind the brutal
organisation called the Union.

It begins in a movie studio in Nice, where
a police raid goes horribly wrong, with inno-
cent men, women and even children killed. It
continues in an English prison, where a corpse
discloses an intriguing secret about the Union.
The trail leads James Bond to Paris, where
he meets the tantalizing movie star Tylyn
Mignonne and embarks on a voyage of sensu-
al discovery.

But Tylyn is in mortal danger. Her former
husband, a volatile French film producer, has
not forgiven his glamorous ex-wife for ending
their trouble marriage--and he is connected
to the Union's thugs.

Meanwhile Bond's friend Mathis, a French
agent, has disappeared while tracking down
the Union's mysterious leader, Le Gérant.
Bond search for Mathis takes him to a
thrilling underwater brush with death, a chase
through a Corsican wilderness, a surprise
encounter with an old friend--and a final con-
frontation with a twisted criminal genius.

Raymond Benson is the author of Doubleshot,
High Time to Kill, The Facts of Death, and Zero
Minus Ten, and the novelizations of the films
World Is Not Enough and Tomorrow Never
Dies. A Director of The Ian Fleming Foundation,
he lives and works in the Chicago area.

2014: BBC Radio 4 Saturday Drama airs an audio production of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Saturday Drama

James Bond seems more interested in gambling at the Casino Royale than tracking down elusive SPECTRE chief Blofeld. Then he meets Tracy, emotionally disturbed daughter of mafia boss Draco.

Now he has a double motive: seek and destroy Blofeld, and prevent Tracy killing herself.

Impersonating a College of Arms official Bond infiltrates Blofeld's Swiss mountain-top lair. He learns that Blofeld and aide Irma Bunt are brainwashing young women. Why? Is biological warfare involved? Backed by 'M' and Draco, Bond mounts an air assault. But can he pin down monstrous Blofeld? And what will happen to Tracy?

Toby Stephens is on top form as 007. A stellar cast includes Joanna Lumley, Alfred Molina, Alex Jennings, Lisa Dillon, John Standing, Janie Dee, Lloyd Owen, Joanna Cassidy, Clare Dunne and Julian Sands, with Jarvis himself as the voice of Fleming.

Specially composed music: Mark Holden and Michael Lopez
Dramatised by Archie Scottney

Director: Martin Jarvis
Producer: Rosalind Ayres
A Jarvis & Ayres Production for BBC Radio 4.

2015: 007: Licencia para matar re-released in Barcelona, Spain.
2016: Science Daily announces a new botanical subgenus named Jamesbondia.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160503072555.htm

https://phys.org/news/2016-05-jamesbondianew-group-caribbean-james-bond.html

2017: Daliah Lavi dies at age 74--Asheville, North Carolina.
(Born 12 October 1942--Shavei Tzion, Israel.)

Obituary: Daliah Lavi

Actress whose memorable turn in the spoofy 1967 Casino Royale belied a prodigious talent

Israeli actress, singer and model Daliah Lavi arrives at London Airport, UK, 15th November 1967.
(Photo by Michael Stroud/Daily Express/Getty Images)

She came on the wing of the 1960s spoof spy thrillers, providing the glamour for a genre that had little to do with MI5 or national security but won audiences with sheer escapism. With her smouldering eyes and raven hair, the actress Daliah Lavi, who has died aged 74, fitted the bill perfectly, not just because of her exotic beauty, but for her linguistic skills and a typically Israeli sense of irony, which should have won her more serious roles.

Some might describe her as Israel’s answer to Italian star Gina Lollobrigida, who was active in the same era, or a brunette Brigitte Bardot. The great fortune of Lavi’s life was to meet the American actor Kirk Douglas when she was 10, and he was in Israel filming The Juggler near the village of Shavi Zion, in pre-Mandatory Palestine, where she was born.

The daughter of Reuben and Ruth Lewinbuk, who came respectively from Russia and Germany, informed Douglas that she wanted to be a ballet dancer. The actor convinced her parents to send her to Stockholm to study ballet. Two years later, he arranged a scholarship for her, but, after three years at the ballet school, low blood pressure put paid to her potential dancing career.

Instead she turned to acting and began her career in serious foreign films — only later moving to the lighthearted turns which helped to make her name.

Lavi’s first film, in 1955, made while she was still a teenager, was a Swedish adaptation of August Strindberg’s novel, The People of Hemso, and the young actress, who was fluent in numerous languages, found that her linguistic skills won her parts in several European ventures. She starred in German, French, Italian and Spanish films (changing her name to Lavi while living in Paris) and in a forerunner of her later roles, also appeared as a femme fatale in Blazing Sand (1960), described as a “matza western” in which she peformed an exotic dance.

Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) was her first American film and not only brought her to wider notice, but also won her a Golden Globe Award for most promising female newcomer. She starred in the film with George Hamilton, and it also reunited her with her early mentor and now co-star Kirk Douglas.

She was cast as the love interest opposite Peter O’Toole in Lord Jim (1965), based on Joseph Conrad’s novel and filmed in Cambodia and Malaysia. However, the film was not a huge success and within a year she was taking on less dramatic roles.

In 1966 she played a sexy double agent in The Silencers with Dean Martin and, in the same year, was a Russian princess in the British film parody The Spy with the Cold Nose.

But her place in cinematic history was assured the following year with her part as a secret agent in the James Bond spoof Casino Royale. She was part of an ensemble cast including David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Woody Allen and Orson Welles.

She was a mysterious woman who runs a gambling house in Nobody Runs Forever (1968) and was the villain, opposite Richard Johnson in Some Girls Do, the following year.

Her gothic horror film, The Whip and the Body, directed by Mario Bava and co-starring Christopher Lee as a sado-masochist aristocrat who seduces her won her some minor acclaim, and, after her last film, the western, Catlow in which she plays a Mexican rebuffed by Yul Brynner (1971) she left the world of film and rebranded herself as a singer, on the advice of Israeli actor Chaim Topol, who had persuaded her to record Hebrew songs for the BBC.

In an interview with the Boston Globe in 1964, just before the opening of Lord Jim, she admitted somewhat ruefully that her first love of dancing remained the pre-eminent one — the one, of course, for which Kirk Douglas had provided her ballet education.

Her new singing career in the ’70s was particularly successful in Germany where she was one of the most popular vocalists of her era. She made her greatest mark with Oh Wann Kommst Du? (When Will You Come? And Willst du mit Mir Gehen? (Will You Go With Me?)

Daliah Lavi’s three marriages, to John Sullivan, Peter Rittmaster and Gianfranco Piacentini ended in divorce. She is survived by her fourth husband, the businessman Charles Gans, whom she married in 1977, and their children Kathy, Rouben, Alexander and Stephen; grandchildren Sophie, Ben, Emma, Hannah and Levi; and sister Michal.

Daliah Lavi: born October 12, 1942. Died May 3, 2017

Daliah Lavi obituary

Glamorous film actor who made her name in spy spoofs of the
1960s

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/09/daliah-lavi-obituary
Ronald Bergan | Tue 9 May 2017 07.57 EDT


In the 1970s Daliah Lavi left the silver screen behind and started a new career as a singer. She was particularly popular in Germany. Photograph: Alamy

With the huge success of the James Bond film franchise, starting with Dr No in 1962, a plethora of spin-offs appeared throughout the 1960s. They followed the original recipe of exotic locales, an evil genius who wishes to take over the world, a laidback, oversexed super spy hero and a bevy of (mostly treacherous) beautiful women. Among the actors portraying the last of these was Daliah Lavi, who has died aged 74.

Almost all Lavi’s film career took place in that swinging decade during which she was most likely to be seen in miniskirt and kinky boots, or displaying her underwear. The multilingual Lavi (born in the British Mandate of Palestine) had already made several French, German, Italian and Hollywood films before she starred as a sexy double agent opposite Dean Martin in The Silencers (1966), the first of the “bosoms and bullets” Matt Helm series.

Continuing in the light-hearted parodic tone was The Spy With a Cold Nose (1966) – the title refers to a bulldog with a microphone implant – in which Lavi as a Russian princess slips into the bed of a British counterintelligence agent (Lionel Jeffries), something he has long dreamed of. Lavi, with her tongue firmly in her cheek, was one of the plethora of 007s in Casino Royale (1967) and, her dark hair in a high beehive, was an alluring and mysterious woman who runs a gambling house in London in the cold war thriller Nobody Runs Forever (1968). The run of spy spoofs ended with Some Girls Do (1969), in which she was a villain, opposing and attracting “Bulldog” Drummond (Richard Johnson).[/img]

Daliah Lavi with Dean Martin in The Silencers, 1966. Photograph: Alamy

She was born Daliah Lewinbuk in the village of Shavi Zion in what was to become Israel. Her Jewish parents, Reuben and Ruth, were Russian and German respectively. When Daliah was 10 years old, she met the Hollywood star Kirk Douglas, who was making The Juggler near the Lewinbuks’ village.

Discovering that she wanted to become a ballet dancer, Douglas arranged for her to get a scholarship to study ballet in Stockholm. However, after three years she was advised to give up dancing because of low blood pressure. It was then that she switched her ambitions to acting, making her first screen appearance while still a teenager in Arne Mattsson’s The People of Hemso (1955), a Swedish production based on the August Strindberg novel.


Daliah Lavi in The Spy With a Cold Nose, 1966. Photograph: Alamy

On her return to Israel, Lavi worked as a model and starred as a femme fatale in Blazing Sand (1960), a trashy “matzo western”, in which she does an exotic dance in a nightclub, a foretaste of her later roles in campy spy movies. Then moving to Paris, and changing her surname to Lavi, which means lioness in Hebrew, she won the part of Cunégonde in Candide (1960), an update to the second world war of Voltaire’s satirical novel.

She had an uncharacteristic part in Violent Summer (Un Soir Sur La Plage, 1961) as a girl found murdered on the beach after a fleeting sexual encounter. For her role as the beautiful Italian woman causing friction between a washed-up movie star (Douglas) and a temperamental newcomer (George Hamilton) in Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) – shot in Italy – Lavi won a Golden Globes award as the most promising female newcomer. One of her rare straight dramatic roles was as a young woman who brings comfort to the complex eponymous hero (Peter O’Toole) in Lord Jim (1965), Richard Brooks’s sluggish epic based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, and shot in Cambodia and Malaysia.


Daliah Lavi and Peter O’Toole in Lord Jim, 1965. Photograph: Alamy

But she had made only a slight impression in the films that preceded the spy spoofs, the exception being The Whip and the Body (1963), a gothic horror film directed by Mario Bava, the father of the Italian giallo genre. One of the fetish set pieces takes place on a beach when the cruel aristocrat (Christopher Lee) horsewhips his brother’s bride (Lavi), before they engage in sado-masochistic love play.


Daliah Lavi performing one of her biggest German hits

After a turn as a furious Mexican woman scorned by an outlaw (Yul Brynner) in the mediocre western Catlow (1971), Lavi deserted the silver screen and began a whole new career as a singer. The Israeli actor Topol had persuaded Lavi to make recordings of Hebrew songs for the BBC in 1969. She soon became one of the most popular singers in Germany, her biggest hits being Oh Wann Kommst Du? (Oh, when will you come?) and Willst Du Mit Mir Gehen? (Do you want to go with me?).

She is survived by her fourth husband, the businessman Charles Gans, and their three sons and daughter.

• Daliah Lavi (Daliah Lewinbuk), actor and singer, born 12 October 1942; died 3 May 2017

Daliah Lavi (1942–2017)
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0492002/

Filmography

Actress (33 credits)

1997 Duell zu dritt (TV Series)
- Manöver des letzten Augenblicks (1997)
1991 Mrs. Harris und der Heiratsschwindler (TV Movie) - Jill Howard

1975 Hallo Peter (TV Series)
- Episode dated 28 September 1975 (1975)
1970-1973 Die Drehscheibe (TV Series) - Singer
- Episode dated 29 November 1973 (1973) ... Singer
- Episode dated 25 August 1971 (1971) ... Singer
- Episode dated 25 July 1971 (1971) ... Singer
- Episode dated 6 June 1971 (1971) ... Singer
- Episode dated 23 April 1971 (1971) ... Singer 7 episodes
1972 Sez Les (TV Series)
- Episode #5.3 (1972)
1971 Catlow - Rosita
1970 Schwarzer Peter (TV Series) - Singer
- Episode #1.2 (1970) ... Singer

1969 Some Girls Do - Helga
1968 The High Commissioner - Maria Cholon
1967 Those Fantastic Flying Fools - Madelaine
1967 Casino Royale - The Detainer (007)
1966 The Spy with a Cold Nose - Princess Natasha Romanova
1966 The Silencers - Tina
1965 Ten Little Indians - Ilona Bergen
1965 Shots in 3/4 Time - Irina Badoni
1965 La Celestina - The Girl
1965 They're Too Much - Lolita, Charly's Step-sister
1964 Cyrano et d'Artagnan - Marion de l'Orme (as Dalhia Lavi)
1964 Old Shatterhand - Paloma
1963 Das große Liebesspiel - Sekretärin
1963 The Whip and the Body - Nevenka
1963 The Demon - Purificata
1962 Black-White-Red Four Poster - Germaine
1962 Two Weeks in Another Town - Veronica (as Dahlia Lavi)
1961 Le jeu de la vérité - Gisèle Palerse
1961 The Return of Dr. Mabuse - Maria Sabrehm
1961 Le puits aux trois vérités (uncredited)
1961 No Time for Ecstasy - Nathalie Conrad
1961 Violent Summer - Marie
1960 Candide - Cunégonde (as Dahlia Lavi)
1960 Blazing Sand

1955 The People of Hemso - Professor's Daughter

Soundtrack (6 credits)

2014 Tito's Glasses (Documentary) (performer: "Willst Du mit mir geh'n")
2010 Cindy Does Not Love Me (performer: "Willst du mit mir geh'n" (Original: "Would you follow me"))
2002 Richtung Zukunft durch die Nacht (performer: "Oh, wann kommst du?")
1996 Tohuwabohu (TV Series) (performer - 1 episode)
- Beweisstück 30 (1996) ... (performer: "Oh, wann kommst du?" - uncredited)
1973 Die Rudi Carrell Show (TV Series) (performer - 1 episode)
- Messe (1973) ... (performer: "Wär' ich ein Buch", "Auf 'ner Messe als antik" - uncredited)
1971 V.I.P.-Schaukel (TV Series documentary) (performer - 1 episode)
- Episode #1.1 (1971) ... (performer: "Wer hat mein Lied so zerstört" - uncredited)

Thanks (1 credit)

2008 The Making of 'Casino Royale' (Video documentary) (special thanks)

The Silencers 1966

The Spy with the Cold Nose, 1966

Nobody Runs Forever, 1968

Some Girls Do, 1969

Casino Royale, 1967





Liebeslied Jener Sommernacht (Love song that summer night)


Daliah Lavi - Willst Du Mit Mir Geh'n (Do you want to go with me) 1991

2017: Dynamite Entertainment releases James Bond Black Box Part 3 - Death Mask.
Rapha Lobosco, artist. Benjamin Percy, writer.

JAMES BOND #3

https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C72513025652203011
Cover A: Dominic Reardon
Cover B: Patrick Zircher
Cover C: Rapha Lobosco
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Art: Rapha Lobosco
Genre: Action/Adventure, Media Tie-In
Publication Date: May 2017
Format: Comic Book
Page Count: 32 Pages
ON SALE DATE: 5/3

Black Box Part 3: Death Mask
Saga Genji -- the tech mogul with Yakuza ties -- has dispatched the unforgettable henchman, No Name, to dispose of everyone's favorite secret agent. And James Bond doesn't know who to trust. A mysterious assassin seems to be helping him. Felix Leiter appears to be tailing him. 007 tries to stick to the shadows, but he'll be thrust into the spotlight at a deadly sumo tournament where the fight extends beyond the arena.

2017: Dynamite Entertainment releases James Bond Hammerhead as a special edition hardcover.
Luca Casalanguida, artist. Andy Diggle, writer. Francesco Francavilla, cover.

JAMES BOND: HAMMERHEAD HARDCOVER

https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C1524103225
Cover: Francesco Francavilla
Writer: Andy Diggle
Art: Luca Casalanguida
Publication Date: May 2017
Format: Hardcover
Page Count: 142+ pages
ON SALE DATE: 5/3

Bond is assigned to hunt down and eliminate Kraken, a radical anti-capitalist who has targeted Britain's newly-upgraded nuclear arsenal. But all is not as it seems. Hidden forces are plotting to rebuild the faded glory of the once-mighty British Empire, and retake by force what was consigned to history. 007 is a cog in their deadly machine - but is he an agent of change, or an agent of the status quo? Loyalties will be broken, allegiances challenged. But in an ever-changing world, there's one man you can rely on: Bond. James Bond.

RichardTheBruce

May 4th

1946: SMERSH, as named by Joseph Stalin for operations started in 1942, transfers duties to the KGB and ends its existence.

1960: Gautam Paul Bhattacharjee is born--Harrow, London, England.
(He dies 12 July 2013--Seaford, East Sussex, England.)

Paul Bhattacharjee obituary

See the complete article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/jul/18/paul-bhattacharjee

Elegant and meticulous actor whose work ranged from
Shakespeare to EastEnders

Paul Bhattacharjee as Benedick with Meera Syal as Beatrice in the RSC's Much Ado About Nothing,
directed by Iqbal Khan, at Stratford last year. Photograph: Nigel Norrington

Paul Bhattacharjee (1960–2013)

Actor
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0080335/

1981: New York Magazine reports that in the new John Gardner novels Bond drives a fuel-efficient Swedish auto.

New James Bond Isn't Fuelish

See the complete article here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=8eUCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq="ian+fleming"+"may+4"&source=bl&ots=HIygL9-nh2&sig=HrnYikwgmyzYk1YwjfeX_wzZr6M&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwik5-_a4-raAhWwd98KHYHZCh44HhDoAQg0MAI#v=onepage&q="ian fleming" "may 4"&f=false

Times change, and so do superagents. In a new series of James Bond books, 007 will forsake the British-made $109,000 Bentley that he drove in the Ian Fleming novels for a $19,000 "fuel-efficient" Swedish car.

A spokesman for John Gardner, the British novelist who's reviving Fleming's fictional hero, said Bond will now drive a Saab Turbo 900, "because this is the eighties, and it gets nineteen to a gallon to the Bentley's eleven".

Just so everyone gets the message, a Saab has been outfitted with those little 007 features--gun portholes and X-ray goggles for seeing in smoke--to ferry Gardner to a New York party this week to launch his first Bond book for publisher Richard Marek.

Still, Rolls-Royce, which makes the Bentley, is unimpressed.

"I knew Ian Fleming, and the James Bond he created was a chap who lived hard and played hard and didn't care about fuel economy said company official Dennis Miller-Williams.

And not forgotten.

2000: Hodder & Stoughton publishes Raymond Benson's fourth Bond book Doubleshot.

Meeting your double
means certain death.

Is this bizarre warning the catalyst for
a series of unsettling events that could
push James Bond close to the edge of
. . . madness?

The intricately organized criminal
conspiracy called the Union was vowed
its revenge on the man who thwarted
its last coup. Now, the Union's
mysterious leader sets out to destroy
James Bond's reputation and sanity
by luring the agent into a dangerous
alliance of deceit and treason with
a Spanish militatn intent on
reclaiming Gibraltar.

Officially on medical leave as a result
of a head injury sustained on his last
adventure, 007 ignores M's orders and
pursues clues that he believes might
lead him to the Union's inner circle.
His search takes him from the seedy
underbelly of London's Soho to the
souks of Tangier; from a terrorist
training camp in Morocco to a bullring
in Spain; and from the clutches of
a murderous Spanish beauty to a
volatile summit conference on the
Rock of Gibraltar.

Each step bring 007 closer to the truth
about the Union's elaborate, audacious
plot to destroy both SIS and its best
agent: James Bond.

Raymond Benson's gripping new
James Bond adventure is one of the
strangest - and most terrifying - the
agent has ever endured.

RAYMOND BENSON
is the author of HIGH TIME TO KILL,
THE FACTS OF DEATH, ZERO MINUS TEN,
and the novelizations of the films THE WORLD
IS NOT ENOUGH and TOMORROW NEVER DIES.
His Bond short stories have been published in
PLAYBOY and TV GUIDE magazines. His first
book, THE JAMES BOND BEDSIDE COMPANION,
was nominated for an Edgar Allen Poe Award
for Best Biographical/Critical work and is
considered by 007 fans to be a definitive work
on the world of James Bond. A Director of The
Ian Fleming Foundation, he is married and has
one son, and is based in the Chicago area.

P R A I S E _ F O R
RAYMOND BENSON

'Welcome back, Mr Bond. We've been waiting for you . . .
Benson has gone back to Bondian basics in a fast-moving
world or bedrooms, firm breasts, betting and bruises.'
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

'Spectacular chases, gory killings and a spot of
sado-masochism . . . addicts of the genre will love it.'
THE TIMES

2006: Craig Bond is shown in action for the first time in the teaser trailer.

2017: Doubleday publishes a special hardcover edition of Red Nemesis (Young Bond #9) by Steve Cole. Published this date in paperback by Red Fox.

https://www.youngbond.com/meet-the-characters-from-red-nemesis-coming-soon/

2020: An interview reveals how Pierce Brosnan got that Aston Martin Vanquish from Die Another Day.

Aston Martin Didn’t Want to Let Pierce
Brosnan Keep the James Bond V12
Vanquish

See the complete article here:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/aston-martin-didnt-want-to-let-pierce-brosnan-keep-the-james-bond-v12-vanquish-143214.html

4 May 2020, 4:45 UTC · by Elena Gorgan

Talk about a job with extra perks. Back in 2002, after Pierce Brosnan completed his fourth James Bond movie, Die Another Day, and was in the middle of the promo tour, word got out that he got to keep the Aston Martin V12 Vanquish that he’d driven in the film.

[James Bond's Aston Martin V12 Vanquish in Die Another Day]

It turns out, this wasn’t without a fight on the part of the actor. In a recent interview / livestream with Esquire from his Hawaii home, Pierce Brosnan revealed one unknown fact about how he became the owner of a brand new, custom-made Vanquish, after driving one as James Bond. The video is available in full at the bottom of the page.

He recalls how thrilled he was to visit Aston Martin and get to test drive the Vanquish, which marked the carmaker’s return to the 007 franchise after three movies in which Bond had only driven BMWs. Brosnan had assumed from the start that he would get to keep the car once shooting was completed, only to be told one day before the promo tour that it wouldn’t happen.

So he instructed his agent to let Aston Martin know that he “wouldn’t go anywhere near that car” at the next day’s press conference, where the Vanquish would be unveiled. Unless, of course, he was told (“in writing”) that he would get to keep the car.

Aston Martin relented and, three months after filming wrapped, a custom-made Vanquish showed up at Brosnan’s home. “There was no other car like it on the road,” the actor recalls with obvious melancholy. It did not come with any of the 007 gadgets, like the passenger ejector seat or the forward mounted machine shotguns with auto-aim assist, the grenades in the trunk or the rockets in the grille, and it certainly couldn’t turn invisible. But it was Brosnan’s and came with plaques that attested it.

The plaques are all that’s left of the beautiful car today. In 2015, a house fire at Brosnan’s Malibu home burned the Vanquish to a crisp, and all he has as a reminder today are the memories and the two plaques and eight bolts.

RichardTheBruce

May 5th

1944: John Rhys-Davies is born--Ammanford, Wales.

1963: From Russia With Love films the truck chase in Istanbul, Turkey.

1988: Michael G. Wilson completes the Licence to Kill screenplay, later credited as "from a story by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson".
1988: Adele Laurie Blue Adkins MBE is born--Tottenham, London, England.

1995: Ian Fleming's 1952 gold plated Royal typewriter sells for £56,250 ($90,309) at Christie's in London.

Ian Fleming's gold typewriter auctioned

https://upi.com/Archives/1995/05/05/Ian-Flemings-gold-typewriter-auctioned/7367799646400/
By PAUL BELSITO | May 5, 1995

LONDON, May 5 -- A gold-plated typewriter belonging to British author Ian Fleming, creator of the fictional spy James Bond, was auctioned in Christies' London auction house Friday for 56,250 pounds ($90,500). An anonymous bidder sent representative Tony Quinn to Christies to snap up the typewriter, with strict orders to buy it at any cost. 'They told me to keep bidding,' said Quinn, a psychotherapist with connections to the entertainment business. 'Just go in there and buy it. That was my brief.' Quinn, who is Irish, refused to reveal the identity of the buyer, although he said his colleague was involved in the film industry. 'He's a James Bond fan, but I wouldn't call him a collector,' he said. Quinn also confirmed the buyer was not British. The gold-plated typewriter, commissioned by Fleming from the Royal Typewriter Company in New York in 1952 for $174, was valued at between 5,000 and 8,000 pounds ($8,000 and $12,800), but Christies said they expected it to fetch a higher price. 'We knew it would sell for more than the listed price,' said Christie's press officer Freya Sims. 'We had a lot of interest from abroad and we had six telephone lines going.' Also auctioned were paraphernalia and works by Britain's World War II Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill to coincide with Victory in Europe Day, including a signed note fetching 18,000 pounds ($30,000). But these were overshadowed by fierce bidding for Fleming's typewriter, which drew gasps of excitement from the crowd as prices spiraled.

Fleming gained worldwide recognition as the creator of the famous 007 agent James Bond series. He bought the typewriter after writing the first draft of the first Bond novel 'Casino Royale'. In accordance with family tradition, Fleming used the machine to type all his subsequent novels. It remained in the family after his death in 1964.

Recommended reading.

1997: Walter Gotell dies at age 73--London, England.
(Born 15 March 1924--Bonn, Germany.)

Obituary: Walter Gotell

See complete article here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-walter-gotell-1256876.html

Tom Vallance | Friday 20 June 1997 00:02

A familiar figure of authority or menace in over 90 films and countless television shows, Walter Gotell was one of those reliable character players whose faces are well known but whose names are familiar to only a few. His balding, severe countenance made him the perfect KGB chief in several James Bond adventures, and in war films his crooked smile could quickly become a cruel sneer when he portrayed a Nazi.

Born in 1924, he went in 1943 straight from acting with a repertory company into films, which were suffering from a dearth of young actors due to the Second World War. His first films all dealt with the war - The Day Will Dawn, We Dive at Dawn, Tomorrow We Live, Night Invader (all 1943) and 2,000 Women (1944). Deciding to pursue a more secure business career, he gave up acting for several years. A man of strong intellect (he spoke five languages), he was an astute and successful businessman, but in 1950 returned to the screen with small roles in The Wooden Horse (a rare sympathetic, if enigmatic, role as a member of the French resistance), Cairo Road and Albert RN.

He was to work steadily for the next 40 years, though still combining acting with business (he ultimately became business manager of a group of engineering companies) and, in later years, farming.

In John Huston's fine film version of C.S. Forester's The African Queen (1951), Gotell was one of the German seamen who briefly capture Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn near the film's climax. Subsequent Nazi roles included Ice-Cold in Alex (1958), Sink the Bismarck! (1960, as an officer on the ill-fated battleship), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and a particularly chilling portrayal of ruthlessness in The Boys From Brazil (1978). In this last bizarre tale of Hitler clones, he was Mundt, an assassin despatched by Joseph Mengele (Gregory Peck) to kill the father of one of the clones. Recognising the victim (Wolfgang Preiss) as an old comrade from his days in the SS, he tells the man that he has a difficult assignment but lies about the identity of his intended victim. When his friend assures him that orders must be obeyed, he hurls the man over a snow-covered dam

As Morzeny, henchman of the memorable villainess Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) in the second and most distinguished James Bond film, From Russia With Love (1963), it was Gotell who, in the opening "teaser" sequence in which Bond (Sean Connery) is apparently assassinated, peels off the dead man's mask to reveal that it was merely a double being used in a lethal training exercise for a Spectre assassin.

In the first Bond film to star Roger Moore [incorrect statement], The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Gotell had a more prominent role as the KGB chief General Gogol, a role he continued to play in other Bond films, including Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985) and the first Bond to star Timothy Dalton, The Living Daylights (1987).

Gotell's prolific television work included the recurring role of Chief Constable Cullen in the popular BBC crime series Softly, Softly: Task Force, which ran for 131 episodes from 1970 to 1976. He was also featured in the mini-series The Scarlet and the Black (1983), in which Gregory Peck played his first dramatic role on television as a real-life Vatican official who aided escaped prisoners of war in Nazi-occupied Rome.

Gotell's last films included the fantasy Wings of Fame (1990) with Peter O'Toole and Colin Firth, and the hit comedy The Pope Must Die (1991). In recent years he had devoted more time to his farm in Ireland.

Walter Gotell, actor: born Bonn 15 March 1924; twice married (two daughters); died 5 May 1997.

Walter Gotell (1924–1997)

Actor
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0331770/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

1997: Putnam publishes the US edition of Raymond Benson's Zero Minus Ten.

ZERO
MINUS
TEN
RAYMOND BENSON

A new era of high adventure, intrigue, and
danger begins for James Bond with
Raymond Benson's eagerly awaited
007 thriller.

The clock is ticking for Hong Kong. On July 1,
1997, the British Crown Colony will be handed
over to the People's Republic of China. But hopes
for a peaceful transition are shattered when a
series of terrorist acts threatens the fragile rela-
tionship between Britain and China. A solicitor
from London is killed by a car bomb; a British "offi-
cer" retaliates by assassinating two officials visit-
ing from Beijing; an explosion eliminates the elite
of a major British corporation.

With ten days of British sovereignty left, James
Bond is dispatched to Hong Kong to investigate
these incidents and avert a political crisis that
could jeopardize the upcoming historic event.
He suspects there are connections with the
nefarious Chinese underworld Triad. But the
truth is difficult to uncover. Bond must navigate a
starting maze of characters--a suspicious British
taipan, a sinister Triad leader, a sadistic Chinese
general, and an exotic dancer with alluring,
seductive skills--before exposing a fiendish plot
of revenge, with roots reaching back more than a
century and a half.

Richly colored with the mysterious hues of the
Orient, where the unexpected is only to be
expected, Zero Minus Ten breathes new fire into
the classic James Bond series.

Raymond Benson is the author of The James
Bond Companion, which was nominat-
ed for an Edgar Allen Poe Award. A director of
The Ian Fleming Foundation, Mr. Benson is also
the designer and writer of several award-winning
software products. He lives in the Chicago area.

Jacket design, Thomas Tafuri.

Bond stood there for a moment, breathing heavily.
He was still filled with rage, an emotion he usually tried to avoid
because it could cause recklessness. This time, however, it served
as a goad. Blasting away the guards had actually felt good. My God,
he thought. This was what he lived for. It was no wonder that he
inevitably became restless and bored when he was between assign-
ments. Living so close to death was what invigorated him and gave
him the edge that had managed to keep him alive for so many years.

Feeling invincible, Bond walked outside into the broad daylight of
the courtyard. He didn't care that his clothes were wet and bloody.
He didn't care if the the entire Chinese army was waiting for him. He
was quite prepared to blast his was out of Guangzhou until he had
no more ammunition or he was dead, whichever came first.

2016: Random House publishes Steve Cole's Young Bond novel Heads You Die.

MEET THE CHARACTERS FROM HEADS YOU DIE

https://www.youngbond.com/meet-the-characters-from-heads-you-die/

The explosive action continues in Steve Cole’s second Young Bond adventure . . .

James’s Cuban holiday has become a nightmare mission to save an old friend from a villain who has perfected 1,000 ways to kill.

With corrupt cops and hired assassins hot on his heels, James must travel through Havana and brave Caribbean waters to stop a countdown to mass murder.

Fates will be decided with the flip of a coin. Heads or tails. Live or die.

James Bond
Diverting to Cuba on his way back from his last nail-biting adventure in Los Angeles, James Bond’s rest cure in the sun does not last long before his guardian is kidnapped and a terrifying adventure begins…

“James felt a flicker of self-doubt. Two against one, over a girl he’d never met before? He hadn’t meant to rival St George for chivalry, but if he walked away now . . .”

Scolopendra
A towering man of mixed ancestry with long, panther-black hair, who has taken his name from the breed of giant, deadly centipede he has discovered. His intricate knowledge of tropical flora and fauna makes him a poisonous individual in more ways than one. Scolopendra has risen from the gutters of Havana to become a rich, powerful and ruthless businessman no one sane would ever cross.

“There was a fierce, sensual hunger about Scolopendra’s proud face. He might have come late to the feast of the rich man, but it seemed that had only left him more determined to take all he desired.”

Jagua
Strong, proud and rebellious, Jagua is the daughter of Scolopendra. She hates him and longs to escape his controlling, abusive grasp. She is also a founder member of teen diving group, the Sociedad Suicidio – or, Suicide Club. Using homemade equipment she and her friends risk their lives to explore underwater wrecks off the coast.

“Her tennis pumps seemed at odds with her formal navy blue dress, but James supposed running away was harder in smart shoes – and judging by the wear on the rubber, running was something this girl did a lot.”

Maritsa
A tough Hispanic girl from a poor village, and Jagua’s best friend, she takes any chance that offers enjoyment in life.

“She was tall and painfully thin, with dark skin and long black hair thrown over her face; there was something feral about the features in the oval face.”

La Velada
Scolopendra’s woman is a mysterious figure dressed all in black and never seen without her veil. She has a mysterious past bound up with violence and betrayal – and knows just how to manipulate her dangerous lover. What is her true identity, and whose side is she really on?

“It was hard to see her face, but her hair was as dark as her simple but elegant satin dress. The fabric was decorated with long silk tassels so that when she walked, the whole garment seemed alive with whispering movement. A pointed chin and a hint of her smile, tight lipped and knowing, was all she chose to display.”

El Puño
A big bald block of Cuban muscle in a raincoat, El Puño is muscle for hire. His name means ‘The Fist’ – so named because when his hand was blown off in the Brazilian revolution, he had the stump crowned with a block of granite carved in the shape of a fist, fixed and pinned to the bone.

“As the Indian Four accelerated, James took out Queensmarsh, pulled the cocking lever up and forward, inserted a ball bearing in the barrel, and closed it. Jagua veered left, making for the narrow gap between El Puño and the wall. James aimed his pistol at the man’s neck and fired, but the metal pellet merely bounced off the fist as it swept down in a killer blow. James ducked inside the sidecar as the windshield was smashed clear off, and his head almost went with it.”

2021: Dynamite Entertainment releases James Bond Agent of Spectre #3.
Luca Casalanguida, artist. Christos Gage, writer.

JAMES BOND: AGENT OF
SPECTRE #3

Cover A: Aaron Lopresti
Writer: Christos Gage
Artist: Luca Casalanguida
Genre: Action/Adventure
Publication Date: May 2021
Format: Comic Book
Page Count: 32
ON SALE DATE: 5/5/2021

As Bond struggles with the fallout of the previous issue's shock ending, all bets are off. Double and triple crosses and being in bed with the enemy - sometimes literally - are the order of the day. Has Bond truly become no different than the members of SPECTRE he is now working for, or does he have a master plan that can work against impossible odds?

Today: Cinco de Mayo.

RichardTheBruce

May 6th

1915: Orson Welles is born--Kenosha, Wisconsin.
(He dies 10 October 1985--Los Angeles, California.)

A Cocktail Recipe For
Disaster: Peter Sellers And
Orson Welles On The
Making Of Casino Royale

See the complete article here:

https://sabotagetimes.com/tv-film/a-cocktail-recipe-for-disaster-peter-sellers-and-orson-welles-on-the-making-of-casino-royale

Take one deluded producer, two huge egos, four directors, five 007s and half-a-dozen writers. Sprinkle with cash, add jokes to taste, shake, stir - and voila! Casino Royale: a cocktail recipe for disaster
Richard Luck | Updated on Nov 2, 2015

Casino Royale must have looked an appetising prospect when it went into pre-production in 1965. The Saltzman/Broccoli Bond movies had established the playboy spy as a bankable commodity, and when producer Charles Feldman signed up comic genius Peter Sellers for his film version of Fleming's novel, he doubtless thought he had a licence to print money. Rather than breaking box-office records, however, Feldman's $12 million movie would devour its budget, fail to recoup its costs and destroy careers, including his own.

But Casino Royale was cursed even before Feldman optioned it in the early '60s. CBS, who had made a US TV movie of it in 1954, passed the option on to actor-director Gregory Ratoff. He signed to make a big-screen version for Fox in 1960 - only to die before a frame was shot.

As for Feldman, his problems began the day he hired Sellers - at the time one of the biggest movie stars in the world. The impact of his performances in Dr Strangelove, in addition to the commercial success of the Pink Panther movies, elevated Sellers to a position of rare power for a comic actor. Feldman knew from experience that Sellers was a draw - the actor had helped make a hit of the producer's giddy comedy What's New Pussycat? - so he agreed to pay the former Goon a then-unheard-of $1m to play accountant and Bond imposter Evelyn Tremble.

No sooner had he agreed terms than Sellers fell out with Feldman and began to act irrationally. He insisted that the producer hire his friend, TV director Joe McGrath, and refused to appear on set with co-star Orson Welles. Many concluded that the already eccentric Sellers had gone mad, especially after he came to blows with McGrath and then fled the set - never to return.

The impact of his performances in Dr Strangelove, in addition to the commercial success of the Pink Panther movies, elevated Sellers to a position of rare power for a comic actor

Peter Sellers' walkout seemed to spell the end of Casino Royale. But rather than capitulating, Charles Feldman reverted to his original plan and set about making a truly immense movie. Out went McGrath and original writer Wolf Mankowitz; in came a string of different directors - Val Guest, John Huston, Richard Talmadge, Robert Parrish, Ken Hughes - and a raft of screenwriters that included co-stars Woody Allen and David Niven, Hollywood legend Billy Wilder and groundbreaking novelist Terry Southern .

The end result has to be one of the strangest films ever made by a Hollywood studio. The combination of Sellers' walkout and Feldman's extravagance deprived Casino Royale of anything approaching structure and transformed it into a series of unconnected sketches. Worst of all, here was a comedy almost totally devoid of laughs.

It was to be Feldman's swansong: he died of stomach cancer within a year of the film's 1967 premiere. The paranoid Peter Sellers had predicted as much. "Feldman is going to die!" he once ranted, "and the reason he'll die is so he can blame me! He'll say, 'Sellers killed me!' He'll do it to spite me!"

Charles Feldman (producer): I love the movies, always have. I like money too, but only because it lets me make the movies I want to make.

Orson Welles (actor, Le Chiffre): The movies need people like Charles Feldman: rich, jolly, generous men who're happy writing cheques.

Val Guest (director): Charlie found out that, when he bought the book, all he got was the title. Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli had already used everything in the book except the baccarat game, so the whole thing had to be structured around that.

Woody Allen (actor, Jimmy Bond/Dr Noah): I was offered a lot of money and a small part. My manager said, "Why not? It could become a big movie." So I went to London. I was on a good salary and expense account. But they didn't film me for six months! I stayed in London at their expense for six months! That's only one example of how utterly wasteful the project was.

I once saw him on one phone to Peter Sellers, on a second to United Artists and on a third to the Italian government

Bryan Forbes (first-choice director): Charlie came into my life brandishing a copy of Casino Royale. He told me he wanted to have five James Bond and would guarantee me an all-star cast. "You can write it wherever you want. Do you like the south of France?" Gifts started to arrive - silk scarves, theatre tickets. Charlie was talking Monopoly money to secure my services. Every time I expressed doubts, he sweetened the deal.

Peter Sellers (actor, Evelyn Tremble): People will swim through shit if you put a few bob in it.

Woody Allen: Charlie was a genius. I once saw him on one phone to Peter Sellers, on a second to United Artists and on a third to the Italian government. He was a big-time charming con man and I never trusted him for a second.

Bryan Forbes: I said 'yes' to Charlie and then thought about the basic idiocies of the script. Five Bonds! That meant departing from the novel. I called one of Charlie's assistants who went into a fit on the phone. But I stuck to my guns.

Wolf Mankowitz (screenwriter): Peter Sellers was a treacherous lunatic. My advice to Feldman was not in any circumstances to get involved with Sellers. But Sellers was at his peak. I told Charlie that Sellers would fuck it all up.

Joseph McGrath (director): Feldman was glad to get Peter at any price. He'd put up the money for Sellers' insurance on What's New Pussycat? - after his heart attack, nobody would cover him.

Wolf Mankowitz: Charlie gave Sellers a Rolls Royce on the first day of shooting as a come-on.

Peter Sellers: I was offered $1 million to play Bond. I said, "You must be out of your bloody minds - what about Sean Connery?" Feldman said, "Yes, I know, but I have this book and I'm going to make it." I said, "I certainly can't play Bond!"

Wolf Mankowitz: Charlie Feldman offered Peter more and more money to play 007. In the end, the fee was so large Peter would have been mad to turn it down.

Peter Sellers: I wanted to play James Bond the way Tony Hancock would play him. But Ian Fleming's people would never have allowed it.

Wolf Mankowitz: In the end, Peter didn't play Bond. He played Evelyn Tremble. "Who's Evelyn Tremble?" everyone asked. Nobody knew. But then we didn't know who Sellers was either.

Charles Feldman: The only way to make a film with Peter is to let him direct, write and produce it as well as star in it.

Wolf Mankowitz: Sellers wanted different directors; he wanted to piss around with the script. He knew nothing about anything except doing funny faces and funny voices.

Joseph McGrath: Peter asked me if I'd be interested in directing a film he'd agreed to star in. I said, "I'd be delighted to." And that's where the trouble started.

Wolf Mankowitz: By Casino Royale, Peter Sellers was pretty well round the bend and couldn't function properly. He'd change the order of shooting. He'd be 'unavailable' or constantly change his timing, making it hard to splice material together.

Sellers was frightened of the scale of Orson - his legend, literally his weight and immensity.

Orson Welles: Sellers wasn't terribly bright, but he came on as the great actor.

Joseph McGrath: One of the problems that blew the film apart was that Orson and I got along really well. And Sellers got really annoyed. "I didn't think you and Orson would take sides against me." I said, "I'm not - but Orson thinks we can come up with some funny stuff." Sellers replied, "I'll only attempt to come up with funny stuff so long as he's not here." He was frightened of the scale of Orson - his legend, literally his weight and immensity.

Wolf Mankowitz: I'll never forget the occasion Orson and I, two rather large fellows, were in the lift. The door opened and Sellers was there. Sellers wasn't talking to Orson, and he was none too keen on me either. He wouldn't go down in the lift with us - said it wasn't safe. Orson was pissed off. "What the fuck is he talking about?" "I think he means the combined weight, Orson." "What the fuck does he weigh? Skinny as a shrimp. Looks like a shrimp, come to think of it."

Joseph McGrath: Orson didn't have the same attitude about his career as Peter did. Peter was what he did. Orson thought, I'll be here for four weeks, let's enjoy ourselves. Peter's thing was: My career is on the line.

Wolf Mankowitz: Peter was terrified of playing with Orson and converted this into an aversion for him.

Joseph McGrath: Orson would come onto the set at 9am prompt, sit down at the baccarat table and say, "So, Joe, where's our thin friend today?"

Orson Welles: Sellers was very proud of how thin he was. Apparently, he'd taken a lot of pills to help shift the weight. If you listened to him talking, you'd think it was the greatest achievement of his career.

Wolf Mankowitz: Sellers claimed Orson was surrounded by a dark aura and said it would not be healthy for him to be close to Orson. He was incredibly superstitious. He was obsessed with horoscopes, tarot cards and colours.

Peter Sellers: Green has been a superstition of mine for a long time. And purple. Vittorio De Sica told me, "My dear Peter, purple is the colour of death." And certain shades of green. The hard, acidy green is bad. I pick up strange vibrations from it. It disturbs me.

Wolf Mankowitz: Sellers was completely obsessed with royalty. He was always going on about Princess Margaret. His biggest thrill was to present people to her.

Orson Welles: The fact that Princess Margaret was stopping by every day at my house was unknown to Sellers. One day she came to the set to have lunch with Peter, or so he claimed. He couldn't wait to tell the cast and crew who he was dining with. Then she walked past him and said, "Hello, Orson, I haven't seen you for days!" That was the real end. That's when we couldn't speak lines to each other. "Orson, I haven't seen you for days!" absolutely killed him. He went white as a sheet, because he was going to present me!

Joseph McGrath: Peter and I had a fist fight in his caravan. He threw a punch and I hit him back. We got separated by Gerry Crampton, the stunt coordinator. "I love you both. I don't know who to thump first," Gerry said. Sellers and I started laughing and crying, but I said, "There's no point going on, because somebody's going to hit somebody again." And he did.

Peter Sellers: If I find myself surrounded by stupid people, I get rid of them.

Joseph McGrath: After I was fired - at Peter's request - Sellers phoned and said, "Come back! Feldman's going to give you a Rolls Royce." I said, "I don't want one." Two years later, I was in LA and Jerry Bressler, who got a credit on Casino Royale as an executive producer, pulled up in a white Coriniche. "Are you Joe McGrath?" he said. "I'm driving your Rolls Royce!"

Peter Sellers: In the end, Peter did one of his celebrated walkouts.

Ken Hughes (director): Peter stated that he was not prepared to complete the movie. Casino Royale came to a ghastly halt. Charles Feldman was left with a few scenes shot with Sellers but no movie. He had to consider closing down. But big money was involved and he decided to go ahead.

Joseph McGrath: It's hard to finish a film when you lose your star.

Ken Hughes: At a panic script meeting, it was decided that since they no longer had Sellers, they'd have to improvise. The writers were working like crazy trying to save the day. Feldman hired everyone in sight: Woody Allen, David Niven, John Huston. It was total chaos. Units were shooting in three studios. I was shooting at Shepperton, another unit was shooting at MGM. And none of us saw a completed script. I had to call the director at MGM to find out what he was shooting so I'd know how it dovetailed into what I was shooting.

Orson Welles: At the end of it, Charlie Feldman hired John Huston to direct and John moved everybody to Ireland because he wanted to go fox hunting.

Ken Hughes: The end result speaks for itself - a mish-mash that came into being because the star had walked out.

Wolf Mankowitz: The film doesn't make any sense. Because of Sellers it was cut, re-cut, screwed around with a thousand different ways.

Joseph McGrath: Peter told me years later, "I don't have a lot of friends, but I can trust you. Because we've been through hell together. You've actually faced me and thrown a punch at me. I know you won't put up with any shit.

Peter Sellers: I am not a funny man. I don't have a strong comedy personality. But even without that, you can be successful if the material is funny.

Woody Allen: I never bothered to see Casino Royale. I knew it would be horrible. The set was a madhouse. I knew then that the only way to make a film is to control it completely.

Peter Sellers: The making of that film would make an interesting film in itself.

Orson Welles (1915–1985)

Actor | Director | Writer
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000080/

Terry O'Neil photo

1950: Jeffrey Deaver is born--Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

1985: Columbia releases title song "A View to a Kill" performed by Duran Duran as a US 7" single and other formats.

1999: The World Is Not enough films the first kiss for OO7 and Elektra.
1999: Hodder & Stoughton publish the third Raymond Benson Bond novel High Time to Kill. The first copyrighted by Ian Fleming Publications (formerly Glidrose Publications).

2008: Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko are photographed at open-air theatre 'Festbuehne' in Konstanz, Austria.

2014: The Guardian praises the new James Bond novel Solo by William Boyd.

Solo: A James Bond Novel review – Has
William Boyd outdone Ian Fleming?

See the complete article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/06/solo-james-bond-novel-william-boyd-ian-fleming-review

Boyd's spy romp has got the tone just right and offers a
plausible peek behind the curtains of British intelligence
Nicholas Lezard | Tue 6 May 2014 05.08 EDT

Perhaps the most serious author to take up the Bond baton … William Boyd.
Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

It's a curious phenomenon, the rise of the semi-canonical sequel. It's a return to the nursery, a kind of fan-fiction, and a reluctance to accept that the final page of the book is the end of the story. Particularly prone to this is James Bond's audience, appropriately enough, given that the Bond books are basically adolescent in appeal (which is not to say this is a bad thing). Those written by Ian Fleming are now hugely outnumbered by those that aren't. The exercise was given an immediate pseudo-legitimacy by Kingsley Amis, who published the first post-Fleming Bond story, Colonel Sun, in 1968; more recently, Sebastian Faulks gave the franchise further respectability with Devil May Care.

William Boyd is, with Amis, and pace Faulks, perhaps the most serious, or most respected author to take up the Bond baton. One does wonder why? He can hardly need the money, or the potential risk to his reputation. Amis put his finger on it, perhaps, when he said we want to be Bond: and the "we" here also means "writers". We have long gone past the point when Bond stories were taken seriously, if they ever were; as the films have, for most of the last 40 years, been travesties of the original concept, Bond is a barrel whose bottom has been scraped right through, and now represents only a kind of Ukip masturbation fantasy in this country (remember that union jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me?) and formulaic high jinks elsewhere.

That said, I have to admit that I found Solo at least as fun as everyone said it was, and at times I found myself wondering if Boyd had outdone Fleming – that is, constructed a plausible look behind the curtains of British post-imperial intelligence, with the adventure, sadism and sex ramped up. Bond – aged 45 now, in 1969 – is sent to a civil-war-torn imaginary African state ("Zanzarim") to get close to the brilliant general whose tactics are making the government's job difficult. The British interest resides in the fact that the country is sitting on an enormous amount of untapped oil. Bond's job is to make the general "a less efficient soldier", in M's words.

And, as romps go, it romps. Bond still drinks and smokes too much; indeed, Boyd seems to have decided that Bond's Morlands are a bit lightweight has him smoking African cigarettes instead, which, if my experience is any guide, feel like grenades going off in your chest. (There is another joke that has Bond reading Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter as part of his preparation. Bond is famously unliterary.) The tone is just right; on the qui vive for solecisms or anachronisms, I found none. Even the baddy is perfectly judged: with a disfigured face, and one eye that cannot stop weeping; a brilliant touch. This is a powerful and smoothly running entertainment machine.

But, but. I would strongly recommend not reading this if you have recently read a Fleming Bond. It was Martin Amis who said of novels that each of them displays, pinned and wriggling, the novelist's soul for all to see. This applies across genres, and part of the savour of Fleming's work is the way we get to peer behind his curtains, too. For Fleming, sadism was not assumed, it was part of his being. There is none of Bond's – how best to put this? – reprehensible attitude to women here, or homosexuals, or anything else (bar a little drink-driving) that might jar with contemporary standards. A tacit clean-up job has been done on the seamier aspects of the spy's character, which is a failure of nerve, if an understandable one; although at least when he somewhat implausibly acts the valiant knight, defending a woman's honour, he does so with satisfying violence. Also, Boyd has chosen to ignore the events of Fleming's final, exhausted Bond novels – as well as his fondness for the exclamation mark. There is, besides, the nagging sense that Bond is a little too decent here. He was never a bounder in the Fleming books – only his smile was cruel – but after the scene where he tries to rescue some starving children, I couldn't quite get the title of Boyd's first novel out of my head: A Good Man in Africa.

2020: Free comic day(s) on Graphite includes some Dynamite Entertainment, apparently.
(The real world Free Comic Day is on hold.)

https://www.graphitecomics.com/s/james bond

RichardTheBruce

May 7th

1959: Kevin McClory and Ivar Bryce meet with Ian Fleming to discuss the production of Bond films.

The Battle for Bond, Robert Sellers, 2007.
Chapter 1 - The Irish Maverick

On 7 May McClory and Bryce met with Fleming at Claridges and declared
Xanadu's intention to bring Bond to the cinema screen for the first time.
Fleming was happy to agree to them using the character of James Bond but
asked McClory to send him an official letter on the company's notepaper
confirming their interest.

1968: Wilhelm Bertram photographs Diana Rigg at Dusselforf.

1997: BOND 18 films the remote control BMW Series 7 E38.

http://www.spencer1984.com/review/pauls-model-art-007-bmw-750il.php


https://www.flickriver.com/photos/29987108@N02/25952672605/

1998: Hodder & Stoughton publishes the second Raymond Benson Bond book The Facts of Death.

2003: Sir Roger Moore is stricken while performing on Broadway. He's fitted with a pacemaker the next day.

2016: Deadline publishes "The Stakes Behind The James Bond Rights Auction As Warner Bros And Others Try To Win 007’s Loyalties From Sony".

The Stakes Behind The James Bond Rights Auction
As Warner Bros And Others Try To Win 007’s Loyalties
From Sony

See the complete article here:

https://deadline.com/2015/10/daniel-craig-james-bond-sony-warner-bros-mgm-daniel-craig-1201528241/

By Anita Busch, Mike Fleming Jr | October 30, 2015 8:10am

Ask anyone in the hunt for the next batch of James Bond films that are now up for grabs, and this is what you’ll hear, as voiced by one exec whose studio is among those in the chase: “They might not say they’re actively shopping it, but they are certainly making it known their deal is up and they will be.”

The James Bond distribution deal with Sony is done after Spectre bows in the U.S. on November 6. It could stay at Sony or it could head to Warner Bros., or Fox (which handles MGM’s home video), or Universal, and Paramount. Or even Disney, where Bob Iger has shown the wisdom of making big bets can work out in buying out whole companies like Marvel and Lucasfilm for cash and stock.

At a time when studios are hungrier than ever for proven global franchises, James Bond is Hollywood’s longest-running success story. Consider that 50 years after Sean Connery launched the character in 1962’s Dr No, 007’s last outing Skyfall became the series’ biggest grossing film, topping out at $1.1 billion globally. With Daniel Craig and that film’s director Sam Mendes a week away from the U.S. launch of what might be their last Bond film together, there is every expectation that Spectre will chase that high-water gross mark. It already opened briskly overseas.

So it’s not surprising that a hit-starved studio like Warner Bros, or any other major, would covet the franchise. Indeed, sources sighted Warner Bros chief Kevin Tsujihara at the Montage Hotel recently with Gary Barber, the point person at MGM whose job it is to figure out the distribution future of 007 for MGM and Danjaq producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. According to our source, the chatter seemed more intense than a meet and greet. It looked like they were throwing around numbers. Not surprisingly, Warner Bros has been oft mentioned as the most aggressive in this hunt.

What’s odd about this is that nobody is saying that Sony hasn’t done a fine job in marketing and releasing the Bond films. But the last deal was made by Amy Pascal, and she is no longer in charge. The new guy in the seat, Tom Rothman, is known from his days running Fox as a tough, bottom-line-minded executive who most feel would walk away from a deal that gave the studio market share at the expense of profit. Indeed, some say that at Pascal’s urging, Sony gave up too much the last time around to keep 007 in the fold.

The Wall Street Journal rifled through those hacked Sony documents and pried out a memo that underscores the troubling risk-reward disparity. According to WSJ, co-financing and marketing and releasing Skyfall brought Sony $57 million on a film that grossed $1.1 billion globally. MGM, in turn, made $175 million, while Danjaq made $109 million. And that doesn’t factor in all the other things Sony gave up and the movies like the 21 Jump Street franchise that MGM was kissed into when the last re-up deal was made. Some would consider the math on this to be on par with the old first-dollar gross deal scenarios which became toxic to studios when owners like Sumner Redstone realized that a star like Tom Cruise had earned way more than $50 million on a Mission: Impossible movie through first-dollar gross participation before Paramount — which financed the whole film –had even recouped its outlay. His generous portion on video pushed that payday to an estimated $80 million.

So much is up in the air right now on 007. First off, the odds are against Craig and Mendes returning for another go, which would mean starting again with a new actor even though reports indicate Craig might owe one more film to fulfill his contract. When Craig recently observed that he would rather “slash his wrists” than do another Bond movie, it certainly echoed loudly around Hollywood, even if those close to him attributed it mostly to the bad idea of putting Craig in front of a journalist right after he completed a time-press and arduous Spectre shoot in which he seriously injured his knee. It would be similar, they said, to asking a woman just out of childbirth how eager she was to have another.

Here’s what we hear. 007 rights gatekeepers Barber, and Wilson and Broccoli, will wait until Spectre plays around the world and accumulates an ungodly global gross that will only strengthen their leverage. And then, early next year, they will make the best deal. If that means bidding farewell to Sony, so be it.

Sony had initially gotten rights to Casino Royale years ago in a deal orchestrated deftly behind the scenes by former Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO John Calley, who revived James Bond while head of United Artists. Because of that, Sony released Casino Royale with a new Bond — Craig — and grossed about $600M worldwide.

When it came time to re-up, Pascal was running the studio and people are still debating whether her zeal to keep Bond led Sony to give up too much. On the plus side, Pascal was invited to have a creative voice in the process over the last few films. Sony co-financed movies that were big hits, and received a distribution fee that some say was capped.

But it was the other concessions granted by Sony that still has tongues wagging. Sony offered up some of its plum projects to be co-financed by MGM. At the time, the sexiest one the studio had was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. That film, which starred Craig, went into the pot and while the movie didn’t come close to meeting everyone’s out-sized expectations, 21 Jump Street — another film offered up for co-financing — certainly did. MGM got to be part of that hit and its sequel and presumably will be part of the next film that is rumored to meld that series with Men In Black. Sony, in turn, got to co-finance and release some MGM films, including the Robocop remake. Sony is now gearing up for another Dragon Tattoo installment with The Girl In The Spider’s Web, the book written by David Lagercrantz, who was installed by the rights-holder relatives of the late author Stieg Larsson. Pascal is a producer on that movie, and MGM is expected to be in the mix if the studio wants to be.

The proceeds from these co-fi deals went into into a split pot, but the unsung coup for MGM was that it got to broker almost all of the international TV deals. That studio was still getting back on its feet after being frozen in a bankruptcy, and it’s believed they didn’t have the kind of clout to get as high a price as Sony would have. It also left Sony’s loyal global customers on the outside looking in because MGM was making the deals and had its own list of customers. The prospect of all that led to widespread internal disagreements within Sony divisions over whether the studio should make such a deal, but Pascal won the day.

Two blockbusters and Spectre later, and Pascal is now off producing movies. And the studio will have some serious decisions to make as it formulates how crucial it is to keep James Bond. Many believe that no studio will replicate the horse trading that took place in the last Sony 007 deal. It is an open question whether another studio will find some ground on which they can get the market share bragging rights that come with 007, while not feeling they made a loss leader deal.

If ever MGM was going to get back into the distribution business — it disbanded distribution when it emerged from bankruptcy and has placed big movies like the Ben-Hur and The Magnificent Seven remakes all over town — the 007 franchise would be the one to relaunch. That’s always an option, but more of a long shot than the notion of Craig returning to His Majesty’s Secret Service.

The betting here is that if Sony’s brain trust led by Michael Lynton and Rothman won’t do it, another big studio like Warner Bros — which successfully partnered with MGM on the billion-dollar The Hobbit trilogy — will swallow hard and make the deal. Tsujihara and Barber are tight, and you can bet that Warner Bros will move heaven and earth to make a hit out of MGM’s upcoming Rocky film Creed, the Ryan Coogler-directed film that opens Thanksgiving with Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan starring. Is it too much to imagine that soon, the most important entries on Tsujihara’s call sheet will be Barber, along with Harry Potter author JK Rowling and James Packer?

2016: The London on Water's final day to feature James Bond's Spirit 54 yacht Soufrière.

James Bond’s yacht Soufrière to be showcased at
London on Water show this weekend

See the complete article here:

https://www.ybw.com/boat-events/james-bonds-yacht-soufriere-to-be-showcased-at-london-on-water-show-17563

Stef Bottinelli | 06.05.2016

The beautiful Spirit 54 yacht Soufrière, which appeared in Casino Royale, will be on show at
the London on Water show at St Katharine Docks 4 - 7 May.

The Spirit 54’, which starred alongside Daniel Craig and Eva Green in Casino Royale, is perhaps Spirit’s most iconic yacht. Following her movie début, the yacht was sold and went on to enjoy subsequent years’ cruising and participating in competitive racing.

Spirit Yachts will be displaying the stunning Soufrière at this year’s London on Water show, which takes place at St Katharine Docks from 4 – 7 May.

The beautiful Spirit 54 had quite the role when she starred alongside Daniel Craig and Eva Green in James Bond’s 2006 film Casino Royale.

Soufriere from Casino Royale

Following her film debut, Soufrière was sold and enjoyed subsequent years’ cruising and participating in competitive racing. She was then returned to Spirit Yachts to complete a refit and is now for sale through Spirit’s brokerage department for £600,000.

Spirit Yachts CEO and head designer Sean McMillan comments, “Soufrière was designed specifically for Casino Royale following the production company’s search for a classically elegant, unique, British built yacht. The scene in which Daniel Craig and Eva Green glide into Venice onboard Soufrière granted her a place in British film history. What better place to re-launch her to the public than London; the home of James Bond?”

Describing the filming of Casino Royale, McMillan adds, “Probably the most challenging voyage for Soufrière came during filming in Venice when we had to take the rig in and out ten times; she was the first sailing yacht to go up the Grand Canal for 300 years.”

Soufrière was recently given a fresh coat of paint on her elegant ice blue coloured hull and all external varnish was stripped and re-varnished where necessary. The interior woodwork has been re-varnished where required and all equipment from the engine to the rigging has been inspected and serviced. She will be on display in berth C09 at the London show.

Also on display at the London show in berth C10 will be the Spirit P40, a sophisticated 12 metre power boat whose clean lines and impeccable design are synonymous with Spirit Yachts’ modern classic style.

2017: Hello Monaco and Olga Taran celebrate resident Sir Roger Moore.

Sir Roger Moore: James Bond of
Monaco

See the complete article here:

https://www.hellomonaco.com/mc-lifestyle/mccelebrities/sir-roger-moore-james-bond-of-monaco/

7 May , 2017

Roger Moore is a famous British actor who will perhaps always be remembered for his role as James Bond in seven of the 007 series films from 1973 to 1985. As he played the role of a dashing spy, Moore also found himself a home fit for James Bond in the glamorous Principality of Monaco.

Roger Moore and the Princely couple. Source: www.thesun.co.uk

He came from considerably humble beginnings, born on October 14th 1927 in London, England to his policeman father and housewife mother. He was a good student, attending prestigious schools and was also a talented swimmer. However his passion was to act, and so at the age of 15 he chose to drop out of school to pursue a career in acting, becoming an animation apprentice at a London film company as his first job in the field.

Source: www.vanityfair.fr

Moore’s rise to fame proved to be quite an uphill battle; he was quickly fired from his first job, it was difficult to be recognized and land important roles, and his budding acting career was interrupted at age 18. Shortly after World War II ended, while he was attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts paid for by director Brian Desmond Hurst who saw the potential in Roger, he was drafted into the military. He was stationed in Germany for about three years, during which time he married his first of four wives actress Doorn Van Steyn, before he was able to return to London to continue his career where he left off.

Source: roger-moore.skynetblogs.be

His desire to pursue his acting dreams kept him inching forwards regardless of the difficulties thrown his way. In 1953 his battle led him to America, where he was welcomed with open arms for his good looks and skills as an actor, as well as his performance in his first TV show World by the Tail. It was during this period that Roger Moore finally got the attention he deserved. Major Hollywood Studios were suddenly interested in this British gentleman, and soon after Moore signed his first contract with MGM he appeared in his first big role in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954). Disappointedly though, after starring in a few other movies for MGM, his time with this production company proved to be fruitless as Moore was still far from becoming a Hollywood star.

Source: roger-moore.skynetblogs.be

This prompted Roger Moore to try his luck elsewhere, signing next with Warner Bros, the company that would finally propel his career into stardom. It was with this production company that Moore began to star in popular TV shows, including The Saint (1962-69) that made him a household name. It was thanks to his performance in that show and in the 1970 film The Man Who Haunted Himself that he proved himself as an actor and ultimately landed the role that would completely revolutionize his career: James Bond.

Sir Roger Moore. Source: roger-moore.skynetblogs.be

Roger Moore effectively replaced the previous 007 agent, Sean Connery, who was tired of playing the role, and in 1973 he filmed his first film with the franchise, Live and Let Die that ended up being a great success, as it grossed more than the previous film starring Connery. A great start for Moore who went on to film another six Bond films! In 1985 he had enough of playing the part of a dashing spy and announced his retirement from the series, and though he still appeared in several other movies post-Bond, none would reach the same levels of success as the Bond series.

Source: roger-moore.skynetblogs.be

Not only did Roger Moore fight to be successful but also fought against various health scares throughout his life, including prostate cancer, heart trouble and type II diabetes, as well as three failed marriages. Nevertheless he remained charitable, serving as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 1991 and receiving an International Humanitarian Award from the London Variety Club for his involvement in various charities.

Moore now lives in Larvotto, the Principality’s seafront, from about 2002 when he met his current wife Kristina Tholstrup at a dinner party in Monaco; the two quickly fell in love and set up a home together on the Côte d’Azur.

Roger Moore and his wife Kristina Tholstrup. Source: www.vanityfair.fr

Roger Moore speaks fondly about his adopted home, Monaco, describing it as a town with no envy, “the only place in the world where you can park a Bentley without someone coming along with a key and scratching it”, and says he enjoys the social life. The absolute security of the Principality is also an appealing factor, as well as the pretty sea views from his Larvotto home.

2021: BBC Top Gear test drives their Real Working Bond Car.

BMW 4 Series Coupe M440i xDrive — long
-term review

https://www.topgear.com/long-term-car-reviews/bmw/4-series/m440i-xdrive-mht-2dr-step-auto/report-7
Ollie Kew | 7 May 2021

RichardTheBruce

May 8th

1945: Ian Fleming pursues a personal interest on VE/Victory in Europe Day.

Ian Fleming's Commandos: The Story of the Legendary 30 Assault Unit, Nicholas Rankin, 2011.

Chapter 14 - Getting the Goods

VE Day, Victory in Europe day, 8 May 1945, signalled 'the greatest
outburst of joy in the history of mankind' as Churchill wrote
later: 'Weary and worn, impoverished but undaunted and now
triumphant, we had a moment that was sublime.' But Ian Fleming
was fretting in London. The Bibliophile and collector wanted the
cache of German naval records from Tambach badly. He was also
afraid that they might fall into the hands of the Russians, believing
that under the Four Power Division of Germany, Tambach would
be in the Russian zone, the eastern part of Germany that would
become the German Democratic Republic. (He was wrong about
the line on the map - Tambach did not quite fall within the
Russian zone - but he was right about the threat from Russia,
which would be the backdrop of much of his fiction.) A couple of
NID officers had been sent out from London to Germany to help
secure the Tambach records, but had failed to achieve anything.
In May 1945, therefore, Fleming flew out to see for himself.

He found Ralph Izzard, the expert Forward Interrogator, and the
American Lieutenant Earle at the castle. It was Izzard to whom Ian
Fleming made the typically off-beat suggestion that was also deeply
serious: when Izzard got hold of the dozen top admirals in the
German navy he should make each of them sit down and write a
10,000 word essay on 'Why Germany lost the war.' The results of this,
and the Admiralty questionnaire that Izzard handed out, though
often self-justificatory, were illuminating. Now at last Fleming got
the chance to see with his own eyes what his intelligence unit had
achieved. He was amazed at the size and comprehensiveness of the
archive; with his intelligence background he could clearly see its
potential importance. Of course, he became even more anxious to
get 30AU's haul back safely to England. Strings had to be pulled,
lorries and ships arranged.

1963: Δόκτωρ Νο (Dóktor No) released in Greece.

1963: Dr. No finally has a wider release in North America, 450 theaters. Includes Denver, Colorado. Very successful.

1963: MGM receives feedback from Fleming on various points for a Solo television project.

http://www.for-your-eyes-only.com/Site/UNCLEtline63.html

Wednesday, May 8, 1963

Ashley-Steiner informs MGM of counterproposal from Fleming on various
points in Solo deal.

1963: From Russia With Love films the boat chase.

1982: Christina Cole is born--London, England.

2019: Dynamite Entertainment releases James Bond Origin #9.
Ibrahim Moustafa, artist. Jeff Parker, writer.

JAMES BOND ORIGIN #9

https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C72513027244709011
Cover A: Dan Panosian
Cover B: Juan Gedeon
Cover C: Eric Gapstur
Cover D: Ibrahim Moustafa
Cover E: Bob Q
Writer: Jeff Parker
Art: Ibrahim Moustafa
Genre: Action/Adventure
Publication Date: May 2019
Format: Comic Book
Page Count: 32 Pages
ON SALE DATE: 5/8/2019

"RUSSIAN RUSE, Part III"
Injured and alone, lieutenant James Bond has escaped his Russian captors, only to be thrust into the heart of war.

The epic World War 2 tale continues from JEFF PARKER (Aquaman, Fantastic Four) and superstar artist IBRAHIM MOUSTAFA (Mother Panic, The Flash).

RichardTheBruce

May 9th

1912: Pedro Gregorio Armendáriz Hastings is born--Mexico City, Mexico.
(He dies 18 June 1963 at age 51--Los Angeles, California.)

Pedro Armendáriz

See the complete article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Armendáriz

Born Pedro Gregorio Armendáriz Hastings, May 9, 1912 - Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico

Died June 18, 1963 (age 51) - Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Cause of death Suicide by gunshot
Burial place Panteón Jardín, Mexico City
Occupation Actor
Years active 1935–1963
Spouse(s) Carmelita Bohr
(m. 1938; his death 1963)
Children 2, including Pedro Jr.

Pedro Armendáriz (born Pedro Gregorio Armendáriz Hastings; May 9, 1912 – June 18, 1963) was a Mexican film actor who made films in both Mexico and the United States. With Dolores del Río and María Félix, he was one of the best-known Latin American movie stars of the 1940s and 1950s.

Early life
Armendáriz was born in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico to Pedro Armendáriz García Conde (Mexican) and Adela Hastings (American). He was also the cousin of actress Gloria Marín. Armendáriz and his younger brother Francisco lived with their uncle Henry Hastings, Sr. in Laredo, Texas after their mother died. He later studied in California. He started in the world of acting by participating in the stage plays performed by the theater group at the University of California, where he continued a career in law. He graduated with an engineering degree from the California Polytechnic State University.

Career

Armendáriz with Harry Carey Jr. and John Wayne in 3 Godfathers in 1949.

When Armendáriz finished his studies, he moved to Mexico where he worked for the railroad, as a tour guide and as a journalist for the bilingual magazine México Real. He was discovered by film director Miguel Zacarías when Armendáriz recited a soliloquy from Hamlet to an American tourist. His meeting with the director Emilio Fernández was providential, whereupon the actor and director began working in numerous films: Soy puro mexicano (1942), Flor silvestre (1942) and specially María Candelaria (1943) were the first films of intense common path. Under the guidance of Emilio Fernández, Pedro Armendáriz developed the film personality traits of strong nationalist; often, he played tough and manly men, indigenous, peasants and revolutionaries. Amendáriz repeatedly portrayed Pancho Villa and played opposite actresses such as Dolores del Río and María Félix.

With Dolores del Río, Amendáriz formed one of the most legendary couples of the Mexican cinema. María Candelaria provided Armendáriz with international visibility. The film was awarded the Palm d'Or at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. Other prominent titles where Armendáriz appeared with Dolores del Río were Las Abandonadas (1944), Bugambilia (1944) and La Malquerida (1949). Maria Felix was his other partner in such films as Enamorada (1946) or Maclovia (1948).[1]

In the late 40s, he made the jump to Hollywood by the hand of John Ford. Armendáriz was a favorite of Ford, appearing in three of his films: The Fugitive (1947), Fort Apache and 3 Godfathers (both 1948).

Armendáriz with Lana Turner in Diane in 1956.

Besides his career in the Mexican cinema, Armendáriz made a remarkable career in Hollywood and Europe. His other prominent films in Hollywood were: We Were Strangers (1949, directed by John Huston), The Torch (1950), Border River (1954), The Conqueror (1956) and Diane (1956), among others. In Europe, highlighted his participation in the film Lucrèce Borgia (1953), filmed in France. In Mexico, his participation highlighted such notable films such as El Bruto (1953, directed by Luis Buñuel), La Cucaracha (1959) and La Bandida (1962).

Armendáriz's last appearance was in the second James Bond film, From Russia with Love (1963), as Bond's ally, Kerim Bey. Armendáriz was terminally ill with cancer during the filming of From Russia with Love, and towards the end of shooting he was too ill to perform his part; his final scenes were performed by his double, director Terence Young. Armendáriz died four months before the release of the film.

Personal life

Armendáriz was married to actress Carmelita Bohr (née Pardo) by whom he had one son and daughter. Pedro Armendáriz, Jr. also became an actor and appeared in the James Bond film Licence to Kill (1989); his daughter Carmen Armendáriz became a TV producer.

Illness and death
In 1956, Armendáriz had a role in the film The Conqueror produced by Howard Hughes. Filmed in the state of Utah at the time when the US government was doing above-ground nuclear testing in neighboring Nevada, within 25 years 91 of the 220 people involved in the production were afflicted with cancer, 46 of whom died.

Armendáriz began to suffer pain in his hips; years later it was discovered that he had neck cancer. He learned his condition was terminal while at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California and, reportedly, endured great pain to film From Russia with Love (he visibly limps in most scenes) in order to assure his family financial resources.

On June 18, 1963, Armendáriz committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a gun he had smuggled into the hospital. He was 51 years old. He is buried in the Panteón Jardín cemetery in Mexico City, Mexico.

Pedro Armendáriz (1912–1963)

Actor | Producer
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000784/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

1936: Albert Finney is born--Salford, Greater Manchester, England.
(He dies 7 February 2019--Royal Marsden Hospital, London, England.)

Albert Finney, 82, ‘Angry Young Man’ Who
Became a Hollywood Star, Is
Dead

See the complete article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/movies/albert-finney-dead.html

By Alan Cowell | Feb. 8, 2019

Albert Finney during the filming of the 1981 crime drama
“Loophole.” He was one of his generation’s finest and most
honored actors over six decades.CreditCredit
Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

LONDON — Albert Finney, the British stage and film actor who defined an era’s rage and frustration in dramas of blue-collar realism and social revolt and went on to find stardom in Hollywood, died on Thursday in London. He was 82.

His death, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, was confirmed by Jon Oakley, a partner at Simkins, a law firm that represents the Finney family. The cause was a chest infection, he said.

Mr. Finney became one of his generation’s finest and most honored actors over six decades. A frequent nominee for an Oscar and Britain’s equivalent of one, the Bafta, he was a star as comfortable in movies like “Tom Jones,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Under the Volcano” and “Erin Brockovich” as he was on the classical British stage.

He first came to wide attention alongside contemporaries like Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay, actors collectively known as “angry young men” — counterparts to the playwrights and novelists who shared that sobriquet. Together they helped turn Britain’s gaze inward, toward gritty industrial landscapes, where a generation of disaffected youth railed against the class system and the claustrophobic trap it laid for workers locked in dead-end jobs.

Mr. Finney was propelled to early stardom by “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” a low-budget 1960 film steeped in smoggy vistas of smokestacks and deprivation and shot in stark black and white. Mr. Finney played Arthur Seaton, a restless young man caught in sexual adventures and bouts of beer drinking intended to distract him from his job at a cavernous bicycle factory.

His broad-voweled northern accent injected a powerful authenticity into the part, and his acting style drew favorable comparisons to such titans of the English stage as Laurence Olivier. Yet he preferred wealth to accolades, according to his biographer, Quentin Falk.

“At the turn of the ’60s, Finney was the screen’s incarnation of the new working-class hero,” Mr. Falk wrote in “Albert Finney in Character,” published in 1992 and republished in 2015. “In the theater, he was barely 20 when he was hailed as the ‘new Olivier.’ Yet instead of pursuing either mantle, he became a millionaire and made love to beautiful women on several continents.”

Mr. Falk added: “To some he is still the leading actor of his generation; to others, though, he has suffered an ambition bypass. To even severer critics, he appears to have remained cheerfully indolent, almost willfully failing to fulfill the remarkable early promise.”

Mr. Finney, as the title character, with Diane Cilento in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s
1963 adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel. The performance brought Mr. Finney the
first of his five Academy Award nominations.
Credit Lopert Pictures Corporation/Photofest

The angry young men “were indignant because little seemed to be changing in postwar Britain,” the critic and essayist Nora Sayre wrote in The New York Times in 2000. “They thought there were few opportunities for the young.”

Their characters grew from the work of novelists like Alan Sillitoe (who adapted his novel in writing the script of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”), John Braine and David Storey, and the playwright John Osborne, whose “Look Back in Anger” set the parameters for what became known as kitchen-sink dramas in the late 1950s and ’60s.

“Stocky and obdurate, Mr. Finney spits with aggression, walks with impatience and indicates that laws exist to be broken,” Ms. Sayre wrote. “His morose, craggy face looks as though it has been pummeled by experience.”

The angry young men were a prelude to the explosion of creativity and license that characterized the so-called Swinging Sixties, when the songs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other bands were anthems to a new permissiveness that changed British society.

Mr. Finney went on to play an eclectic array of movie roles, from the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Sidney Lumet’s star-studded version of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” in 1975, to the pugnacious lawyer Edward L. Masry, who hires the crusading title character (Julia Roberts) in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), Steven Soderbergh’s tale of a power-company pollution scandal.

But in 2007 Mr. Finney dropped out of sight, disclosing only in 2011 that he had been struggling for four years with cancer. After his return to acting, he took small parts in the thriller “The Bourne Legacy” and the James Bond movie “Skyfall,” both in 2012.

“The pattern of my life is that there is no pattern,” Mr. Finney once said. “In work I like doing things that are different, contrasting. I’m lurching rather than pointing in any given direction.”

An episode in 1960 seemed to confirm that self-assessment. Mr. Finney had a long screen test for the lead role in David Lean’s epic movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” but, according to Mr. Falk, he rejected a lucrative five-year contract with the film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, saying, “I didn’t know where I want to be in five years’ time — or tomorrow for that matter.”

The role, of the adventurer T. E. Lawrence, went to Peter O’Toole and turned him into an international star.

Mr. Finney, center, in his Oscar-nominated performance as the Belgian detective
Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974), directed by Sidney Lumet.
Credit Paramount Pictures

Mr. Finney was nominated five times for an Oscar, four for best actor: as the title character in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel; as Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express”; as an aging, embittered actor in Peter Yates’s 1983 version of “The Dresser”; and as an alcoholic British consul in a small town in Mexico in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano,” based on the Malcolm Lowry novel. His performance in “Erin Brockovich” earned him a supporting actor nomination.

He was also nominated 13 times for a Bafta and won twice — as “most promising newcomer” in 1960 and, in 2002, for his performance as Winston Churchill in “The Gathering Storm,” a BBC-HBO television movie that also brought him an Emmy.

He never won an Oscar, however, and made a point of not attending the glittering award ceremonies.

“It’s a very long evening and not exactly my idea of a good night out,” Mr. Falk quoted him as saying — “sat there for five hours in a nonsmoking, nondrinking environment.”

During the Oscar ceremony in 1963, Mr. Finney was cruising aboard a luxurious catamaran off Hawaii while a news crew, surrounded by a throng of onlookers, awaited his return to port in case he won the award for his role in “Tom Jones.”

From an upper deck, Mr. Finney had a clear view onto the approaching quay side. “Suddenly,” Mr. Falk wrote, “Finney saw a man pushing his way through the crowd, shouting: ‘Wrap it up. He didn’t win.’ Sidney Poitier had.” (Mr. Poitier won for “Lilies of the Field.”)

By the time the catamaran docked, the news crew and its equipment had disappeared.

Mr. Finney’s aversion to such accolades extended even to Britain’s own system of medals, knighthoods and peerages. In 2000, he turned down an opportunity to become Sir Albert Finney, echoing an earlier rejection of a lesser award. He said the honors system was a way of “perpetuating snobbery.”

Albert Finney was born on May 9, 1936, in Salford, near Manchester in northwest England, the third child and first son of Alice Hobson, who left school at age 14 to work in a mill, and Albert Finney Sr., who made his living running bets on horse racing.

The family lived at first in a rowhouse — the familiar cramped accommodation of the working classes in a region where the Industrial Revolution had spread a patina of grime, grit and pollution over back-to-back homes separated by cobbled alleyways and streets. Overshadowed by the nearby northern metropolis of Manchester, Salford was known as a factory town and inland port, and its docklands became a target for German bombers during World War II.

In 1941, when Mr. Finney was 5 years old, the family was bombed out of its rowhouse and moved to a more genteel home across town.

Mr. Finney with Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 tale of a
power company pollution scandal. He played a pugnacious lawyer who hires the
crusading title character (Ms. Roberts), and was again nominated for an Oscar. CreditBob Marshak/Universal Studios

“Though Finney himself would later come to personify the working-class hero in several of his earliest roles,” Mr. Falk wrote, the move to a new area “confirmed a strictly lower-middle-class status for a family who were never really less than comfortably off.”

As a high school student at Salford Grammar School, Mr. Finney displayed both a liking for the theater and a poor grasp of academic subjects. A teacher suggested that he apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art — Britain’s premier acting school, usually known as RADA — where he auditioned in 1953 and won a scholarship.

By 20, he had completed his course at RADA and was playing parts in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” at a repertory theater in Birmingham, in the English Midlands. He went on to play Henry V in the play of the same name — one of many Shakespearean roles that established his reputation on the stage.

Besides Shakespeare, he had leading roles in plays by Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, August Strindberg and John Osborne.

Mr. Finney met Jane Wenham, a fellow actor, in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957. The couple married and had a son, Simon, who became a film technician. They divorced in 1961. Mr. Finney married the French actress Anouk Aimée in 1970. They divorced in 1978. He married Pene Delmage, a travel specialist, in 2006.

He is survived by his wife, his son and two grandchildren.

The low-budget “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” filmed on location in Nottingham and at Twickenham Studios, was Mr. Finney’s big break. Three years later, the critical and box-office success of “Tom Jones,” which won three Oscars including best picture, made him a millionaire at the age of 27. He took a 10-month break to travel the world for much of 1964.

As Mr. Finney’s career unfolded, movies overlapped with stage plays. He appeared in the musical films “Scrooge” in 1970 and “Annie” in 1982, for which he shaved his head to play Daddy Warbucks. He made his American television debut in the role of Pope John Paul II in 1984.

“I often wondered why I am an actor,” Mr. Finney told a television interviewer in 1962. He then seemed to answer the question, speaking of the profession as a very public form of escape.

“I think I am always watching and balancing, and sort of tabulating my own emotions,” he said. “And the only way I can lose myself is when I’m acting.”

Albert Finney (1936–2019)

Actor | Producer | Soundtrack
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001215/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

1963: 鐵金剛勇破神秘島 (Tiě jīngāng yǒng pò shénmì dǎo; Iron King Kong Broke the Mysterious Island) released in Hong Kong.

https://playitagain.info/site/1963/dr-no/

https://talkcinema.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/占士邦電影50周年紀念/

1998: James Bond 007: A License To Thrill theme park attraction opens at 5 Paramount amusement parks in North America: Paramount's Great America, Paramount's King's Dominion, Paramount's Carowinds, King's Island, and Canada's Wonderland in Toronto, Canada.

2015: Christopher Wood dies at age 79--Southwest France.
(Born 5 November 1935--London, England.)

Christopher Wood, writer - obituary

See complete article here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11951112/Christopher-Wood-writer-obituary.html

Author of the risqué Confessions novels who armed James Bond with wit and
humour in Moonraker
5:47PM BST 23 Oct 2015

Christopher Wood

Christopher Wood, who has died aged 79, was an advertising executive turned writer whose oeuvre included literary fiction, historical novels and the screenplays for the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979).

“One of the keys of writing a Bond movie,” he said, “is to do the same thing, just differently.” It was, however, his Confessions series of humorous erotic novels, written during the 1970s under the name “Timothy Lea” and presented as Lea’s real experiences, which proved his richest seam . “Timothy” recalls his amorous encounters while on a variety of jobs, and his improbable success rate as window cleaner, driving instructor or plumber made the books a publishing phenomenon.

Wood took as his inspiration the tall tales he heard in his youth while working as a mason’s mate and part-time postman. “These stories were prolific,” he said. “Even one of the – to my eyes – singularly uncharismatic workers had apparently been invited to indulge in carnal capers after a glass of lemonade one hot summer afternoon near Guildford.” Most of the men’s claims, Wood recalled, involved a mature but seductive “posh bird”.

Film poster for Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974)

The first in the series, Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1971), set the tone. “She has dyed hair, too much lipstick and a diabolical eyebrow pencil beauty spot that dates her a bit,” Timothy notes while eyeing up a potential conquest. “If she is going down hill I can think of a few blokes who wouldn’t mind waiting for her at the bottom.”

Henry Hitchings, author of Sorry! The English and their Manners, suggested that the first book proved “that we are not just bad at anything to do with the erotic life but also window cleaning”. The combination of soft pornography and bawdy comedy proved a hit, prompting 18 more titles – each one dashed off in five weeks – and four film adaptations, scripted by Wood, with Robin Askwith as the irrepressible Lea and Tony Booth (father of Cherie Blair) as Timothy’s oily brother-in-law.

Film poster for Confessions of a Driving Instructor
Photo: Rex Features

Elegant and erudite, Wood was an unlikely author of erotica. One interviewer was taken aback by his tweed jacket and received pronunciation. Yet, when the series was republished in 2013, Wood remained unapologetic about the books’ racy content. “They were funny then, and they are funny now,” he insisted. “They are full of clever alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphors and similes.” In later life he observed that Fifty Shades of Grey made his Confessions books “seem like Aristotle”.

Christopher Hovelle Wood was born on November 5 1935 in Lambeth, south London. During the Blitz his parents sent him away to Norwich where he became a pupil at the Edward VI Grammar School. He later returned to London to attend King’s College Junior School.

He read Economics and Law at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and after graduating in 1960 had a spell working in Cameroon, where he took part in the administration of the UN plebiscite of 1961. He did his National Service in Cyprus during the Eoka crisis.

By the end of the 1960s Wood was back in London managing brands for the advertising agency Masius Wynne-Williams. He used his daily journey from Royston in Hertfordshire to write fiction. His first two novels, both in the comical-realist vein of Evelyn Waugh, drew on his experience in Cameroon (Make it Happen to Me, 1969) and Cyprus ('Terrible Hard’, Says Alice, 1970). Although well reviewed, neither sold well. He then pitched the idea of a sex journal written in the hand of a Cockney chancer, and he “could almost see the pound signs in my publisher’s eyes”.

In 1976 he wrote the comedy film Seven Nights in Japan (1976, starring Michael York) for the director Lewis Gilbert, with whom he shared an agent. Gilbert’s next project was The Spy Who Loved Me, and he brought Wood on board. “I just wanted to do a good job for everybody,” Wood said, describing their producer, Cubby Broccoli, as a generous employer: “Everybody on the movie lived in style.” His approach to the script, writing with Richard Maibaum, fitted the Roger Moore era in which Bond was more of a lover than a killer.

Wood, centre, looking up at Richard Kiel as he greets Prince Philip at the premiere of
Moonraker in 1979
Photo: Rex Features

Wood returned to the franchise two years later as the sole writer on Moonraker. “It seemed to me that we were copying Star Wars,” he recalled. “I also found the idea of space slow in filmic terms. It is difficult to rush around in an astronaut’s suit. Did I tell Cubby that his idea sucked? No.”

As Ian Fleming had sold only the titles to his books, not the content, Wood was commissioned to “novelise” his screenplays for tie-in paperbacks. “Mr Wood has bravely tackled his formidable task,” Kingsley Amis wrote in the New Statesman, “that of turning a typical late Bond film, which must be basically facetious, into a novel after Ian Fleming, which must be basically serious.”

Film poster for Moonraker (1979)
Photo: Rex

In the early 1980s Wood published A Dove Against Death (1983), a Boy’s Own tale set in Africa during the First World War. In all his writing there was a sense of fun and a keen intelligence. William Boyd, who wrote the Bond sequel Solo, described Wood as “one of the most quick-witted, wittiest men I have ever met – up there with Gore Vidal”.

Wood’s other projects include two novels involving the adventurer John Adam (“deadlier than Kung Fu, lustier than Flashman”), the Rosie Dixon series of novels, sex comedies this time from a female perspective , and the screenplay for Remo Williams: Unarmed and Dangerous (1985), an action film directed by another Bond veteran, Guy Hamilton.

Latterly he lived in France, where he was occasionally asked to comment on Timothy Lea and James Bond. “I miss the lightness of touch of the old Bonds,” he told one reporter. In 2013 Harper Collins republished the Confessions books.

Christopher Wood married Jane Patrick in 1962; the marriage was dissolved. He is survived by their son and daughter; another son predeceased him.

Although he died in May, his death only became widely known earlier this month when Sir Roger Moore published the news on Twitter, saying: “He wrote two of my best.”

Christopher Wood, born November 5 1935, died May 9 2015

Christopher Wood (I) (1935–2015)

Writer
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0228970/?ref_=fn_al_nm_3

2021: New Manchester Walks offers Secrets of MI6 with Penguin author Ed Glinert.

May
09
Secrets of MI6 with Penguin author Ed Glinert
by New Manchester Walks
£8.50

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/secrets-of-mi6-with-penguin-author-ed-glinert-tickets-150021354911

MI6: they're the ones who jet overseas with exploding fountain pens and golden guns. Our man in the Fedora and cravat explains all.

About this event

James Bond isn’t available to take this tour into the secret world of MI6, so you’ll just have to make do with our man in the Foreign Office with the poisoned fountain pen and bugged bow-tie.

It’s a nasty world out there. Spies, spooks, saboteurs, stooges and stool pigeons. But here in MI6, the government’s intelligence wing devoted to Britain’s interest overseas, we’re on the look-out for terrorist plots, attempted assassinations of politicians and royals, and enemy agents who speak like Hood in Thunderbirds. You’ve seen Spooks? Pah, pussies! To devise this tour our guides had to break into Vauxhall Cross, home of MI6, when no one was looking, photocopy all the tasty documents, make our exit without being noticed, take said intel to a secret location to learn it, remember it, eat it and then burn it. We can however tell you what they don’t want you to know about:

• How a maths whizz single-handedly won the War despite MI6’s best efforts.
• Colonel Dansey’s “Z” network of spies.
• How a Bulgarian dissident was eliminated by a poisoned umbrella in the middle of London.
• The MI6 chief who cut off his own leg to rescue his son after a car crash.
• The vital supplies you’ll need if you find yourself held a prisoner-of-war.

Heed the advice of James Bond. If you are going to order a dry martini, shaken not stirred, make sure you add a Scotch Egg or you won’t get served.

So join the man from MI7 (one up from MI6), briefed by legendary tour guide and Penguin author Ed Glinert, to discover what the security services wished they knew.

RichardTheBruce

May 10th

1960: Paul David Hewson (Bono) born--Dublin, Ireland.

1973: The television special James Paul McCartney airs in the United Kingdom. McCartney and Wings perform "Live and Let Die" ahead of the June film release.

1995: GoldenEye films the final battle between OO7 and Trevelyan.

2008: Quantum of Solace filming at the floating opera stage in Bregenz, Austria, ends.
Up to 1500 extras watched Tosca, while Bond stirred Quantum.
2008: Roger Moore presents BBC 4's scheduled airing of “The Bond Correspondence”, letters between Ian Fleming and readers of James Bond.

2017: Geoffrey Bayldon dies at age 93--Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.
(Born 7 January 1924--Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.)

Geoffrey Bayldon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Bayldon

Geoffrey Bayldon in 2009

Born Albert Geoffrey Bayldon - 7 January 1924 - Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Died 10 May 2017 (aged 93) - Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Occupation Actor
Years active 1952–2010
Partner(s) Alan Rowe

Albert Geoffrey Bayldon (7 January 1924 – 10 May 2017) was an English actor. After playing roles in many stage productions, including the works of William Shakespeare, he became known for portraying the title role of the children's series Catweazle (1970–71). Bayldon's other long-running parts include the Crowman in Worzel Gummidge (1979–81) and Magic Grandad in the BBC television series Watch (1995).

Early life
Bayldon was born in Leeds and attended Bridlington School and Hull College of Architecture. Following service in the Royal Air Force during World War II, he appeared in amateur theatricals and then trained at the Old Vic Theatre School.

Career

Bayldon enjoyed a substantial stage career, including work in the West End and for the RSC. He made several film appearances in the 1960s and 1970s, including King Rat (1965), To Sir, with Love (1967), Casino Royale (as Q) (1967), the Envy segment of The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins (1971), the Marc Bolan/T. Rex film Born to Boogie (1972), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), as well as the film versions of Steptoe and Son, Steptoe and Son Ride Again (1973) as the vicar, and Porridge (1979) as the Governor. Bayldon also appeared in several horror films; Dracula and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed for Hammer Film Productions and The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum and Tales from the Crypt for Amicus Productions. In 2004, after many years of successful television work he appeared in the film Ladies in Lavender.

He appeared in Doctor Who with a guest appearance as Organon in The Creature from the Pit (1979) opposite Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. Subsequently, he played an alternative First Doctor in two audio plays based on the Doctor Who television series by Big Finish Productions in the Doctor Who Unbound series: Auld Mortality (2003) and A Storm of Angels (2005).[12] In 1963, Bayldon had been one of the first actors offered the role of the Doctor.

Bayldon's other television roles include, ITV Play of the Week (1957, 1959, 1964, 1967), The Avengers (1961 and 1967), Z-Cars (1963, 1968), Theatre 625 (1964–1968), The Wednesday Play (1968, 1969), ITV Sunday Night Theatre (1970, 1972), Space: 1999 (1976), The Tomorrow People (1976), Tales of the Unexpected (1980, 1983), Blott on the Landscape (1985), Star Cops (1987), Rumpole of the Bailey (1987), The Chronicles of Narnia (1989).[14] He later took part in a number of BBC Schools programmes, where he displayed a number of otherwise unexploited talents (such as singing). In 1993, he played Simplicio in the Open University video Newton's Revolution.

In 1986, Bayldon provided the vocals on Paul Hardcastle's The Wizard which was also used (without the vocal) as the theme for BBC1's Top of the Pops.

Among his later television appearances were the Five game show Fort Boyard (1998-2001), Waking the Dead (2004), Heartbeat (2004) and Casualty (2006, after previous appearances in 1991, 1997 and 2004). His final television appearances, before his retirement, were New Tricks (2007) and My Family (2010).

Death
Bayldon died on 10 May 2017, aged 93, from undisclosed causes. His partner of many years, fellow actor Alan Rowe, had predeceased him in 2000.

Geoffrey Bayldon (1924–2017)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001933/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
Actor

2019: Naomie Harris proposes "Old Bond" is history.

Naomie Harris says 'old Bond' is history
thanks to Phoebe Waller-Bridge

https://www.list.co.uk/article/108441-naomie-harris-says-old-bond-is-history-thanks-to-phoebe-waller-bridge/
Bang Showbiz
10 May 2019


Naomie Harris

Naomie Harris says the days of the "old Bond" are
numbered and insisted Phoebe Waller-Bridge will "ramp
up the female perspective" on Bond 25

Naomie Harris says the days of the "old Bond" are numbered thanks to Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Phoebe – who wrote the script of the hit assassin thriller TV series 'Killing Eve' and wrote and starred in BBC comedy-drama 'Fleabag' – has joined the writing team for Bond 25, which will be Daniel Craig's fifth and final outing as 007.

Harris – who plays Miss Moneypenny in the franchise – revealed that the writer and actress will "ramp up the female perspective" on the yet-to-be-titled film and hailed the star as a "strong woman" with a "comedic touch".

Speaking to Stuart McGurk at the GQ Heroes summit on Thursday (09.05.19) the 42-year-old star said: "She's a strong woman with a great comedic touch so she's going to ramp up the female perspective on Bond 25. The Bond of old, his days are numbered."

The 'Moonlight' actress also explained that one of the reasons James Bond is such a successful franchise is that it toes the line between Ian Fleming's original novels and "being progressive with the times."

She added: "I think it always has to be its own thing because you always have to represent the Bond Ian Fleming wrote and it was a very particular time.

"But this is going to be the 25th Bond, this is the longest running franchise of all time and that's for a very particular reason. The reason is that it manages to keep the essence of what Ian Fleming wrote but it's also constantly adapting and changing with the times.

"To keep people interested that's the incredibly difficult line you have to walk between keeping the diehard Bond fans who want [a] traditional Bond and also being progressive with the times."

James Bond 25 | 2019 UK
Directed by: Cary Joji Fukunaga
Cast: Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Lea Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, Jeffrey Wright, Ana de Armas, Dali Benssalah, David Dencik, Lashana Lynch, Billy Magnussen
UK release: 3 April 2020

The next James Bond film has the working title of Shatterhand [incorrect] and is due for release in April 2020 [changed due to pandemic].

2019: No Time To Die first unit filming finishes in Jamaica.

RichardTheBruce

May 11th

1959: Kevin McClory writes from his hospital bed to confirm to Ian Fleming he'll pursue the production of the first Bond film.

The Battle for Bond, Robert Sellers, 2007.
Chapter 1 - The Irish Maverick

... Despite being suddenly struck down by a duodenal
ulcer, which McClory blamed on the intense amount of work involved on Boy
and the Bridge, the Irishman wrote Fleming from his hospital bed on 11 May
to confirm. "Xanadu Productions have decided that we would like to go ahead
with our plans to make a full length motion picture feature based on the
character created by you, James Bond. We are at present exploring the
wonderful and secretive world of Bond, and hop to be able in the very near
future to make a choice of the novel we should like to film."

Where producers and studios had failed to recognise the filmmaking
potential in 007, it had taken a relatively inexperienced Irish filmmaker to see
what should have been staring more seasoned pros in the face. But what no one
could possibly have realised at the time was that cinema history had just been
made. The seeds had also been sown for 40 years of lawsuits, court cases,
injunctions, betrayals, deaths and broken lives.

1965: Thunderball begins filming the underwater climax near Lyford Cay, New Providence Island, Northern Bahamas.
1966: You Only Live Twice begins construction of the SPECTRE lair at Pinewood, eventually finished 1 November.

1974: Original Bond comic strip Beware of Butterflies ends its run in The Daily Express.
(Started 4 December 1973. 2408–2541) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

https://spyguysandgals.com/sgLookupComicStrip.aspx?id=1011

‘Beware of Butterflies’ has more on its mind than just Lepidoptera
By Edgar Chaput Last updated Dec 9, 2015
https://www.popoptiq.com/beware-of-butterflies/"]https://popoptiq.com/beware-of-butterflies/

Danish 1976 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no36-1976/
James Bond Agent 007 no. 36: “Beware of Butterflies” (1976)

1987: A-ha records title song "The Living Daylights" for Warner Brothers.

2001: Kevin McClory's court case seeking approval to film a series of Bond films directly competing with Eon, is dismissed by the court. Their reasoning: the lengthy delay indicated Eon and UA could not have infringed on rights that were not previously recognized to exist.

2018: Reports say that French President Emmanuel Macron plans to give Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, a special lighter as a gift.

Macron Is Getting This James Bond Cigarette Lighter
For Prince Harry

https://www.2oceansvibe.com/2018/05/11/macron-is-getting-this-james-bond-cigarette-lighter-for-prince-harry/
11 May 2018 by Nereesha Patel in Lifestyle, Politics, Prince Harry, Royal Wedding, Royalty


We all know that smoking can be bad for one’s health. In fact, South Africa’s new draft law will basically wipe out smoking forever and save us all from the plight of tobacco addiction.

Or something like that.

But it seems like Emmanuel Macron doesn’t know that tidbit about smoking being a bad thing, since he’s reportedly planning to give Prince Harry a cigarette lighter as a wedding gift.

Before you scoff, it’s not just any old lighter from a corner shop. The President of France is getting a golden lighter that’s part of a James Bond collection, explained The Telegraph:

French heritage brand ST Dupont’s London-based PR group said it was “delighted to announce that their ST Dupont 007 Collection will be the official Royal Wedding gift on behalf of France from President Macron. (Prince Harry is reported to be a 007 fan!)”

Accompanying pictures showed a travel case with a golden lighter, cigar cutter, pens and cuff links all arranged in the shape of a gun, each with the 007 logo.

Check out this bad boy:

If this isn’t a direct reference to The Man with the Golden Gun, I’ll be so friggin’ upset.

Meghan Markle apparently wants her fiancé to cut down on his ciggie intake:

The catch is that news of the Gallic wedding gift came just weeks after reports that Megan Markle had persuaded her husband-to-be to ditch his Malboro Lights and cut down on alcohol consumption as part of a health drive to “get his soldier body back” in time for the big day.

It was unclear whether the Elysée had been hastily informed of Prince Harry’s decision to quit smoking.

While the reports of Prince Harry kicking his nicotine habit are unconfirmed, he has not been seen smoking in public for some time and royal watchers said it would clash with his global role model status.

We know that Harry is currently shredding for the wedding at that high-end London gym, so bad timing, Macron, bad timing.

The choice of a golden cigarette is yet to be confirmed “100” percent, though. Perhaps Macron has another gift in mind:

ST Duponts did confirm, however, that the luxury heritage brand had been chosen to create the royal gift, which would be “unique”, and most likely including an engraved message from President Macron.

Let’s hope whatever Macron has up his sleeve meets Markle’s approval. Probably not, but it’s fun to imagine.

Read more: https://www.2oceansvibe.com/2018/05/11/macron-is-getting-this-james-bond-cigarette-lighter-for-prince-harry/#ixzz5na1g2pxq

2018: Aston Martin has a personal submarine.

James Bond-style personal submarine unveiled by Aston Martin

See the complete article here:

https://www.carsifu.my/news/james-bond-style-personal-submarine-unveiled-by-aston-martin

By DPA | 11 May 2018

LONDON: Building exclusive sports cars is clearly not enough for Aston Martin, which has teamed up with some marine experts to build a James Bond-style submarine.

Project Neptune is the name given to the collaboration between the British carmaker and Triton Submarines which is based in the US state of Florida.

Aston Martin will be forever linked with the fictional spy 007 and the company is known for its handsome, high-performance luxury cars. Models from the Gaydon-based firm have featured in 11 James Bond films.

A mock-up submersible Lotus Esprit featured in the 1977 Bond movie "The Spy Who Loved Me". Now, over 40 years later, the first production model of a strictly-limited aquatic offering is set to surface later this year, the companies have announced.

The three-person submarine with a bubble-like cabin is said to combine the classic design features of Aston Martin's cars with Triton's deep-diving technologies.

The is designed to appeal to wealthy super-yacht owners who want to spend some leisure time exploring underwater.

According to unconfirmed reports, only a dozen of the submarines will be available to buy each year. Each one will cost around US$4mil (RM15.8mil). Aston Martin unveiled its first power boat at the 2016 edition of the Monaco Yacht Show.

Technical details are scarce but the submersible can dive down to 500 metres and remain there for up to 12 hours. It can travel at up to 5 knots and has four times the acceleration of Triton's fastest existing flagship model. Occupants will enjoy near-360-degree all-round visibility.

Aston Martin's creative officer Marek Reichman likened the design of the submarine to the company's Valkyrie hypercar. He said fettling the submersible was a major challenge for the carmaker.

The interior is pure Aston Martin too, with a luxurious mix of hand-stitched leather and high-performance carbon fibre. A high degree of customisation is planned and customers will be able to choose from all manner of combinations of colour and trim.

Aston Martin has recently been branching out into other luxury areas, including Italian-made furniture which carries the company's winged emblem.

2019: Phoebe Waller-Bridge calls herself a bad feminist and promises to make Bond Girls feel like real women.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge says she will
make Bond girls feel like real women –
we deserve them

See the complete article here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/james-bond-25-phoebe-waller-bridge-daniel-craig-feminism-a8909276.html

Video
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/james-bond-25-phoebe-waller-bridge-daniel-craig-feminism-a8909276.html?jwsource=cl

RichardTheBruce

May 12th

1928: Burt Bacharach is born--Kansas City, Missouri.

1952: William Plomer divines that Ian Fleming has written a novel.

William Plomer: Man of Letters

See the complete article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1979/01/14/william-plomer-man-of-letters/ae16a7fb-6edf-4ab9-87f5-67065a5ba60f/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.78e235d314d3

By PETER QUENNELL
PETER QUENNELL, coeditor of History Today,
essayist, biographer, has written The Marble Foot and
the first volume of his autobio
January 14, 1979

ON MAY 12, 1952, Ian Fleming was seated at a London restaurant opposite his friend William Plomer. Suddenly he produced a startling question. How, he enquired of Plomer, do you "get smoke out of a woman once you've got it in?" Though Plomer claimed to be "always alert to the caprices of the human race," he felt considerably bewildered, until Fleming proceeded to assure him that the question had a literary motive. You couldn't say that your heroine "exhaled" her cigarette-smoke -- that would be insufferably pompous -- while "puffed it out" sounded downright silly. Then a flash of enlightenment crlssed Plomer's mind. "You must have written a book," he said. Fleming agreed; and Plomer, being a publisher's reader, suggested he should see the manuscript, with the result that Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale, appeared in April 1953.

I quote this incident because it may help to illustrate both Plomer's professional versatility and his gift of human understanding. Though he had himself a well-established reputation as a poet and a highbrow novelist, he immediately grasped the popular appeal of his old friend's shocking thriller, and, when Ian had entered the best-seller class, continued to encourage and advise him. For Plomer was, above all else, a deeply sympathetic man; and Rupert Hart-Davis' posthumous selection of his occasional verse and prose shows the range of his intelligence. During his literary career, he published two volumes of verse, five novels, five collections of short stories, two autobiographies, a quartet of libretti for Benjamin Britten's operas, and an entertaining children's tale. He also edited a number of books, among them Francis Kilvert's famous diary of clerical life in mid-Victorian England.

Electric Delights, which owes its title to a phrase taken from Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, "the electric delight of admiring what is admirable," contains besides poems, stories and travel sketches, a series of essays that the editor calls "Admirations," each an appreciative portrait of some fellow artist he particularly valued. The best perhaps is his study of Edward FitzGerald; though why the translator of Omar Khayyam should be discussed under the heading "Prose Writers" is a problem that I cannot solve. FitzGerald, however, seems to have interested him more as a splendid letter writer and curious human being than as a remarkably accomplished poet; and I suspect that Plomer's affection for FitzGerald may have had something to do with the fact that their temperaments were much akin.Plomer's selfepitaph includes the revelatory lines:

Sometimes thinking aloud He went his own way.

He was joky by nature, Sad, sceptical, proud.

He shared not only FitzGerald's scepticism, but his "jokiness," his loneliness and his taste in odd companions. The Victorian writer's strongest attachment was to a simple fisherman he nicknamed "Posh"; and he and Posh spent happy days "knocking round" the North Sea, aboard a lugger that FitzGerald had bought and the good-looking Posh sailed. A somewhat similar association gladdened Plomer's last years.

For one glimpse of FitzGerald's character I feel particularly grateful to Plomer. As a middle-aged man, he decided that he ought to get married, and chose a tall, big-boned woman, with a loud, deep voice. It was an unwise step. According to Plomer: "The wedding-day did not show Fitzgerald in any haste to be ruled or reformed. He turned up in a slouch hat... and during the wedding-breakfast only spoke once. This was when he was offered some blancmange. He looked at it, and then waved it away,... saying as he did so, 'Ugh! Congealed bridesmaid!'"

Among Plomer's other "admirations" is an essay on the Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy, of whom E. M. Forster said that he stood "at a slight angle to the universe." Many of the other artists discussed and praised here evidently stood at such an angle, a little outside and in opposition to the accepted social system -- Herman Melville, George Gissing, Christina Rossetti, even the ingenuous country clergyman Francis Kilvert.

Of Kilvert, while he edited his diaries, Plomer seems to have grown extremely fond; and he writes on him with special feeling.Born in 1840, the diarist spent his whole adult existence at a succession of remote parsonages, far from London and urban literary life, where he divided his time between his parishioners, their attractive wives and daughters, and the radiant beauties of the natural world. Kilvert adored nature, which inspired the finest passages in his diary. (He was a Wordsworthian romantic). He also worshipped, and fervently though innocently pursued, a series of fascinating local girls, whom he often kissed, now and then embraced, but, so far as we can make out, never embarassed or offended.

Like his 20th-century editor, Kilvert was an individualist; and it is that same individualistic quality in Plomer's essays that makes them always worth reading. They convey his personal response to life and art in evocative yet unaffected prose.

1966: Glidrose allows Geoffrey Jenkins to write the first Bond continuation novel, named Per Fine Ounce.
It remains unpublished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Fine_Ounce


https://mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/literary_per_fine_ounce_extract.php3


https://literary007.com/2015/03/25/the-re-boot-of-per-fine-ounce-a-continuation-novel-that-isnt-what-you-think/

Notional bookcover in the style of Richard Chopping.

1967: Time magazine prints its Casino Royale review "Keystone Cop-Out".

Cinema: Keystone Cop-Out

See the complete article here. Subscriber content preview or Log-In:

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,843773,00.html

Friday, May 12, 1967

Casino Royale starts with a premise that is cheerfully cheeky: Sean Connery is an impostor. The real 007 is David Niven, now Sir James Bond, retired to a county seat. Visited by an all-star team of secret agents including William Holden, Charles Boyer and John Huston, he is persuaded to re-enter Her Majesty's Service, an experience that he soon finds simply SMERSHing. Along the way he encounters Joanna Pettet, the byproduct of his illicit union with Mata Hari; Peter Sellers, a green-gilled card shark who impersonates James Bond; Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond, James's narky nephew; and the ubiquitous Ursula...

1976: Eon sees an ad in Variety that James Bond Of The Secret Service, a remake of Thunderball, is in pre-production.

The Bond film that was supposed to
star a robotic hammerhead shark

See the complete article here:

https://www.gamesradar.com/bond-film-never-say-never-again-was-more-complicated-one-spectres-plots-shark/

By SFX Staff September 08, 2015

“The name’s Bond. James Bond.” In the official pantheon of 007 movies this iconic line has been spoken by no less than six performers – with, arguably, none more legendary than Sean Connery. When he chose to explore new acting avenues after 1967’s You Only Live Twice, Eon Productions – home of Bond’s cinematic exploits – went into a tailspin. While the unknown Australian model George Lazenby would eventually win the much-coveted part in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he too would flee the franchise. But you should never say never...

Consequently, with a multi-million dollar salary, a share in the box office and the promise of starring in any two non-Bond films of his own choosing, Connery would be convinced to make a one-time only comeback with 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. The result was a box office blockbuster (in comparison to the commercial apathy that greeted On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and that, it would seem, was that. Roger Moore and his perpetually-raised right eyebrow made his debut with Live And Let Die in 1973 and Bond continued to enthral subsequent generations...

Yet, there was just one problem: when Ian Fleming released his novel of Thunderball in 1961 it was adapted from a story for a potential Bond movie which had been co-written by independent producer Kevin McClory and his screenwriter friend Jack Whittingham. Having found themselves uncredited in the final book, McClory took Fleming to court, resulting in a settlement. McClory would produce the film adaptation of Thunderball (released in 1965) and, for ten years, agree not to bring the story to the big screen again. To his credit, McClory played ball – but when Eon saw an advertisement in Variety, on 12 May 1976, proclaiming that a remake of Thunderball called James Bond Of The Secret Service was now in pre-production, all hell broke loose.

Inevitably, lengthy legal proceedings followed amid rumours that none other than Connery, who had bemoaned his treatment by Eon, was slated to appear. “Before I put my nose into anything, I want to know it is legally bona fide,” teased the superstar Scotsman in a 1978 interview. McClory claimed that he owned the rights to the franchise’s perennially villainous organisation SPECTRE, having invented them for Thunderball. The immediate effect was a drastic rewrite of Moore’s next outing The Spy Who Loved Me, which was scheduled to highlight the ultimate battle between Bond and Blofeld.

As press interest in the legal battle between Eon and McClory went into overdrive, eagle-eyed reporters managed to spot Connery scouting for locations in New York. Fresh rumours arose that the Tartan-treasure was going to be directing instead of starring, although the ex-007 was remaining tight-lipped. Alas, as the court battles dragged on, come 1980 even Connery had admitted defeat, proclaiming that any sort of return to his career-defining mythology was “clearly not on the cards”.

You can imagine the surprise when McClory – with distribution backing from Warner Bros – finally got the legal greenlight to do a new version of Thunderball, now dubbed Never Say Never Again. The film got its title from Sean Connery’s wife Micheline. When her husband told her Diamonds Are Forever would mark his retirement from all things Bond she replied, “Never say never…” Connery clearly remembered those words when it came to his comeback.

"The fiendish group planned to
unleash a robotic
hammerhead shark, armed
with a bomb, in order to start
World War Three (yes, really)."

Directed by Irvin Kershner, then fresh from the success of The Empire Strikes Back, and starring Connery himself, this was, surely, going to be the big screen event of 1983. Well, that was the plan... “I felt that I was in a vice a lot of the time, put it that way,” stated Kershner when SFX caught up with him shortly before his death in November 2010. “While I was working on the script, and then when we began shooting, we had to be really careful about the legal consequences of using the Bond name. Someone would say, ‘No, you cannot do that.’ My producer was always in court and he would come back to me and say, ‘Now this needs to be changed, we cannot get away with it.’ There were many things I wanted to do on that film which got thrown out. We originally filmed a prologue and even that was cut. The film got simpler as a result, which is a bit of a shame because I wanted a couple of scenes in there that would be very shocking to Bond fans. It was a very difficult film.”

Indeed, originally Never Say Never Again was a different beast altogether. Initially titled Warhead, the film began life as an outlandish fantasy epic, with SPECTRE obtaining a horde of nuclear weapons and holing them up in a lavish sea-base situated underneath the Statue of Liberty. The fiendish group planned to unleash a robotic hammerhead shark, armed with a bomb, in order to start World War Three (yes, really). Unfortunately, the unintentional similarities to The Spy Who Loved Me meant that any stories of aquatic anarchy were soon shelved.

Instead, having to stick closely to the promise of a straightforward Thunderball adaptation, fans expecting an all-out Bond adventure – with gregarious gadgets, garish credits, grand theme ballads and gurning villains – were in for a sour experience. Never Say Never Again was based upon Bond’s search for some rogue nuclear missiles, thought to have been nabbed by SPECTRE. We'll see how new Bond handles the updated Spectre organisation this October. While some of the old Bond sexiness was provided by Playboy cover girl Barbara Carrera and future A-lister Kim Basinger, Never Say Never Again was a 007 epic that was distinctly light on the thrills and spills...

“Although Sean was easy to work with, and still brilliant as Bond, I had to shoot the film in six countries and keep everything straight and legally in line,” maintained Kershner. “Cubby Broccoli and Eon tried to stop the production of Never Say Never Again every single day. Not a morning went by but we were not in the courts in London. They kept saying, ‘You cannot make this because we have a huge stake in this character’ but the Thunderball book was owned by two people so they couldn’t actually stop us as long as we stuck to the source. So they kept very close tabs on us. They knew the script and they did not want anything that resembled their version of Thunderball – even though it was the same book we were adapting! So I had to do some fancy footwork, which was very difficult. Broccoli even said, ‘You cannot shoot any parts of the book that we have already shot.’ Well that meant we would not be able to do the underwater sequences – and that was part of our film. So we had to settle that too. It just went on and on.”

In its overwhelming favour Never Say Never Again at least has Connery back on form, highlighting an ageing and insecure secret agent.“I had worked with Sean Connery years before on a film called A Fine Madness,” continued Kershner. “I remember when Sean first called me about the project. He said, ‘How would you like to do my last 007 movie?’ My first reaction was, ‘Wow, you are an old man now, Sean. Can you actually do this again?’ He laughed and said, ‘Yeah but that is the thing – it will have to be a different kind of film, much more psychology and less action.’ So I didn’t want to have Bond hanging from a helicopter with one arm and shooting people with the other [laughs]. We had to make sure that the script indicated that Bond had come back from the sidelines to do this one special mission.”

Another plus for Never Say Never Again came in the form of some grounded villains. Austrian born Klaus Maria Brandauer is especially memorable as arch-misogynist Maximilian Largo – a sea-faring billionaire who masquerades as a charity philanthropist but is in fact SPECTRE’s number one honcho in underground arms deals. Blofeld, previously played by the likes of Telly Savalas and Donald Pleasence, is here given the subdued, and even gentlemanly, presence of Max von Sydow. Meanwhile, Barbara Carrera’s sadomasochistic sex-fiend Fatima Blush paves the way for such future 007 femme fatales as May Day in A View To A Kill and Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye.

“I loved the cast that we had,” added Kershner. “Max von Sydow and Barbara Carrera were wonderful and Klaus Maria Brandauer is an amazing actor with limitless depth. Unfortunately, he was very difficult to work with – although I think it was worth it. He played his role as normal as possible – with a little humour but a visible deadly streak. We had our differences but I like what he did and I respected his efforts enormously. I wanted his character to be very contemporary so I chose a greedy businessman as our villain. Of course, I didn’t realise how much of a forecast for the future this was [laughs].”

Released only four months after summer-smash Octopussy had done blockbuster business, Never Say Never Again would open to a Bond-breaking weekend gross. Even so, it was all downhill from there. Mixed critical reception, and the grudging acknowledgement that this was not a typical outing for everyone’s favourite undercover agent, resulted in Never Say Never Again failing to match the money of its Moore counterpart. Although by no means a flop (its theatrical take would remain unmatched by the three Bond outings which followed) this attempt to one-up Eon lacked the sheer spectacle of the official 007 epics.

“I did not want to refuse Sean when he asked me to make it but I was never actually a big fan of James Bond,” confided Kershner. “I saw some of them with my kids but this was not the sort of thing I ever wanted to make. And there were so many problems with Never Say Never Again. For a start, Thunderball is not a very good book so we had to move away from that in as much, legally, as we could.

“Consequently it was difficult to get a good script. But once we began shooting it was not challenging for Sean to resume his Bond persona. He was right there, he always knew the lines and he did what had to be done.”

1981: Rami Malek is born--Los Angeles, California.

2002: Die Another Day films the fight between Jinx and Frost.

2014: The Week interviews Timothy Dalton on Penny Dreadful, James Bond, and demons.

Timothy Dalton opens up about Penny
Dreadful, leaving James Bond, and the
demon in all of us

See the complete article here:

https://theweek.com/articles/447045/timothy-dalton-opens-about-penny-dreadful-leaving-james-bond-demon-all

Scott Meslow | May 12, 2014

I answer the phone and am immediately greeted by a warm, polite, and unmistakably British voice: "Hello. This is Timothy Dalton."

Dalton quickly launches into a string of apologies, as he's calling several hours after our scheduled interview time, which he forgot because he was driving his children to school. "I'm mortified," he reiterates, repeatedly, throughout our conversation.

Indeed, Dalton is as warm and conversational in real life as Sir Malcolm Murray — the character he plays in Showtime's excellent new horror drama Penny Dreadful — is cold and solitary. Describing an emotional scene from the end of Penny Dreadful's first episode — a scene in which he doesn't even appear — Dalton becomes emotional: "I wept," he proclaims. "Literally. I just found it so moving."

Dalton is revelatory as the haunted, haunting Sir Malcolm, who assembles a group of misfits that includes Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), and Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) to explore what he calls "the place where science and superstition go hand-in-hand." Dalton himself isn't much of a horror fan, and he thinks for a long time before coming up with another piece of horror fiction that he admires. ("The first thing that comes to my mind is the original Alien, where you never saw the damned alien until the end. That was pretty scary.") He's also skeptical of television; in an interview with Entertainment Weekly several years ago, Dalton said that he doubted he'd ever take a recurring role in a TV series because he thinks he "would find it difficult to do the same thing year in and year out." With all that in mind, I had to ask: What was it about Penny Dreadful that turned his head?

"How much good writing is there around these days?" he asks. "There are some terrific movies made. Great TV? There is good writing in TV, and some splendid writing in TV. But it's not common. So when it's in front of you, and it's good, and you've got someone like [writer and showrunner John Logan], and someone like [director J.A. Bayona] doing the first two episodes… You've got to do it. You can't say no, really. You could — but you shouldn't."

But as an actor, Dalton remains wary about the boredom that could come with playing the same character for too long. "Once you've created a character… once you've done it, once you've taken on that challenge — and hopefully been successful — what is the joy of repeating it? I don't know that there is any joy in repeating it. Once you've done a few weeks in the West End or on Broadway, and you've really got to grips with a serious piece of work, there's got to come a moment when it loses some of its challenge because you've already done it. You've climbed the mountain."

That leads, quite naturally, into a discussion of the role that Dalton is still most famous for: James Bond, who Dalton played in 1987's The Living Daylights and 1989's Licence to Kill.

Dalton waves away the idea that the fear of stagnation was a part of his relatively short tenure as 007. "That was my worry going into the James Bond franchise, certainly," he explains. "But it wasn't why I left." That doesn't mean he didn't have some concerns about the franchise: "On [Licence to Kill], I think I saw the script about two weeks before we started shooting. You know, that's not great, is it?"

Licence to Kill wasn't supposed to be his final James Bond movie; a third 007 movie, which would have starred Dalton, entered preproduction in 1990. "We had the script. They were interviewing directors. We were really rolling forward, ready to start. It was actually quite a good story, I thought," says Dalton. But a lengthy legal dispute between Eon Productions and MGM delayed the film indefinitely — and gave Dalton an out. "Because of the lawsuit, I was free of the contract," Dalton explains. "And [producer] Mr. Broccoli, who I really respected as a producer and as a friend, asked me what I was going to do when it was resolved. I said, 'Look, in all honesty, I don't think that I will continue.' He asked me for my support during that time, which of course, I gave him."

But when the lawsuit was resolved several years later, Dalton had a change of heart. "When [the next movie] did come about, it was probably four or five years later," he explains. "[Broccoli] asked if I would come back, and I said, 'Well, I've actually changed my mind a little bit. I think that I'd love to do one. Try and take the best of the two that I have done, and consolidate them into a third.' And he said, quite rightly, 'Look, Tim. You can't do one. There's no way, after a five-year gap between movies that you can come back and just do one. You'd have to plan on four or five.' And I thought, oh, no, that would be the rest of my life. Too much. Too long. So I respectfully declined." When Goldeneye hit theaters in 1995, it was Pierce Brosnan in the starring role.

In the years since, Dalton has turned in strong performances in everything from Hot Fuzz to Toy Story 3 — but Penny Dreadful is the meatiest role he's had in a while, and he's clearly relishing the depth and complexity that comes with playing Sir Malcolm Murray. "Vanessa, in a later episode, describes him as weak, foul, lustful, vainglorious," he explains. "You could add into that obsessive, manipulative, ruthless. You could also add in compassionate and courageous and all sorts of things. […] But this could be true about all of us, at certain moments of our lives, because human beings are such complex creatures. Actors, sometimes, they look for a character and they just want to play one thing. But human beings are so multifaceted, you know? We carry with us our good and our evil."

"I know [Penny Dreadful] is set in Victorian times — but it's about us, isn't it? Our guilt, and our shame, and our own personal demons, and how we work them out. How we come to terms with them, and whether we try to go back and turn them the right way. I think some people try to atone, and I don't think atonement leads to redemption at all. That's my personal feeling. You know, I think you have to accept your guilt. You have to live with your guilt. It's always struck me as being weird: You do something terrible, and you do penance. Penance isn't anything. I mean, what does penance mean? You do a few good deeds here or there? The consequences of your foul deeds will live on. You've got to handle redemption a different way."

Once again, we've taken a philosophical detour — but Dalton hastens to get back on track. "Let me bring it back to Penny Dreadful," he says. "You have to have characters you believe in, characters you empathize with. You have to have truth. And then you take them on a really interesting and scary journey. We are human beings watching, and we do have to empathize. I think that's what we're doing, and I hope that's what we're doing in Penny Dreadful. Showing an audience that all of these people are humans. Even if they're warped, even if they've got great problems. They're human beings, and they're trying to come to terms with themselves."

He pauses, then laughs. "But that's the boring side. On the other hand, you could say, 'All the good-looking people! Blood! Sex! Violence!' And fortunately, we've got it all."

Penny Dreadful airs on Showtime every Sunday at 10 p.m. You can stream the first episode here.
(Embedded Image: AP Photo/MGM/United Artists, FILE)

2020: Through the Guardian, Rory Kinnear shares the passing of his sister as related to COVID-19.

My sister died of coronavirus. She needed
care, but her life was not disposable

Rory Kinnear

See the complete article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/12/rory-kinnearsister-protect-vulnerable-coronavirus-rory-kinnear

Rory Kinnear

Those who most need compassion are being hit the hardest. I hope our focus in future is the easing of lives such as Karina’s.

2021: The Salisbury Museum hosts its Online Talk - Richard Chopping: The Original Bond Artist.

RICHARD CHOPPING: The Original Bond Artist - Jon Lys Turner, Chair of
Salisbury Museum

See the complete article here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-talk-richard-chopping-the-original-bond-artist-tickets-145520480675

Date and time
Wed, 12 May 2021, 14:30 EDT

About this event

FREE ONLINE TALK
SUGGESTED DONATION £5
Richard Chopping was a British writer and painter, best-known as the original illustrator of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, including From Russia with Love and Goldfinger - a commission that had been declined by his former friend and subsequent arch-rival, Lucien Freud.

His distinctive style and immaculate mastery of tromp l'oeil led Fleming - who was a Wiltshire resident in later life and is buried in Sevenhampton, Wiltshire - to describe him as 'a totally brilliant artistic collaborator!', but he was also a successful illustrator and writer of natural history and children's books. The range of Chopping's work will be explored in an exhibition at Salisbury Museum, due to launch when the museum re-opens in May.

In this Online Talk, Jon Lys Turner - Chair of the Salisbury Museum Board of Trustees, and close friend of Chopping and his partner Denis Wirth Miller - will introduce Chopping's extraordinary work and life, including some of his intimate friendships with many significant twentieth century cultural figures, from Francis Bacon to Benjamin Britten, Nina Hamnett to Noel Coward.

Tickets for this Online Talk are by donation.

The talk will be held on Zoom, and you will be sent the joining details by email in advance. The cut-off for ticket sales is 10am on the morning of 12 May.

You will be able to join on the evening from 7pm - giving you the opportunity to check your connection, test your sound, and settle in comfortably! - with the talk itself starting promptly at 7.30pm.

RichardTheBruce

May 13th

1946: Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith is born--Rugby, Warwickshire, England.
(He dies 7 April 2017 at age 70--Northampton, England.)

Tim Pigott-Smith obituary

See the complete article here:

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

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
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.

Tim Pigott-Smith (1946–2017)

Actor | Miscellaneous Crew
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0683116/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

1958: Macmillan publishes Ian Fleming's non-fiction book The Diamond Smugglers in the US.

THE DIAMOND SMUGGLERS
With an introduction by ‘John Blaize’,
formerly of the International Diamond
Security Organization

A major campaign against the greatest
smuggling racket of the world - the smug-
gling of diamonds from Africa, to the tune
of some ten million pounds a year - has
just been completed. It took three years,
Paris was involved and Antwerp, Beirut,
Freetown, Johannesburg - and Moscow.
Now this underground battle was waged in
the greatest spy story since the war.

All the facts have come into the hands
of Ian Fleming. He has been in Africa with
the secret agent chiefly responsible for
penetrating the international smuggling
network. Ian Fleming has written this
man’s story: it is a true story, and breath-
taking.

1963: Agente 007 contra el Dr. No (Agent 007 against Dr. No) premieres in Madrid, Spain.

1964: Sean Connery practices his golf swing at Northolt Airport, South Ruislip, England.

1967: Title song "You Only Live Twice" charts this date. Also, British weekly Melody Maker declares “Nancy meets James Bond … in the recording studio.”

https://nancysinatra.com/blog/2017/04/nancy-meets-james-bond-you-only-live-twice-at-50/

1971: Diamonds Are Forever films the craps game with Bond and Plenty O'Toole.

https://twitter.com/007/status/598517510133182464

1974: Bond comic strip The Nevsky Nude begins its run in The Daily Express.
(Finishes 21 September 1974. 2542–2655) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, artist.

‘The Nevsky Nude’ centres on a rather revealing mystery
https://www.popoptiq.com/the-nevsky-nude/
By Edgar Chaput




https://spyguysandgals.com/sgLookupComicStrip.aspx?id=1012


http://sequart.org/magazine/16692/on-the-james-bond-omnibus-volume-004-by-jim-lawrence-yaroslav-horak/

Swedish Semic Comic 1982 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1982.php3?s=comics&id=02218

Fallen Från Skyarna ("Fall From Sky" - The Nevsky Nude)

Danish 1976 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no38-1976/

James Bond Agent 007 no. 38: “The Nevsky Nude” (1976)

1987: Happy Anniversary, 007 hosted by Roger Moore celebrates Bond's 25th anniversary.

Commentary version, Moore looks great

1993: MGM through Variety announces work on BOND 17 resumes with writer Michael France.
1999: UNICEF Envoy Roger Moore visits a Stankovac refugee camp to raise funds for Kosovo children.

2008: Thomas Dunne Books publishes the US hardcover version of The Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel by Samantha Weinberg (as "Kate Westbrook").

2014: The Norwegian press says Norwegian actresses compete for Bond Girl roles in BOND 24.

Norwegian actors in race to be next Bond
girl

See the complete article here:

https://www.thelocal.no/20140513/headhunters-star-in-running-to-be-next-bond-girl

Synnøve Macody Lund (right) and Ingrid Bolsø Berdal (left) Photo: Magnet

Releasing/Resolve film | The Local | [email protected] | @thelocalnorway
13 May 2014 | 09:11 CEST+02:00
Norwegian actresses Ingrid Bolsø Berdal and Synnøve Macody Lund are both among the Scandinavian women competing to become the next 'Bond girl'.

Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, the 34-year-old Norwegian star of the upcoming Hollywood film Hercules, auditioned for the provisionally named "Bond 24" last year, her agent Anne Lindberg told The Local.

According to Norway's Dagbladet newspaper, Synnøve Macody Lund, the 38-year-old star of the film Headhunters, has also recently filmed audition scenes in Copenhagen for the film which, like Skyfall, will star Daniel Craig as James Bond and have Sam Mendes as director.

According to Sweden's Aftonbladet newspaper two Swedish actresses have also auditioned: Disa Östrand, a 27-year-old known for her role in Känn Ingen Sång, and Ida Engvoll, a 28-year-old who starred in 2013's Bäst Före.

The film's producers have confirmed they are recruiting a woman with typical Scandinavian features to play "a woman with a difficult history" in the film.

If Lund gets the role and is cast as one of Bond's love interests, the mother of two will become the eldest Bond girl in the history of the franchise. In Ian Fleming's 14 Bond books, Pussy Galore, the eldest of Bond's lovers, is described by Bond as "in her early thirties" .

According to Dagbladet, Lund would only confirm that she had met Sam Mendes at Pinewood Studio outside London.

"It was a great moment for me as a film enthusiast, and I was more than a little nervous," the former TV2 film journalist told the newspaper. "Just to look inside Pinewood Studios, with all its Bond props on display, was amazing."

Norway has already had one Bond girl, Julie Ege, who played Helen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969). Sweden, on the other hand, has already had no fewer than six Bond girls (click here for a full list https://www.thelocal.se/20121026/44070). Swedish actor Ola Rapace played one of the villains in Skyfall.

According to Lindberg, the film's producers have over the past year auditioned almost every suitable actress in Denmark, Sweden and Norway without yet giving any indications of who will get the role.

"In Denmark, there was a lot of castings last year and this year for the Bond girl but nobody knows anything yet," she said. "I don’t think anyone knows yet what the outcome is."

According to the film journalist Morten Steingrimsen, who edits James Bond magazine, Lund would fit into the new trend for more psychologically complex Bond girls.

"Synnøve has something Bond-like about her, and it is easy to imagine that she could develop a good dynamic with Craig and create a complex, interesting and different Bond girl," he said.

"In recent years there has been a clear trend towards making Bond's female counterpart something more than a sex symbol."

Synnøve Macody Lund


Ingrid Bolsø Berdal


Disa Östrand


Ida Engvoll