On This Day

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• peter Toronto

  January 2019 Posts: 9,509

  Tracy wrote: »

  
  
  25 yrs ago today , I miss him and wish i couldve met him :(

  
  Great face. Great voice. Great actor.
• Thunderfinger Das Boot Hill

  January 2019 Posts: 45,489

  This is what Blofeld did all those years.
• Revelator

  January 2019 Posts: 2,918

  Thunderfinger wrote: »

  This is what Blofeld did all those years.

  
  It's more lucrative than international terrorism and causes greater damage.
• Thunderfinger Das Boot Hill

  January 2019 Posts: 45,489

  It also draws some dames, without the need to hypnotize them.
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 23rd
  
  1943: Willy Bogner is born--Munich, Germany.
  1944: Maggie Wright is born--London, England.
  1962: Tonight plus two more nights Monty Norman supervises the music for the scene at Puss Feller's nightclub. Bond, Leiter, Quarrel, and that photographer in attendance.
  1962: David Arnold is born--Luton, England.
  1964: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover prepares a document regarding Harry Saltzman's request to use military aircraft (and intent to portray the FBI in a positive light) in the latest Bond film production.

  
  Opening the “James Bond File”
  mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/01/opening-the-james-bond-file/
  Nick Redfern January 8, 2016
  
  Have you ever wondered how government agencies react to seeing their employees portrayed in big-bucks movies? It’s an intriguing question. And so is the answer. In 2015, under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI declassified its file on the creator of the world’s most famous secret-agent: James Bond, 007. We’re talking about none other than author Ian Fleming. The 25-page file makes for eye-opening, interesting, and entertaining reading.
  https://vault.fbi.gov/ian-fleming/
  
  An FBI document dated January 23, 1964 – and prepared by J. Edgar Hoover himself, for the Los Angeles and Miami offices of the FBI – states that one Harry Saltzman “…today contacted a representative of the Department of Defense in Washington requesting the use of military aircraft in connection with a movie based on the Pocket Book entitled quote Goldfinger unquote by Ian Fleming. Stated FBI would be depicted in movie in favorable manner.” And who, you may ask, was Harry Saltzman? None other than one of the leading figures in the production of such James Bond movies as Dr. No, From Russia With Love, You Only Live Twice, Live And Let Die, and The Man With The Golden Gun.
  
  
  Ian Fleming and Harry Saltzman
  
  The dossier on Fleming and his work continues: “Bufiles contain no derogatory information concerning Saltzman. Fleming is writer of paperback novels concerning spy stories in which his fictional character, James Bond, is the star, and they are generally filled with sex and bizarre situations. Los Angeles is instructed to advise the Bureau regarding any information in their possession regarding this proposed movie.”
  
  Hoover added: “Miami is instructed to contact Saltzman who is residing at the Fontainebleau Hotel and vigorously protest any mention of FBI or portrayal of its agents in his proposed movie. You should bring forcefully to his attention the provisions of Public Law Six Seventy which prohibits the use of the words quote Federal Bureau of Investigation unquote or its initials in any manner without my written permission.” Clearly, Hoover was far from happy with the plans for Goldfinger.

  1984: Ποτέ μην ξαναπείς ποτέ (James Bond, praktor 007: Pote min xanapeis pote; translated--Never Ever Again) released in Greece.

  

  2013: Film fans in mainland China complain of censor cuts to Skyfall.

  Includes:
  - hitman Patrice killing a Chinese security guard in Shanghai.
  - mention of prostitution in Macau.
  - the villain Silva speaking of torture as a prisoner of the Chinese.

  2013: Hollywood buzz for the 2013 Oscars says a tribute to James Bond's 50th anniversary in film may assemble all six OO7 actors on stage.
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 24th
  
  1947: Ian Fleming enjoys a "bachelor sojourn" with Ivar Bryce and John Fox-Strangways at his recently completed Goldeneye estate, Jamaica. They drive to Montego Bay, northwest coast, to the opening of the Sunset Lodge Club. The start of the 'North Coast Jet Set'.

  

  Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica, Matthew Parker, 2015.
  
  https://books.google.com/books?id=zp-XBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT39&lpg=PT39&dq="ian+fleming"+"24+january"+"north+coast+jet+set"&source=bl&ots=dUEyKBYoWO&sig=ACfU3U1BJGNjriw6JhWpgZ55SQXz-8LjvA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7-I-1loXgAhUOVt8KHRzcBvMQ6AEwBXoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q="ian fleming" "24 january" "north coast jet set"&f=false

  1947: Warren Zevon is born--Chicago, Illinois. (He dies 7 September 2003 at age 56--Los Angeles, California.)
  1960: A series of articles by Ian Fleming on "Thrilling Cities" begins in The Sunday Times.
  1971: 007 James Bond Kraliçenin Hizmetinde (007 James Bond at the Service of the Queen) released in Turkey.

  

  1986: A View To a Kill released in New Zealand.
  1988: Pierce Brosnan appears in a Bond-inspired Diet Coke® ad.

  It airs Super Bowl (XXII) Sunday--ninjas, train, and all.
  

  1998: Tomorrow Never Dies released in Taiwan.
  2003: Die Another Day released in Denmark.
  2003: Не умирай днес (Do Not Die Today) released in Bulgaria.
  2003: Sa nu mori azi (Do Not Die Today) released in Romania.

  
  

  2008: BOND 22's title goes public.

  https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/bond_22_is_quantum_of_solace.php3

  2009: Quantum of Solace general release in Japan.

  
  

  2012: Omega Seamaster offers a James Bond 50th Anniversary Watch.

  
  Omega Seamaster James Bond 50th Anniversary Watch sports a 007 themed dial
  luxurylaunches.com/watches/omega_seamaster_james_bond_50th_anniversary_watch_sports_a_007_themed_dial.php
  by kamakshi
  
  
  The world was never enough for 007, and 50 years later, it seems it still hold true. As a p[art of the celebrations Omega will be bring out a “limited edition” Omega Seamaster James Bond 50th Anniversary Watch. While details remain sparse, some nice internet junkie has posted pictures of the stunning the Seamaster James Bond 50th Anniversary edition watch that sports “007″ theme on the dial and a “50″ marked in red on the bezel. The back case sports a true-blue Bond identity, the “bullet in a gun barrel” which marks the opening sequence in every James Bond movie. The bullet reads “50 years of James Bond.” The 41mm steel case watch will be limited to 11,0007 pieces and will run on the automatic mechanical Omega’s caliber 2507 co-axial movement.

  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 25th
  
  1950: John Terry is born--Florida.
  1955: Noel Coward writes a diary entry about his friend Ian Fleming.

  I have read Ian's new thriller in proof. It is the best he has done yet, very exciting and, although as usual too far-fetched, not quite so much so as the last two and there are fewer purple sex passages. His observation is extraordinary and his talent for description vivid. I wish he would try a non-thriller for a change; I would so love for him to triumph over the sneers of Annie's intellectual friends.

  1963: James Bond 007 jagt Dr. No (James Bond 007 Chasing Dr. No) released in West Germany.

  
  

  1981: Alicia Augello Cook (Keyes) is born--Hell's Kitchen, New York City, New York.
  2013: Skyfall's gross to date ($1.78 billion) exceeds that of Thunderball ($1.037 billion, inflation-adjusted).
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 edited January 2020 Posts: 13,820

  January 26th
  
  1904: Charles Fraser Smith is born--Deal, Kent, England.
  (He dies 9 November 1992, Bratton Fleming, Devon, England.)

  [img]Spying gadgets serve as tribute to the real-life Q: Exhibition recalls the eccentric inventor who became the model for James Bond's saviour[/img]

  Spying gadgets serve as tribute to the
  real-life Q: Exhibition recalls the
  eccentric inventor who became the
  model for James Bond's saviour

  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/spying-gadgets-serve-as-tribute-to-the-real-life-q-exhibition-recalls-the-eccentric-inventor-who-1454181.html
  WILL BENNETT | Friday 9 April 1993 00:02
  
  THE DEVICES are fiendishly cunning. The tiny camera masquerades as a cigarette lighter and the golf balls have compasses hidden inside them.
  
  At the entrance to the exhibition is a cut-out figure of James Bond and the music playing is the theme from the 007 films. But the display is not about the suave British agent.
  
  It is a tribute to Charles Fraser-Smith, an eccentric figure who spent the Second World War fooling the Germans by providing spies, saboteurs and escaping prisoners with concealed gadgets.
  
  But for the children who go to the exhibition at Dover Castle, the lure is that Mr Fraser- Smith was the model for Q, the inventor of scores of devices that enabled Bond to escape repeatedly from the jaws of death.
  
  Ian Fleming, author of the books on which the films were based, worked alongside Mr Fraser-Smith for British Intelligence during the war, and realised that for a novelist he was a dream character.
  
  The exhibition, just opened, is called Live and Let Spy: Who Was the Real Q?. On display is a hairbrush which conceals a compass, a map and a double- edged saw; a miniature radio disguised as a lunch box; and a set of apparently innocuous plastic balls coated inside with luminous radium paint, which were used as landing lights.
  
  With typical ingenuity Mr Fraser-Smith realised that the one liquid people were not going to run short of was urine. So he devised a handkerchief which when dipped in it revealed a map which could be used by escaping prisoners.
  
  Compasses concealed inside buttons became standard issue for British agents dropped into German-occupied territory, while the camera disguised as a lighter enabled spies to take pictures of the damage caused by Allied bombing without attracting attention.
  
  Many of his devices were sent to British prisoners of war who used them to escape. The Germans failed to spot maps hidden inside playing cards and cutting wire concealed inside shoelaces.
  
  The exhibition was the brainchild of Mr Fraser-Smith, who was born in Deal, Kent, but he never lived to see it open. He died last November, aged 87.
  
  For years he used the prototypes on display for giving talks. But as he neared the end of his life he got in touch with Ken Scott, general manager of Dover Castle.
  
  Mr Scott went to see him at his home in Bratton Fleming, north Devon, and Mr Fraser- Smith offered the devices to the nation. English Heritage, which runs Dover Castle, will keep them there for two years and then move them to another site.
  
  English Heritage hopes that with the James Bond connection as bait, the exhibition will teach children about the Second World War, which is now part of the national curriculum.

  
  
  
  

  
  1996: Goldeneye (GoldenEye) released in Denmark.
  1997: Reports say BOND 18 features Bond driving a BMW 750iL.

  
  

  2015: International Artists Management announces Brigitte Millar to play a villainous character in BOND 24.
  2019: Michel Legrand dies at age 86--Paris, France. (Born 24 February 1932--Bécon les Bruyères, France.)
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 edited January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 27th
  
  1963: James Bond 007 contre Dr. No (Also: Docteur No; James Bond 007 contre docteur No) released in France.

  
  Boris Grinsson
  
  
  

  1965: Alan Cumming is born--Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland.
  1979: Rosamund Mary Elizabeth Pike is born--Hammersmith, London, England.
  2010: Martin Ryan Grace dies at age 67--Spain.
  (Born 12 September 1942--Lisdowney, County Kilkenny, Ireland.)

  
  News > Obituaries
  Martin Grace: Roger Moore's stunt
  double in the James Bond films
  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/martin-grace-roger-moores-stunt-double-in-the-james-bond-films-1897007.html
  Friday 12 February 2010 01:00
  
  
  
  Performing as Roger Moore's stunt double in the James Bond films brought Martin Grace respect throughout the industry – but, because of the nature of his job, he was never a "star". He also did stunts for some of the early Cadbury's Milk Tray commercials.
  
  Grace first stood in for Moore in the 1977 picture The Spy Who Loved Me, driving a Lotus Esprit through the winding streets of Sardinia in a furious chase – with the express instruction that the car had to be returned to its manufacturer intact. He followed this with Bond's fight with the steel-jawed henchman Jaws on top of a cablecar 1,300 feet above ground in Rio de Janeiro in Moonraker (1979). The action continued in the air in For Your Eyes Only (1981), with Grace hanging on to the outside of a remote-controlled helicopter for the pre-title sequence. Later, in Moore's final Bond film, A View to a Kill (1985), the stunt performer did more aerial acrobatics, on the Eiffel Tower and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.
  
  But during Octopussy (1983) a complicated stunt involving a train and a car went horribly wrong while shooting on the Nene Valley railway. A helicopter was to shoot the action from the air, but communication was lost between Grace, the pilot, the train driver and the rest of the stunt team, and Grace smashed into a wall, fracturing his pelvis and damaging his thigh.
  
  "The impact was so lightning fast that I only realised that I had hit something when I found I was hanging prone for dear life on the side of the train!" he recalled. "Adrenalin was pumping through my arms like never before. I looked down and saw my trouser leg had been ripped off and saw my thigh bone through the gash in my thigh muscle."
  
  Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1942, Grace attended Kilkenny College. He then moved to England, joined boxing, weight-lifting, wrestling and fencing clubs, and worked at Butlin's.
  
  He then trained as an actor at the Mountview Theatre School, in London, and joined a stunt agency. His first jobs were in commercials, such as the Cadbury's Milk Tray campaign, in which he jumped from a bridge on to a train, was lifted from a sports car and dropped on a hotel roof and, finally, jumped from a cliff on to a moving truck, before diving into a lake to deliver the chocolates to a woman on a boat.
  
  His first film was the television spin-off Dr Who and the Daleks (1965). Like many stunt performers, he was cast in a role that demanded his special skills, as he was in pictures such as Who Dares Wins (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), and television programmes that included The Onedin Line (1972) and The Protectors (1973).
  
  In You Only Live Twice (1967), starring the screen's original Bond, Sean Connery, Grace was one of a host of stunt performers taking part in the climactic volcano-eruption scene where Bond gives an elite ninja force access to the villain Blofeld's secret base. Grace underwent four weeks of intensive training – scaling nets, sliding down ropes and practising trampoline "explosions" – before the sequence was shot.
  
  In 1969, he was Oliver Reed's fencing double in The Assassination Bureau. He fought with Anthony Hopkins in When Eight Bells Toll (1971), and did stunts with Kirk Douglas in To Catch a Spy (1971), after seven months out of action as a result of breaking his neck in Scrooge (1970).
  
  Grace appeared in a show that toured Scandinavia in 1974 and starred the Norwegian stunt performer Arne Berg. The experience of doing six performances a week that required high falls, car crashes, motorcycle jumps, fights and tunnels of fire stood him in good stead when he was asked to double for Roger Moore in five Bond films. He also doubled for Richard Kiel, as the villain Jaws, in both The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979).
  
  This also led Grace to become Moore's stunt double in some of the star's other films – The Wild Geese (1978), Escape to Athena (1979), North Sea Hijack (1979), The Sea Wolves (1980) and The Naked Face (1984). Also among the 70-plus films in which he did stunt work were Superman (1978), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Brazil (1985), King Arthur (2004), Ella Enchanted (2004) and The Number 23 (2007). He had extra responsibility, as stunt co-ordinator, on pictures such as High Spirits (1988), Erik the Viking (1989), Nuns on the Run (1990), Patriot Games (1992) and Angela's Ashes (1999).
  
  In 1978, the Rank Organisation chose Grace to be its fifth famous gong-beater, but in the end his sequence was consigned to the cutting room floor. A keen cyclist, Grace fractured his pelvis in an accident last year. He returned to hospital after developing breathing problems at his home in Spain and died after suffering an aneurysm.
  
  Anthony Hayward
  

  Martin Ryan Grace, actor and stunt performer and co-ordinator: born Kilkenny, Ireland 12 September 1942; twice married; died Spain 27 January 2010.

  2013: BOND 23 is declared the #1 successful Bond film--overtaking Thunderball.
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 28th
  
  1965: Dedos de oro (FIngers of Golde) released in Argentina.

  
  

  1965: 007 Contra Goldfinger (007 Against Goldfinger) released in Brazil.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  2000: Lumea nu e suficientă released in Romania.
  2012: BOND 23 films at Smithfield Market, OO7 travels to MI6's "new digs".
  2013: Bernard Horsfall dies at age 82--Isle of Skye, Scotland.
  (Born 20 November 1930--Bisshops Stortford, Herfordshire, England.)
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 29th
  
  1931: Leslie Bricusse is born--London, England.
  1962: Ursula Andress arrives in Jamaica, stays at the Courtleigh Manor Hotel, Kingston.
  1965: 007 ja Kultasormi (007 and Gold Bull; Swedish: 007 och Guldfinger, 007 and Goldfinger) released in Finland.
  1967: The Colgems label releases "The Look of Love" written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, sung by Dusty Springfield. Inspired by Ursula Andress in the film, says Bacharach.

  

  1983: Varley Thomas dies at age 81--Ewell, Surrey, England.
  (Born 29 November 1901--Wandsworth, Surrey, England.)
  1995: BOND 17 films in Puerto Rico.
  2007: Casino Royale released in Beijing, China.

  
  
  
  
  

  2014: British miniseries Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond starring Dominic Cooper premieres in the US.

  

  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 edited January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 30th
  
  1960: Bond comic strip Diamonds Are Forever ends its run in the Daily Express.
  (Started 10 August 1959. 340-487) John McLusky, artist. Henry Gammidge, writer.

  
  
  
  
  
  https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/daf.php3?s=comics&id=01045
  
  Swedish https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1988.php3
  
  
  Danish http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no9-1967/
  
  
  

  1977: Bond comic strip When the Wizard Awakes begins its run in the Sunday Express.
  (Ends 22 May 1977. 1-54) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

  http://spyguysandgals.com/sgLookupComicStrip.aspx?id=1020
  

  2003: Die Another Day released in Hong Kong, China.
  2006: BOND 21 filming begins in Prague, Czech Republic.

  https://www.mi6-hq.com/news/index.php?itemid=3286&catid=2

  2011: John Barry Prendergast, OBE, dies at age 77--Oyster Bay, New York.
  (Born 3 November 1933--York, North Yorkshire, England.)

  Movies |
  
  John Barry Dies at 77; Composed for Bond Films
  https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/movies/01barry.html
  By WILLIAM GRIMESJAN. 31, 2011
  
  John Barry, whose bold, jazzy scores for “From Russia With Love,” “Goldfinger” and nine other James Bond films put a musical stamp on one of the most successful film franchises of all time, and who won five Academy Awards as a composer for “Born Free,” “Dances With Wolves” and other films, died on Sunday in New York. He was 77.
  
  His death was announced in a statement by family members and reported by The Associated Press. No other details about the cause of death or where he died were provided.
  
  Mr. Barry scored dozens of films, big and small, that called for music to express a wide variety of human emotions and dramatic situations. He composed taut, pulsing, jittery music for the espionage thrillers “The Ipcress File” (1965) and “The Quiller Memorandum” (1966), delivered a sultry sound for the noirish “Body Heat” (1981) and established an offbeat intimacy for “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), with its haunting harmonica theme.
  
  “I like to score the inner feelings of a character — get into their shoes in an imaginative way and take the audience there and enlighten them in a poetic rather than realistic way,” he told The New York Times in 2000.
  
  His throbbing, expansive score for “Born Free” (1966) earned him two Oscars, one for best score and the other for best song.
  

  Although he won Oscars for his work on “The Lion in Winter” (1968), “Out of Africa” (1985) and “Dances With Wolves” (1990), he was known first and foremost as the resident composer for most of the Bond films.
  
  The musical template he established was as much a part of the films as Bond’s double entendres, Q’s gadgetry and Miss Moneypenny’s flirtatious repartee. The films began with a catchy song performed by a pop star, its themes picked up and reprised throughout the movie, most effectively in the tense transitions when Bond moved from one exotic location to the next or prepared to execute a choice bit of spycraft.
  
  His role in composing the most famous Bond music of all, the theme that has been a signature of the films since “Dr. No” (1962), remains unclear. When he took credit for the theme in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in 1997, the original composer hired for the film, Monty Norman, successfully sued the newspaper for libel, asserting that Mr. Barry had only done the orchestration.
  
  After being called in as a kind of musical special agent for “Dr. No” by the film’s producers, Mr. Barry went on to score “From Russia With Love” (1963), “Goldfinger” (1964), “Thunderball” (1965), “You Only Live Twice” (1967), “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), “The Man With the Golden Gun” (1974), “Moonraker” (1979), “Octopussy” (1983), “A View to a Kill” (1985) and “The Living Daylights” (1987).

  John Barry Prendergast was born on Nov. 3, 1933, in York, England. His father ran a chain of movie theaters in the north of England, and early on he became entranced by film music. He later credited film composers like Max Steiner, Erich Korngold and Bernard Herrmann as important influences, as well as Stan Kenton’s big band.
  
  
  John Barry scored dozens of films that called for music to express a wide variety of human emotions and situations. Credit PBS, via Photofest
  
  “I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque sharp attack,” he told Film Score Monthly in 1996, calling it a brassy wall of sound with notes hitting extreme highs and lows.

  
  He studied piano and took instruction in composition with Francis Jackson, the organist and composer at York Minster. He later played the trumpet with dance bands and, during his military service, with an Army band.
  
  In 1957 he formed the John Barry Seven, a rock ’n’ roll band styled after the popular guitar-based instrumental group the Ventures. His group recorded several instrumental hits as well as “Hit and Miss,” the theme song for the popular television program “Juke Box Jury.”
  
  The band reached its widest audience as the backup group for Adam Faith on the BBC pop show “Drumbeat.” When the singer was cast in the 1959 film “Beat Girl,” released in the United States as “Wild for Kicks,” and the Peter Sellers film “Never Let Go,” Mr. Barry came along to write the music.
  
  He quickly found himself in demand at a time when British directors looked to jazz and pop music to create a cool image for their films. He was the composer for “Man in the Middle” (1963), “The Wrong Box” (1966), “The L-Shaped Room” (1962) and “Zulu” (1964).
  
  He inched closer to the center of the British New Wave when he married the actress Jane Birkin in 1965, inspiring Newsweek to call him the man “with the E-type Jag and the E-type wife.”
  
  It was his second marriage. He is survived by his fourth wife, Laurie; four children, Kate, Suzanne, Sian and Jonpatrick; and five grandchildren.
  

  The origins of the James Bond theme are disputed. Mr. Norman said that he brushed off a musical passage from “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” a song he had written for a musical version of the V. S. Naipaul novel “A House for Mr. Biswas.” With a few adjustments, it became the theme to “Dr. No.” The John Barry Orchestra, an expanded version of Mr. Barry’s group, performed the theme, with Vic Flick supplying the twangy, Duane Eddy-style guitar sound.
  
  Mr. Barry testified in court in 2001 that he had entered into a secret agreement with the film’s producers to write the theme for a flat fee, with Mr. Norman, whose authorship claims he called “absolute nonsense,” retaining the credit. He adopted a more circumspect tone after the libel judgment in 2001.

  
  When he was not scoring the Bond films, Mr. Barry composed the music for films like “The Tamarind Seed” (1974), “The Day of the Locust” (1975), “Robin and Marian” (1976), “The Deep” (1977), “The Cotton Club” (1984), “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986), “Jagged Edge” (1985) and, perhaps least of all, “Howard the Duck” (1986). He also composed the theme for the 1970s television series “The Persuaders,” with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore.
  
  His scores for “Mary, Queen of Scots” (1971) and “Chaplin” (1992) were nominated for Academy Awards.
  

  Mr. Barry decided to quit the Bond game while the going was still good. “I gave up after ‘The Living Daylights’ in 1987,” he told The Sunday Express of London in 2006. “I’d exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible. It was a formula that had run its course. The best had been done as far as I was concerned.”

  
  Correction: February 2, 2011
  An obituary on Tuesday about the film composer John Barry misstated the surname of one of the composers he considered an influence. He was Max Steiner, not Stern. The obituary also misstated part of the title under which the British movie “Beat Girl,” for which Mr. Barry wrote the music, was released in the United States. It was “Wild for Kicks,” not “Living for Kicks.”
  
  Correction: February 19, 2011
  An obituary on Feb. 1 about the film composer John Barry misstated his legal given name. He was born John Barry Prendergast, not Jonathan.
  
  A version of this article appears in print on February 1, 2011, on Page B18 of the New York edition with the headline: John Barry Dies at 77; Composed for Bond Films.

  2012: Industry reports connect Javier Bardem to BOND 23.[/quote]
  2019: Dynamite Comics James Bond OO7 #3 "in shops".

  https://www.previewsworld.com/Catalog/NOV181157
  
• Tracy

  January 2019 Posts: 1,708

  
  
  Jan 23 , 1979 : Lonsdale writes a letter during filming of MR :D
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  January 2019 Posts: 13,820

  January 31st
  
  1942: Daniela Bianchi is born--Rome, Lazio, Italy.
  1960: The Sunday Times of London prints Ian Fleming's "The Thrilling Cities: Hong Kong."
  1963: Dr. No released in the Netherlands.
  1964: A 007, dalla Russia con amore (At 007, From Russia With Love) released in Italy.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  1970: Minnie Driver is born--Middlesex Hospital, London, England.
  1973: B.J. Arnau films her Filet of Soul scenes at Pinewood Studios.
  2003: Die Another Day released in Norway and Switzerland (Italian speaking region, after French and German speaking regions.)
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 1st
  
  1960: Bond comic strip From Russia with Love begins its run in The Daily Express.
  (Ends 21 May 1960. 488-583) John McLusky, artist. Henry Gammidge, writer.

  
  
  
  
  
  Swedish 1980 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1980.php3
  
  Swedish 1987 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1987.php3
  
  
  Danish http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-no-5-frwl-1966-eng/
  

  1961: Mrs. James Bond writes Ian Fleming and calls his Bond "a rascal."

  

  The Man with the Golden Typewriter, Fergus Fleming (Editor), 2015.

  TO MRS. JAMES BOND, 721, Davidson Road, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
  18, Pasadena
  
  'It was inevitable we should catch up with you. . . " On which ominous note
  Mrs James Bond began her letter of 1 February 1961. Fleming had never
  made any secret of the fact that he had borrowed his her's name from one
  of his favorite books, Birds of the West Indies, by the American orni-
  thologist James Bond. But now, almost ten years after he had written
  Casino Royale, news reached the Bonds that 'you had brazenly picked
  up the name of a real human being for your rascal.' They didn't really
  mind, as the real Bond had led an adventurous life, his colorful exploits
  not being too far, in the ornithological scale of things, from those of his fic-
  tional equivalent. 'I told MY JB he could sue you for defamation of charac-
  ter,' Mrs. Bond concluded cheerfully. 'JBBA [James Bond British
  Agent] is too much fun for that and JB authenticus regards the whole thing
  as "a joke".'

  1995: Dark Horse Comics releases James Bond 007: The Quasimodo Gambit #2.

  

  2002: BOND 20 filming of 007 escaping the military medical facility.
  2003: Die Another Day released in Taiwan.

  

  2005: Actor Pierce Brosnan posts a letter on his Web site confirming an end to his involvement with Bond, detailing his future projects, and thanking fans for their support through the uncertainty of the previous year.

  February 1, 2005
  
  Dear Friends,
  
  Is it too late to say Happy New Year? I don't think so. I've just come back from The Sundance Film Festival. It was the first outing for my company Irish DreamTime with our independent film The Matador which was greeted warmly and heralded a great success. In fact, we sold out all eight performances and received a standing ovation!
  
  From start to finish the movie was a joy to make. The cast and crew were a tight outfit. Of course when you only have a cast of three main characters, and when those players are actors like Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis, well, it was a walk in the park. We shot the entire movie in Mexico City in early spring of last year. The city and her people embraced us all, and in return we were seduced by her charms; it was truly a gifted time.
  
  Immediately following Sundance, we sold our film The Matador, to none other than Mr. Harvey Weinstein at Miramax. To say that we are happy and overjoyed is an understatement. These moments must be cherished, shared, and enjoyed with friends as they don't come around that often.
  
  Next up…
  
  Irish DreamTime is going full steam ahead on Thomas Crown 2, AKA The Topaki Affair, along with Lochinvar and a few other projects we are developing. In the meantime, life is filled with family. This time at home away from the hustle and bustle of location life is wonderful. I could get used to it.
  
  I would like to thank all of you who have supported me over the last year or so in regard to my playing Bond. It was a decade of my life that I will always hold dear to my heart and a time that will never be forgotten. And you dear friends stood by me throughout. Many, many thanks! But everything comes to an end, and one must accept this decision which cannot be dealt with in any other way but with some kind of grace and knowledge that I did the job to the best of my ability.
  
  So let us all go out there into each new day and be great, to ourselves and each other.
  
  Love and only love,
  
  Pierce Brosnan

  2012: First official photo of BOND 23 shows scruffy beard growth on OO7 in Shanghai (actually Pinewood Studios).

  

  
  
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  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 2nd
  
  1981: Bond comic strip Doomcrack begins its run in The Sunday Express. (Ends 19 August 1981. 1-174)
  Harry North (known for Mad Magazine film parodies), artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

  
  
  

  1983: Bond comic strip Deathmask ends its run in The Sunday Express. (Started 7 June 1982. 379-552)
  John McLusky, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

  https://piktag.net/shatterhandgrice/photo/1892640221298045302_2057419686
  
  
  https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1983.php3
  

  1984: Insan gibi yasa (Human Like Law) released in Turkey. Television title: Asla asla deme (Never Say Never).

  

  1986: Gemma Arterton is born--Gravesend, Kent, England.

  

  1995: Donald Pleasence dies at age 75--Saint-Paul de-Vence, Alps-Maritimes, France.
  (Born 5 October 1919--Worksop, Nottinghamshire, England.)
  2019: Groundhog Day in the US.
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 3rd
  
  1970: Sean Thomas Connery photographed by Godfrey Argent.

  https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw86015
  
  https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw86017

  1976: Casino Royale (1976) is televised in Guatemala hours before an earthquake that kills thousands, earning its notoriety as La película de la noche anterior al terremoto (The Movie of the Night Before the Earthquake).
  2005: EON announces Martin Campbell will direct BOND 21, with the title Casino Royale.

  https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/bond_21_announced.php3

  2012: BOND 23 filming has Daniel Craig running the streets of London, Tower Hill, on the way to M's hearing.
  2016: Dynamite's James Bond #4 Vargr goes on sale.
  Cover: Dom Reardon. Jason Masters, artist. Warren Ellis, writer.

  
  
  

  
  
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  February 2019 edited February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 4th
  
  1962: "The Living Daylights" is published in The Sunday Times colour supplement.

  The Daily Express objects, since they have rights to comic versions of Bond books and stories. Fleming works it out with them. The story later appears in Argosy as "Berlin Escape", June 1962. A 1966 comic version eventually runs in The Daily Express. And of course the story is published in the last Fleming book Octopussy and the Living Daylights, 1966.
  
  http://james-bond-literary.wikia.com/wiki/The_Living_Daylights
  

  1989: 리빙 대이 라 이 트 (The Living Daylights) released in the Republic of Korea.

  

  2012: The BOND 23 production delays filming at Vauxhall Bridge due to snow.
  2015: Filming of airplane action at Kartitsch, Austria.

  https://007travelers.blogspot.fi/2015/02/spectre-action-pics-from-kartitsch.html

  
  
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  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 5th
  
  1920: Rose Alba is born--Cairo, Egypt. (She dies January 2006 at age 85--London, England.)
  1921: Ken Adam is born--Berlin, Germany. (He dies 10 March 2016 at age 95--London, England.)
  1958: The conversation between Bond and the Governor related in the story "Quantum of Solace" takes place. Bond had been on a mission since 29 January. As confirmed by the John Griswold book, Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond Stories.
  1965: Goldfinger released in Sweden.

  
  

  2000: The World Is Not Enough released in Japan.

  
  
  
  

  2015: Spectre filming at Pinewood Studios pauses due to Daniel Craig's sprained knee during a fight scene.
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

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  February 6th
  
  1922: Patrick Macnee is born--Paddington, London, England.
  (He dies 25 June 2015 at age 93--Rancho Mirage, California.)
  1944: Maud Russell writes in her diary about Ian Fleming.

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

  Sunday 6 February, 1944
  
  Yesterday I. came to dinner, looking well and busy with a dream, the
  dream being a house on a mountain slope in Jamaica after the war.

  1952: Succeeding George VI, Elizabeth II begins her reign as Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms.
  2002: For BOND 20, Pierce Brosnan and Rick Yune fight in the Alvarez Clinic.
  2008: Mythbusters airs its James Bond Special: Part 2 (Season 6, Episode 4).

  

  2012: Skyfall reaches #7 on the list of top film box office grosses.
  2015: Three days of filming begins at "Bond chapel" (Bacher Kapelle zur Schwarzen Madonna" /Bacher Chapel of the Black Madonna).
  2015: 87-year-old former Bond actor Roger Moore acknowledges Daniel Craig's injury on the BOND 24 set.

  "Sorry to hear Daniel Craig has sprained his knee on set of #Spectre... Being 007 is not without its hazards. I'm available to step in if needed."

  2017: Alec McCowen dies at age 91--London, England. (Born 26 May 1925--Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.)

  
  SINCE 1880
  Obituary: Alec McCowen
  https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/obituaries/2017/obituary-alec-mccowen/
  by Michael Quinn - Feb 17, 2017
  
  
  Alec McCowen in The Tempest at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1993. Photo: Marilyn Kingwill Actor Alec McCowen, 91. Photo: Marion Kingwill
  
  Few actors were as consistently intelligent and engagingly relaxed on stage and screen as Alec McCowen. They were qualities that shone through a career encompassing the classics and contemporary work and that lit up his two remarkable one-man plays – St Mark’s Gospel (1978) and Kipling (1983).
  
  Both pieces enjoyed runs in the West End and on Broadway, the former – a vivid account from the King James’ Bible – boasted “theatrical merits past telling” according to The Stage, while the latter, a portrait of the Edwardian poet written by Brian Clark, was “a personal triumph” for McCowen.
  
  Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to devout evangelical parents, he made his professional debut as Micky in Paddy the Next Best Thing with Macclesfield Rep in 1942 while still a student at RADA. He spent the war in India and Burma performing with the military’s Entertainments National Service Association.
  
  His first London appearance was as Maxim in Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (Arts Theatre, 1950) and he made an impression at the same venue in 1952 as Hugh Voysey in The Voysey Inheritance. A run of successful roles that included Daventry (Roger MacDougall’s Escapade, St James’s Theatre, 1953), Barnaby Tucker (Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, Haymarket Theatre, 1954) and Dr Bird (Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Hippodrome Theatre, 1956) soon saw him rising through the ranks.
  
  He became a regular with London’s Old Vic in the 1960s, making his debut as the Dauphin – “the most striking and interesting… since Alec Guinness” said The Stage – in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan and as Mercutio to Judi Dench’s Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, before going on to play Algernon, Richard II, Oberon and Malvolio.
  
  With the Royal Shakespeare Company, McCowen was a knowing Fool to Paul Scofield’s King Lear in Peter Brook’s austere 1962 production, contrasting its severity with the comic relish of Antiphonus in the same year’s The Comedy of Errors.
  
  Forty years later he teamed again with Scofield’s Lear, this time as the Earl of Gloucester, for a recording by Naxos featuring Kenneth Branagh as the Fool.
  
  His “large, sweeping, dominating performance” (The Stage) as the delusional Father Rolfe in Peter Luke’s Hadrian VII at Birmingham Repertory Theatre and, later, the Mermaid Theatre, London, proved to be McCowen’s breakthrough performance. It earned him an Evening Standard drama award and a Tony nomination on Broadway.
  
  In 1970, he returned to Birmingham to play Hamlet and was back in the West End and on Broadway the following year for a second Tony nomination as Philip in the Royal Court’s transfer of Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist.
  
  With the National Theatre in 1973, his Alceste was “alive in every way in every moment” in John Dexter’s “dream come true” production (The Stage) of Tony Harrison’s robustly witty adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope.
  
  He reunited with Dexter to create the role of the psychiatrist Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s Equus in 1973 and again the following year for “an apparently perfect” Professor Higgins to Diana Rigg’s Eliza in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Albery Theatre, London. In 1975, the pair reprised The Misanthrope on Broadway (earning McCowen a third Tony nomination) and subsequently at the Old Vic.
  
  His later stage career was marked by a variety that embraced Antony to Dorothy Tutin’s Cleopatra in 1977 for Toby Robertson’s Prospect Theatre Company and a superlative Frank – the timid researcher thwarted in his attempts to find a cure for the common cold – in Brian Thompson’s Tishoo (Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 1979).
  
  Writing in the Guardian, critic Michael Billington described McCowen’s performance as Adolf Hitler in Christopher Hampton’s The Portage to San Cristobal of AH at the Mermaid Theatre in 1982 as “one of the greatest pieces of acting I have ever seen”. The Stage’s Peter Hepple considered it “the very stuff of great theatre”.
  
  In 1986, he was seen as Henry Harcourt Reilly in TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, the inaugural production of director John Dexter and producer Eddie Kulukundis’ New Theatre Company, at London’s Phoenix Theatre.
  
  At the National Theatre in 1987 he portrayed Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a glorious clown and was seen alongside Scofield and Eileen Atkins as a veteran crime reporter in danger of being ousted in Jeffrey Archer’s pressroom drama Exclusive at the Strand Theatre in 1989. The following year he lent Uncle Jack, the missionary priest sent home from Uganda under a cloud, a sense of seemingly harmless disorientation in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa at the National Theatre.
  
  Notable late appearances included the pedantic English professor Michael imprisoned in Beirut in Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (Hampstead and Vaudeville theatres; it also marked his Broadway swansong), and a commanding Prospero memorably teamed with Simon Russell Beale’s Ariel in The Tempest, directed by Sam Mendes, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1993.
  
  He was heard in a radio broadcast of John Osborne’s never-produced screenplay The Charge of the Light Brigade, given a gala charity staging at Armoury House, London, in 2002.
  
  Directing credits include Terence Rattigan’s While the Sun Shines (Hampstead Theatre, 1972) and Martin Crimp’s Definitely the Bahamas (Orange Tree Theatre, 1987).
  
  McCowen’s screen debut came in 1953’s The Cruel Sea and he made his mark as Brown in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in 1962. His exquisitely underplayed comic timing was seen to delightful effect as the nephew to Maggie Smith in Travels With My Aunt (1972) and as the police inspector forced by his wife to eat rich gourmet food in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).
  

  He was also seen as Q in Sean Connery’s 1983 one-off comeback as James Bond, Never Say Never Again. His last screen appearance was a cameo in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York in 2002.

  Television credits included the Whitehall spy-catcher title role in two series of Mr Palfrey of Westminster (1984-85), Dr Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest (1986) and Sir Robert Peel in Victoria and Albert (2001).
  
  He published two volumes of autobiography – Young Gemini (1979) and Double Bill (1980) – and was appointed an OBE in 1972 and a CBE in 1986. His partner, the actor Geoffrey Burridge, died in 1987.
  
  Alexander Duncan McCowen was born on May 26, 1925, and died on February 6, aged 91

  
  
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  February 2019 edited February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 7th:
  
  1952: Anne Rothermore's divorce is finalized. She plans a March wedding with Ian Fleming.
  1962: The Dr. No film crew arrives at St. Ann's Bay, Ocho Rios, north coast of Jamaica.
  1964: From Russia With Love released in Ireland.

  

  1970: Þrumufleygur (Thunderbolt) released in Iceland.

  Hey--
  

  1970: John Barry's On Her Majesty's Secret Service soundtrack charts in the US, eventually reaching #103.
  1985: Matt Munro dies at age 54--Ealing, London, England. (Born 1 December 1930--London, England.)

  
  Matt Monro, Britain's 'Cockney Como,' Dies at 54
  http://articles.latimes.com/1985-02-08/news/mn-4672_1_matt-monro
  February 08, 1985|BURT A. FOLKART | Times Staff Writer
  
  Matt Monro, an East London bus driver who perfected his lyrical baritone techniques while serenading his passengers, died Thursday of liver cancer in London.
  

  The popularizer of such hits as "Born Free" and "From Russia With Love" died in London's Cromwell Hospital after a liver transplant operation was deemed useless two weeks ago.

  
  Likened to Perry Como because of his effortless versions of the ballads of the day, Monro, 54, had the speaking voice of a Cockney but phrased like an English troubadour. Although he once had a succession of such hit recordings as "My Kind of Girl," "Portrait of My Love," "Softly, As I Leave You" and "Yesterday," in recent years he had been out of the international arena and his appearances limited to nightclubs and cameos on British television.
  
  Munro admitted in the late 1960s that alcohol had once been a problem but that he had overcome it. He also confessed to being an ongoing nicotine addict.
  
  'Smoked Incessantly'
  
  "I have smoked incessantly since I started at 9 on tea leaves," he had said. "If they're announcing, 'Ladies and Gentlemen--Matt Monro,' I'll light a cigarette because I know we've got two minutes of overture time and I can have a puff."
  
  Monro, who was born Terence Parsons in London's middle-class East End, got his first paying job as a lorry operator. He later graduated to buses. But even as a boy, he told The Times in a 1968 interview when he was appearing in Las Vegas, he had always wanted to sing.
  
  He took those frustrated ambitions out on his passengers who encouraged him, and he soon made his debut in small clubs.
  
  In 1960 he recorded "Portrait of My Love" and followed it with "Walk Away." Both were popular in England and abroad but it was his agent, lyricist Don Black, who made Monro a true international star.
  
  Monro recorded Black's lyrics to "Born Free," the theme from the film about a lioness domesticated by a British couple in Africa, and the song topped charts in Britain, America and Japan.
  
  He also had capitalized on a recording industry oversight. One of The Beatles' most popular tunes, "Yesterday," had not been released as a single and Monro, by then called the "Cockney Como," soon filled that gap with his own version.
  
  Favorite Among Fellow Vocalists
  
  It stayed on Britain's Top 10 for months.
  
  His warm, relaxed interpretations of old and new songs and his gentle phrasing made him a favorite among fellow vocalists.
  
  Frank Sinatra once said that Monro was the only British singer he ever listened to.
  
  Monro's hospitalization and recent illnesses were kept from the public until an exploratory operation Jan. 20 revealed that his cancer had spread too far for a liver transplant to save him.
  
  He is survived by his wife, Mickie, and three children.

  

  2008: BOND 22 films at Howard Air Force Base, Panama City (substituting for Haiti and Bolivia).

  The National Institute of Culture of Panama subs for a Bolivian hotel. Director Marc Forster is frustrated by the limitations for filming at Panama's Fort Sherman, a former US military base, on the Colón coast. His vision of the harbour boat chase is grander than circumstances allow.
  
  Meanwhile, a teaser poster is revealed online.

  2019: Albert Finney dies at age 82--London, England.
  (Born 9 May 1936--Pendleton, Salford, Lancashire, England.)

  
  Albert Finney obituary
  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/08/albert-finney-obituary
  Actor hailed as the new Olivier but who preferred playing
  working-class heroes to classical roles
  Michael Coveney | Fri 8 Feb 2019 13.04 EST
  
  A look back at Albert Finney's most memorable performances – video
  
  One of the new-style working-class heroes and shooting stars of the 1960s, the actor Albert Finney, who has died aged 82, enjoyed a rich and varied career that never quite fulfilled its early promise. Like Richard Burton before him and Kenneth Branagh after him, he was expected to become the new Laurence Olivier, the leader of his profession, on stage and on screen.
  
  That this never quite happened was no fault of Finney’s. He worked intensely in two periods at the National Theatre, was an active film producer as well as occasional director, and remained a glowering, formidable presence in the movies long after he had been nominated five times for an Oscar (without ever winning). Although a stalwart company member – Peter Hall paid heartfelt tribute to his leadership and to his acting at the National – he led his life, personal and professional, at his own tempo.
  Advertisement
  
  From middle age onwards – and he was only 47 when he gave one of those Oscar-nominated performances, the fruity old actor defying the blitz, Donald Wolfit-style, in Peter Yates’s The Dresser, written by Ronald Harwood – he assumed a physical bulk and serenity that bespoke a life of ease, far from the madding crowd, in good restaurants and on Irish racecourses. He never courted publicity.
  
  His unusual, cherubic face, slightly puffy and jowly, but with high cheekbones, the face of an unmarked boxer, was always a reminder of his sensational breakthrough in two signature British films, Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) – his line as the Nottingham bruiser Arthur Seaton, “What I want is a good time; the rest is all propaganda”, could serve as a professional epitaph – and Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), a lubricious historical romp that imparted a metaphorical mood of the swinging 60s.
  
  Finney was the new roaring boy of that high-spirited, colourful decade – cheeky, northern and working-class. Born in Salford, he was the son of Albert Finney Sr, a bookmaker, and his wife, Alice (nee Hobson); as it happens, also born that day was another Lancastrian “new wave” actor, Glenda Jackson.
  
  Young Albert attended Tootal Drive primary school and Salford grammar. He flunked his exams but played leading roles in 15 school plays and went south to London and Rada, where he was in a class that included Peter O’Toole, Tom Courtenay, Frank Finlay, John Stride and Brian Bedford. While still a student, as Troilus in a modern play, he was spotted by Kenneth Tynan – the best-known critic of the day – who proclaimed a “smouldering young Spencer Tracy ... who will soon disturb the dreams of Messrs Burton and Scofield”. And so it proved. His rise was instant and meteoric. He played Brutus, Hamlet, Henry V and Macbeth at the Birmingham Rep, and in 1956 made his London debut in the Old Vic’s production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. In 1958 he played opposite Charles Laughton in Jane Arden’s The Party at the Arts theatre.
  
  
  Albert Finney with Diane Cilento in the film Tom Jones, 1963, directed by Tony Richardson.
  Photograph: Allstar/Woodfall Film
  
  He followed Laughton to Stratford, joining a stellar company under the direction of Glen Byam Shaw, and played Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Laughton was Bottom) and Cassio with Paul Robeson as Othello and Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona. He also understudied (and went on for, to sensational effect) Olivier as Coriolanus.
  
  But Finney was a modern actor not really destined for classical eminence. Much more his style was the insolence and daydreaming of Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall at the Cambridge theatre, though the role on film went to Tom Courtenay. At the Royal Court he took the lead roles in a satirical musical, The Lily White Boys, directed by Lindsay Anderson, and in John Osborne’s vitriolic, tumultuous Luther (the latter in the West End, later on Broadway); he made his film debut opposite Olivier in The Entertainer in 1960.
  
  A pattern of oscillation between theatre and cinema was soon established, as he bookended his first major stint at the National, in the great Olivier company, with screen appearances in Reisz’s 1964 remake of Emlyn Williams’s psychological thriller Night Must Fall and Stanley Donen’s delightful study of a disintegrating relationship, scripted by Frederic Raphael in flash back and fast forward, Two For the Road (1967). Finney’s leading lady in the latter, Audrey Hepburn, was not the first nor last of his amorous work-and-pleasure intrigues.
  
  His NT appearances in 1965 and 1966 were as a strutting Don Pedro in Franco Zeffirelli’s Sicilian take on Much Ado About Nothing (with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens), the lead in John Arden’s Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, a great double of the candescent upstart Jean in Strindberg’s Miss Julie and the outrageous Harold Gorringe in Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy, topped off with the double-dealing, split-personality Chandebise in Jacques Charon’s definitive production of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear.
  
  Then he was off again, having founded Memorial films in 1965 with his great friend and fellow actor Michael Medwin, directing and starring in Charlie Bubbles (1968), written by his fellow Salfordian Shelagh Delaney (author of A Taste of Honey) and featuring Billie Whitelaw and Liza Minnelli. He co-produced Lindsay Anderson’s savage public school satire If … (1968), bankrolled Mike Leigh’s first feature film, Bleak Moments (1971), and gave Stephen Frears his movie-directing debut on Gumshoe, a brilliant homage to film noir as well as a good story (written by Neville Smith) about a bingo caller (Finney) in a trenchcoat with delusions of being Humphrey Bogart. He even had time to disguise himself totally as a wispily senile Scrooge in Ronald Neame’s 1970 film, with Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley and Edith Evans as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
  
  
  Albert Finney as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1970 film based on Dickens’s novel.
  Photograph: Waterbury/Cinema Center/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
  
  An invitation to return to the Royal Court as an associate director (1972-75) resulted in one of his blistering stage performances, opposite Rachel Roberts, in EA Whitehead’s Alpha Beta. He directed Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City and a revival of Joe Orton’s Loot, and appeared in David Storey’s Cromwell and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
  
  The reminiscing Krapp unspooled his old Grundig on a double bill with Billie Whitelaw’s hectic jabbering in Not I, and Finney confided in Whitelaw his lack of rapport with the playwright: “You know the way I work, I take all the different paints out of the cupboard, I mix the colours together. If they’re not right, I shove them all back and take out a new lot.” Whitelaw advised him to dispose of all the colours and retain the white, black and grey.
  
  He was much happier unbuttoning in Peter Nichols’s sharp West End comedy Chez Nous and embodying Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot in Sidney Lumet’s star-laden Murder on the Orient Express (1974). But he returned to the National under Peter Hall during the difficult transition period from the Old Vic to the South Bank.
  
  Over six years from 1974, as striking technicians and unconvinced critics lined up to try to scupper the new building, Finney ploughed on as a bullish, tormented Hamlet, a lascivious Horner in The Country Wife, the perfect arriviste Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard and a disappointing Macbeth. The centrepiece was his heroic, muscular and glistening Tamburlaine in Peter Hall’s 1976 defiant staging of Marlowe’s two-part mighty epic, twirling an axe to deadly effect.
  
  This performance marked Finney’s grandest, if not necessarily finest, hour on stage; he appeared briefly at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 1977 to deliver beautifully modulated performances as Uncle Vanya and an ultra-credible woman-slaying Gary Essendine in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter. Another long absence from the theatre ended with a stunning performance as a roguish Chicago hoodlum in Lyle Kessler’s Orphans at the Hampstead theatre in 1986 (and a movie version a year later) and another great turn as a Catholic priest, held hostage and deprived of his faith, in Harwood’s JJ Farr at the Phoenix theatre.
  
  Finney was now nearly a grand old man, but without the seigneurial distinction of either Olivier or Gielgud. He was delightful and dewy-eyed, eventually, as a bald Daddy Warbucks in John Huston’s film of Annie (1982), but truly magnificent as the alcoholic British consul – “a drunk act to end all drunk acts” said one critic – in Huston’s Under the Volcano (1984), adapted from the novel by Malcolm Lowry.
  
  
  Albert Finney as the detective Hercule Poirot in the film Murder on the Orient Express (1974), directed by Sidney Lumet. Photograph: Allstar/Studiocanal/EMI
  
  That performance should have won the Oscar, perhaps, but he remained a near-miss nominee, as he had done in The Dresser (1983). On stage, the beautiful, bolshie boy had settled into ruminative, but always interesting, late middle age, notably in Harwood’s ingeniously structured Another Time (1989), in which he played a bankrupt Jewish commercial traveller and, in the second act, his own musician son, 35 years later; another Harwood play, Reflected Glory (1992), allowed him to let rip as a breezy Mancunian restaurateur confronted with a critical family play written by his own playwright brother (though it was slightly unsettling to see Finney, the brave new Turk, siding with Harwood’s contempt for “modish” contemporary theatre manners).
  
  His last stage appearance reunited him in 1996 with his old friend Courtenay in Yasmina Reza’s Art, at Wyndham’s, a play about friendship being threatened by the purchase of a white painting for a lot of money. Courtenay was the art-loving dermatologist, Finney hilarious and exasperated as an astronautical engineer appalled by the purchase.
  
  Harwood scripted a new film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1994), directed by Mike Figgis, but Finney was probably as unwise to assume Michael Redgrave’s mantle as the unloved classics teacher as he was to play the Ralph Richardson role of Henry James’s Dr Austin Sloper in Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square (1997), a remake of William Wyler’s far superior The Heiress.
  
  Finney, it seemed, was selecting his movie scripts for their surprise and eclectic qualities, rather than any urgency about fulfilling his destiny as a great actor. But he was much racier on film than on stage. He honed his gangster act as a dodgy politician in the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990), bumbled irascibly as a retired track official in Matthew Warchus’s Simpatico (1999), an underrated version of a difficult Sam Shepard play, and added a touch of class (and a wayward American accent) as the small-town lawyer in Steven Soderbergh’s crusading Erin Brockovich (2000), opposite a rejuvenated, tremendous Julia Roberts, which brought his fifth and last Oscar nomination.
  
  His best, and now often elegiac, performances materialised sporadically on television: as Maurice Allington in The Green Man (1991), adapted from a Kingsley Amis novel; as Reggie in A Rather English Marriage (1998), alongside Courtenay; and as Churchill in The Gathering Storm (2002), written by Hugh Whitemore, with Vanessa Redgrave as his wife.

  In Hollywood, he clocked in for Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and the third in a superb trilogy adapted from Robert Ludlum’s spy action thrillers, starring Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). His last movie credits came in The Bourne Legacy and the Bond film Skyfall (both 2012).

  Finney, always known as Albie, was rumoured to have declined both a CBE and a knighthood. In 1957 he married the actor Jane Wenham; they had a son, Simon, and divorced in 1961. His marriage to the French actor Anouk Aimée in 1970 ended in divorce eight years later. He then had a long relationship with the actor Diana Quick – the pair were for a while feared missing up the Amazon. In 2006 he married Pene Delmage, who survives him, along with Simon.
  
  • Albert Finney, actor, born 9 May 1936; died 7 February 2019

  
  Entertainment & Arts
  Albert Finney: Daniel Craig leads tributes to late Bond co-star
  
  https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47175279
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 8th
  
  1962: The Gleaner reports on Ocho Rios area locals objecting to almost 100 production-related jobs with EON going to Kingstonians.
  2002: Media reports say Madonna will sing the title theme of BOND 20, which does not yet have a title.
  2015: BOND 24 filming at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire.
  2018: Anthony Horowitz announces the title of his second James Bond novel as Forever and a Day. To be published 31 May 2018, it will include original Fleming material.

  

  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  Update
  February 7th
  
  2019: Albert Finney dies at age 82--London, England.
  (Born 9 May 1936--Pendleton, Salford, Lancashire, England.)

  
  Albert Finney obituary
  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/08/albert-finney-obituary
  Actor hailed as the new Olivier but who preferred playing
  working-class heroes to classical roles
  Michael Coveney | Fri 8 Feb 2019 13.04 EST
  
  A look back at Albert Finney's most memorable performances – video
  
  One of the new-style working-class heroes and shooting stars of the 1960s, the actor Albert Finney, who has died aged 82, enjoyed a rich and varied career that never quite fulfilled its early promise. Like Richard Burton before him and Kenneth Branagh after him, he was expected to become the new Laurence Olivier, the leader of his profession, on stage and on screen.
  
  That this never quite happened was no fault of Finney’s. He worked intensely in two periods at the National Theatre, was an active film producer as well as occasional director, and remained a glowering, formidable presence in the movies long after he had been nominated five times for an Oscar (without ever winning). Although a stalwart company member – Peter Hall paid heartfelt tribute to his leadership and to his acting at the National – he led his life, personal and professional, at his own tempo.
  Advertisement
  
  From middle age onwards – and he was only 47 when he gave one of those Oscar-nominated performances, the fruity old actor defying the blitz, Donald Wolfit-style, in Peter Yates’s The Dresser, written by Ronald Harwood – he assumed a physical bulk and serenity that bespoke a life of ease, far from the madding crowd, in good restaurants and on Irish racecourses. He never courted publicity.
  
  His unusual, cherubic face, slightly puffy and jowly, but with high cheekbones, the face of an unmarked boxer, was always a reminder of his sensational breakthrough in two signature British films, Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) – his line as the Nottingham bruiser Arthur Seaton, “What I want is a good time; the rest is all propaganda”, could serve as a professional epitaph – and Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), a lubricious historical romp that imparted a metaphorical mood of the swinging 60s.
  
  Finney was the new roaring boy of that high-spirited, colourful decade – cheeky, northern and working-class. Born in Salford, he was the son of Albert Finney Sr, a bookmaker, and his wife, Alice (nee Hobson); as it happens, also born that day was another Lancastrian “new wave” actor, Glenda Jackson.
  
  Young Albert attended Tootal Drive primary school and Salford grammar. He flunked his exams but played leading roles in 15 school plays and went south to London and Rada, where he was in a class that included Peter O’Toole, Tom Courtenay, Frank Finlay, John Stride and Brian Bedford. While still a student, as Troilus in a modern play, he was spotted by Kenneth Tynan – the best-known critic of the day – who proclaimed a “smouldering young Spencer Tracy ... who will soon disturb the dreams of Messrs Burton and Scofield”. And so it proved. His rise was instant and meteoric. He played Brutus, Hamlet, Henry V and Macbeth at the Birmingham Rep, and in 1956 made his London debut in the Old Vic’s production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. In 1958 he played opposite Charles Laughton in Jane Arden’s The Party at the Arts theatre.
  
  
  Albert Finney with Diane Cilento in the film Tom Jones, 1963, directed by Tony Richardson.
  Photograph: Allstar/Woodfall Film
  
  He followed Laughton to Stratford, joining a stellar company under the direction of Glen Byam Shaw, and played Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Laughton was Bottom) and Cassio with Paul Robeson as Othello and Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona. He also understudied (and went on for, to sensational effect) Olivier as Coriolanus.
  
  But Finney was a modern actor not really destined for classical eminence. Much more his style was the insolence and daydreaming of Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall at the Cambridge theatre, though the role on film went to Tom Courtenay. At the Royal Court he took the lead roles in a satirical musical, The Lily White Boys, directed by Lindsay Anderson, and in John Osborne’s vitriolic, tumultuous Luther (the latter in the West End, later on Broadway); he made his film debut opposite Olivier in The Entertainer in 1960.
  
  A pattern of oscillation between theatre and cinema was soon established, as he bookended his first major stint at the National, in the great Olivier company, with screen appearances in Reisz’s 1964 remake of Emlyn Williams’s psychological thriller Night Must Fall and Stanley Donen’s delightful study of a disintegrating relationship, scripted by Frederic Raphael in flash back and fast forward, Two For the Road (1967). Finney’s leading lady in the latter, Audrey Hepburn, was not the first nor last of his amorous work-and-pleasure intrigues.
  
  His NT appearances in 1965 and 1966 were as a strutting Don Pedro in Franco Zeffirelli’s Sicilian take on Much Ado About Nothing (with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens), the lead in John Arden’s Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, a great double of the candescent upstart Jean in Strindberg’s Miss Julie and the outrageous Harold Gorringe in Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy, topped off with the double-dealing, split-personality Chandebise in Jacques Charon’s definitive production of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear.
  
  Then he was off again, having founded Memorial films in 1965 with his great friend and fellow actor Michael Medwin, directing and starring in Charlie Bubbles (1968), written by his fellow Salfordian Shelagh Delaney (author of A Taste of Honey) and featuring Billie Whitelaw and Liza Minnelli. He co-produced Lindsay Anderson’s savage public school satire If … (1968), bankrolled Mike Leigh’s first feature film, Bleak Moments (1971), and gave Stephen Frears his movie-directing debut on Gumshoe, a brilliant homage to film noir as well as a good story (written by Neville Smith) about a bingo caller (Finney) in a trenchcoat with delusions of being Humphrey Bogart. He even had time to disguise himself totally as a wispily senile Scrooge in Ronald Neame’s 1970 film, with Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley and Edith Evans as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
  
  
  Albert Finney as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1970 film based on Dickens’s novel.
  Photograph: Waterbury/Cinema Center/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
  
  An invitation to return to the Royal Court as an associate director (1972-75) resulted in one of his blistering stage performances, opposite Rachel Roberts, in EA Whitehead’s Alpha Beta. He directed Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City and a revival of Joe Orton’s Loot, and appeared in David Storey’s Cromwell and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
  
  The reminiscing Krapp unspooled his old Grundig on a double bill with Billie Whitelaw’s hectic jabbering in Not I, and Finney confided in Whitelaw his lack of rapport with the playwright: “You know the way I work, I take all the different paints out of the cupboard, I mix the colours together. If they’re not right, I shove them all back and take out a new lot.” Whitelaw advised him to dispose of all the colours and retain the white, black and grey.
  
  He was much happier unbuttoning in Peter Nichols’s sharp West End comedy Chez Nous and embodying Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot in Sidney Lumet’s star-laden Murder on the Orient Express (1974). But he returned to the National under Peter Hall during the difficult transition period from the Old Vic to the South Bank.
  
  Over six years from 1974, as striking technicians and unconvinced critics lined up to try to scupper the new building, Finney ploughed on as a bullish, tormented Hamlet, a lascivious Horner in The Country Wife, the perfect arriviste Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard and a disappointing Macbeth. The centrepiece was his heroic, muscular and glistening Tamburlaine in Peter Hall’s 1976 defiant staging of Marlowe’s two-part mighty epic, twirling an axe to deadly effect.
  
  This performance marked Finney’s grandest, if not necessarily finest, hour on stage; he appeared briefly at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 1977 to deliver beautifully modulated performances as Uncle Vanya and an ultra-credible woman-slaying Gary Essendine in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter. Another long absence from the theatre ended with a stunning performance as a roguish Chicago hoodlum in Lyle Kessler’s Orphans at the Hampstead theatre in 1986 (and a movie version a year later) and another great turn as a Catholic priest, held hostage and deprived of his faith, in Harwood’s JJ Farr at the Phoenix theatre.
  
  Finney was now nearly a grand old man, but without the seigneurial distinction of either Olivier or Gielgud. He was delightful and dewy-eyed, eventually, as a bald Daddy Warbucks in John Huston’s film of Annie (1982), but truly magnificent as the alcoholic British consul – “a drunk act to end all drunk acts” said one critic – in Huston’s Under the Volcano (1984), adapted from the novel by Malcolm Lowry.
  
  
  Albert Finney as the detective Hercule Poirot in the film Murder on the Orient Express (1974), directed by Sidney Lumet. Photograph: Allstar/Studiocanal/EMI
  
  That performance should have won the Oscar, perhaps, but he remained a near-miss nominee, as he had done in The Dresser (1983). On stage, the beautiful, bolshie boy had settled into ruminative, but always interesting, late middle age, notably in Harwood’s ingeniously structured Another Time (1989), in which he played a bankrupt Jewish commercial traveller and, in the second act, his own musician son, 35 years later; another Harwood play, Reflected Glory (1992), allowed him to let rip as a breezy Mancunian restaurateur confronted with a critical family play written by his own playwright brother (though it was slightly unsettling to see Finney, the brave new Turk, siding with Harwood’s contempt for “modish” contemporary theatre manners).
  
  His last stage appearance reunited him in 1996 with his old friend Courtenay in Yasmina Reza’s Art, at Wyndham’s, a play about friendship being threatened by the purchase of a white painting for a lot of money. Courtenay was the art-loving dermatologist, Finney hilarious and exasperated as an astronautical engineer appalled by the purchase.
  
  Harwood scripted a new film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1994), directed by Mike Figgis, but Finney was probably as unwise to assume Michael Redgrave’s mantle as the unloved classics teacher as he was to play the Ralph Richardson role of Henry James’s Dr Austin Sloper in Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square (1997), a remake of William Wyler’s far superior The Heiress.
  
  Finney, it seemed, was selecting his movie scripts for their surprise and eclectic qualities, rather than any urgency about fulfilling his destiny as a great actor. But he was much racier on film than on stage. He honed his gangster act as a dodgy politician in the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990), bumbled irascibly as a retired track official in Matthew Warchus’s Simpatico (1999), an underrated version of a difficult Sam Shepard play, and added a touch of class (and a wayward American accent) as the small-town lawyer in Steven Soderbergh’s crusading Erin Brockovich (2000), opposite a rejuvenated, tremendous Julia Roberts, which brought his fifth and last Oscar nomination.
  
  His best, and now often elegiac, performances materialised sporadically on television: as Maurice Allington in The Green Man (1991), adapted from a Kingsley Amis novel; as Reggie in A Rather English Marriage (1998), alongside Courtenay; and as Churchill in The Gathering Storm (2002), written by Hugh Whitemore, with Vanessa Redgrave as his wife.

  In Hollywood, he clocked in for Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and the third in a superb trilogy adapted from Robert Ludlum’s spy action thrillers, starring Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). His last movie credits came in The Bourne Legacy and the Bond film Skyfall (both 2012).

  Finney, always known as Albie, was rumoured to have declined both a CBE and a knighthood. In 1957 he married the actor Jane Wenham; they had a son, Simon, and divorced in 1961. His marriage to the French actor Anouk Aimée in 1970 ended in divorce eight years later. He then had a long relationship with the actor Diana Quick – the pair were for a while feared missing up the Amazon. In 2006 he married Pene Delmage, who survives him, along with Simon.
  
  • Albert Finney, actor, born 9 May 1936; died 7 February 2019

  
  Entertainment & Arts
  Albert Finney: Daniel Craig leads tributes to late Bond co-star
  
  https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47175279

  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 9th
  
  1983: Bond comic strip Flittermouse begins its run in The Daily Express (Ends 20 May 1983. 553-624)
  John McLusky, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

  http://spyguysandgals.com/sgLookupComicStrip.aspx?id=1028
  
  https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=870828
  

  1995: BOND 17 films interiors for the Janus Satellite Control Center.

  https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Janus_Satellite_Control_Center

  1996: 007: Kuldsilm released in Estonia.

  

  1998: Nintendo releases James Bond 007 for Game Boy, a video game developed by Saffire.

  
  
  
  
  

  2006: BOND 21 films the pre-title sequence and Bond's first two kills.
  2012: BOND 23 films OO7 and M escaping to the Scottish highlands in the Aston Martin DB5.
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 10th
  
  1941: Michael David Apted is born--Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England.
  1962: Bond comic strip Thunderball in The Daily Express (started 11 December 1961; 1066-1128 ) suddenly ends midstream, due to a dispute over Fleming's arrangement to premiere his short story "The Living Daylights" in the competition--The Sunday Times. Later resolved, and comics resume in 1964's Daily Express with On Her Majesty's Secret Service. John McLusky, illustrator. Henry Gammidge, writer.

  
  
  
  
  
  https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/tb.php3
  
  Danish http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no-6-eng/
  
  
  
  

  1966: Thunderball premieres in Dublin, Ireland.

  
  http://obsessional.uk/facts.htm

  February 10th 1966 saw a charity premiere held at the Savoy in Dublin. Luciana Paluzzi, Molly Peters, Kevin McClory and Cubby Broccoli were amongst the guests. This was followed by a party held by McClory at the Gresham Hotel.

  
  
  
  

  2013: BAFTAs awarded to BOND 23 for Best British Film, Best Original Music. Nominations also included Javier Bardem, Judi Dench, Roger Deakins.
  2015: Daniel Craig returns to the filming of BOND 24 following a knee injury.
  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 edited February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 11th
  
  1961: Carey Lowell is born--Huntington, New York.
  1962: Sheryl Crow is born--Kennett, Missouri.
  1966: Thunderball general release in Ireland.
  1987: The Prince and Princess of Wales visit the Pinewood set of The Living Daylights.

  

  2015: The first official photo of BOND 24 is released.

  

  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 12th
  
  1936: Joe Don Baker is born--Groesbeck, Texas.
  1942: Maud Solveig Christina Wikström (Maud Adams) is born--Luleå, Norrbottens län, Sweden.
  1967: Altinparmak (Goldfinger) released in Turkey.
  1987: The Living Daylights production films the scene in Gibraltar wherein OO7 witnesses the death of OO4.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  1997: BOND 18 make-up and lighting tests for Jonathan Pryce.
  2005: Composer John Barry receives the BAFTA Fellowship award at The Orange British Academy Film Awards, Odeon Leicester Square, London.

  

  2013: Skyfall released on DVD and Bluray in the US.
  2015: A fire at Pierce Brosnan's five-mansion estate in Malibu destroys his Aston Martin Vanquish.

  

  
  
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 edited February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 13th
  
  1916: Joseph Fürst is born--Vienna, Austria.
  (He dies 29 November 2005 at age 89--Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.)
  1970: On Her Majesty's Secret Service released in Ireland.
  1987: It's a wrap for the filming of The Living Daylights.
  1995: BOND 17 filming of the Monaco-Monte Carlo scenes take place in England.
  2002: Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson receive a special award from the London Film Critics' Circle recognizing the 40th anniversary of the James Bond films.
  2019: Dynamite Entertainment releases James Bond: Origin #6. Bob Q, artist. Jeff Parker, writer.

  James Bond: Origin #6 (Cover A Cassaday) https://forbiddenplanet.com/265027-james-bond-origin-6-cover-a-cassaday/
  
  
  James Bond: Origin #6 (Cover B Colak) https://forbiddenplanet.com/265028-james-bond-origin-6-cover-b-colak/
  
  
  James Bond: Origin #6 (Cover C Anwar) https://forbiddenplanet.com/265029-james-bond-origin-6-cover-c-anwar/
  
  
  James Bond: Origin #6 (Cover D Moustafa) https://forbiddenplanet.com/265030-james-bond-origin-6-cover-d-moustafa/
  
  
  James Bond: Origin #6 (Cover E Bob Q) https://forbiddenplanet.com/265031-james-bond-origin-6-cover-e-bob-q/
  

  2020: BOND 25 planned release date in Germany and Portugal. (Later shifted to April 2020.)

  Update: Apologies to @j_w_pepper and others.
  

  
  
  
• j_w_pepper Born on the bayou, but I now hear a new dog barkin'

  February 2019 Posts: 9,042

  Thank you. I hope it will really be a reason for congratulations.
• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  February 2019 edited February 2019 Posts: 13,820

  February 14th
  
  1989: James Bond dies at age 89--Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
  (Born 4 January 1900--Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.)

  

  Journal of Geek Studies
  Spreading knowledge and geekness (not necessarily in this order)

  https://jgeekstudies.org/2015/05/10/the-birds-of-james-bond/
  About Guidelines Current Issue Archives
  Vol. 6(1): June, 2019 Vol. 5(2): Dec/2018 Vol. 5(1): Jun/2018 Vol. 4(2): Dec/2017 Vol. 4(1): Jun/2017 Vol. 3(2): Dec/2016 Vol. 3(1): Jun/2016 Vol. 2(2): Dec/2015 Vol. 2(1): Jun/2015 Vol. 1(1-2): Dec/2014 Editorial Board Partners Contact
  
  The birds of James Bond
  Posted on May 10, 2015 by JGS editor
  Rodrigo B. Salvador1 & Barbara M. Tomotani2
  
  1 Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart; Stuttgart, Germany. Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; Tübingen, Germany. Email: salvador.rodrigo.b (at) gmail (dot) com
  
  2 Netherlands Institute of Ecology; Wageningen, The Netherlands. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen; Groningen, The Netherlands. Email: babi.mt (at) gmail (dot) com
  
  Download PDF https://jgeekstudies.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/salvadortomotani_2015_bond.pdf
  

  “The name is Bond, James Bond.”
  
  This particular British Secret Service agent is known worldwide through numerous books, comics, videogames and, of course, films. James Bond was created by Ian Fleming and the series now outlives its creator, continuing to grow on a somewhat constant rate. Fleming’s superspy character was based on many people he met during the time he spent serving in the British Naval Intelligence Division during World War II. In his own words, James Bond “was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war”.
  
  But what few know is where the name comes from. Actually, it was not invented by Fleming for the character; instead, it was borrowed from a real person. So who was the original James Bond and how Fleming came to know him and to borrow his name?

  
  LICENSE TO MAP
  
  James Bond was born in Philadelphia on 4 January 1900. After his mother’s death during his teens, in 1914, he moved with his father to England, going to Cambridge University and receiving his degree in 1922. Back in Philadelphia, after less than three years working for a banking firm, his love of natural history led him to join an expedition of the ANSP (Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia) to the lower Amazon River in Brazil. His father, Francis E. Bond, who led an ANSP expedition (when James was 11) to the Orinoco Delta, perhaps influenced James’ decision, as well as his interest in the natural sciences.
  
  
  James Bond, in 1974. Photo taken at the ANSP
  by Jerry Freilich. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
  
  After the expedition to the Amazon, James Bond became a true ornithologist (see Box 1 for a glossary) and curator of the ANSP and started to publish many scientific papers on the South American birds. Nevertheless, he soon decided that the focus of his studies would be the Caribbean birds and this became his life’s work. He spent the next decades travelling through the Caribbean islands and studying their avifauna. The main result of his work in the region was the book “Birds of the West Indies” (1936), containing a scientific account (with descriptions, habits, geographic distribution etc.) of all the known species from the islands. The book was renamed “Field Guide of Birds of the West Indies” on its second edition (1947), but reverted to the original name on the third edition (1961). Also, from the third edition onwards, the book featured color plates of the birds (by Don R. Eckelberry) and more simplified descriptions. This made the book more similar to modern field guides, making it a must for scientists and birdwatchers alike. After the final edition (1985), Bond kept the book updated via a series of 27 supplements. He finished revising a sixth edition shortly before his death (on 14 February 1989, after a years-long fight with cancer).
  
  
  Cover of the first edition of “Birds of the West Indies”,
  featuring the Jamaican tody (Todus todus).
  
  From all the islands that James Bond visited, perhaps the one that most fascinated him was Jamaica, where he realized that the native avifauna was derived from North America, and not from South America as was previously supposed. This kind of study is part of the discipline known as Biogeography and led Bond, in 1971, to establish a biogeographic boundary between the Lesser Antilles and Tobago. This line separates two zones, the West Indies and South America, each with its own type of avifauna. This later led David Lack to propose, in 1973, the name “Bond’s Line” for this boundary.
  
  
  Map of the Caribbean Islands, showing
  the West Indies avifaunal region, encompassed by
  Bond’s Line. (Source: Bond, 1993.)
  
  Besides the books, Bond published more than 100 scientific papers and was awarded many medals and honors throughout his career. He is known today as the father or Caribbean ornithology. What he did not expected though, was the other Bond, which appeared in Jamaica of all places, and caused him a certain deal of consternation.

  GOLDENEYE
  
  It was only in 1960–1961 that Bond discovered his fictional namesake from Ian Fleming’s novels, after several novels had already been published (the first one, “Casino Royale”, dates from 1953). This led his wife Mary to write the book “How 007 Got His Name” (published in 1966). In this book, she tells how she jokingly wrote a letter to Fleming saying that he had “brazenly taken the name of a real human being for your rascal!”
  
  Fleming was a British novelist and spent a couple of months every year in his estate (named Goldeneye) on Oracabessa Bay, on the northern coast of Jamaica. He was interested in the Jamaican wildlife and had a growing collection of book on shells, birds, fish and flora. Also, as any keen birdwatcher on the Caribbean, Fleming used the “Field Guide of Birds of the West Indies” (he had the 2nd edition, from 1947) and was thus very familiar with the name James Bond. On his reply to Mary’s letter, he explained that he “was determined that my secret agent should be as anonymous a personality as possible. (…) At this time one of my bibles was, and still is, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, and it struck me that this name, brief, unromantic and yet very masculine, was just what I needed and so James Bond II was born.” On a later interview, Fleming explained further his choice of name: “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, ‘James Bond’ was much better than something more interesting, like ‘Peregrine Carruthers’. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.”
  
  The Goldeneye estate, as of 2011.
  (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
  
  On that letter to Mary, Fleming added that in return for using the name he could offer “your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purpose he may think fit. Perhaps one day he will discover some particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion.” This never happened though. Finally, Fleming also invited the Bonds to visit him in Jamaica. This happened in 1964, when the Bonds were there researching and paid a surprise visit to Fleming. This was shortly before the novelist’s death six months later, and luckily, this one-time meeting was captured in video for a future documentary. At first, Fleming was suspicious of Bond’s identity and asked him to identify some birds. Bond, of course, passed the test with flying colors and Fleming had the happiest day of the rest of his life.

  FROM JAMAICA WITH LOVE
  
  Jamaica, despite being a rather small country, has a very diverse avifauna. There are circa 320 bird species living in Jamaica, including migrants. From these, 28 are endemic species, 12 are endangered and 14 are introduced. Some of these species have fascinated James Bond, Ian Fleming and countless other tourists and birdwatchers. Moreover, since Ian Fleming was such a keen birdwatcher, birds sometimes featured in his stories (and later in the films), and a collection of bird trivia can be found in Box 2 further below.
  
  We will now briefly introduce some of the more interesting Jamaican birds and explore a little bit of their natural history and even folklore.
  

  Red-Billed Streamertail (Trochilus polytmus)
  
  The red-billed streamertail, also known as doctor bird or scissortail hummingbird, appears in Fleming’s short story “For Your Eyes Only” (1960). The first lines of the story are: “The most beautiful bird in Jamaica, and some say the most beautiful bird in the world, is the streamer-tail or doctor humming-bird.” It is very hard to crown a “most beautiful” bird, but the red-billed streamertail is indeed remarkable. The feathers on the male’s tail (the “streamers”) are longer than their actual body and make a humming sound during flight. James Bond (the ornithologist) seems to agree; well, partially, at least: his book says that the “adult male is the most spectacular West Indian hummingbird”.
  
  This species is the most abundant and widespread bird in Jamaica and was actually selected as the country’s national bird. Frederic G. Cassidy (1962–2000), who studied the evolution of the English language in Jamaica, says that the name doctor bird comes from the way the animals spear the flowers with their beaks to feed. Still, the term “doctor” also carries a superstitious overtone (as in “witch-doctor”) and Cassidy notes that natives referred to these hummingbirds as “god birds”.
  
  
  Male (top) and female (bottom) of the
  Red-Billed Streamertail (Trochilus polytmus).
  (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

  
  Jamaican Tody (Todus todus)
  
  The todies belong to the order Coraciiformes, a group that also includes kingfishers, rollers and bee-eaters. The Jamaican tody was at first believed to be a species of hummingbird. Later, it received the name of robin, due to its small size and round appearance. This early folk name still survives in Jamaica as robin red-breas’, an allusion to the bird’s red colored patch below the beak and a copy of the English name of another bird. Robin redbreast is the old name of the European robin (Erithacus rubecula), a totally unrelated species.
  
  The Jamaican tody is a tiny bird that feeds on insects and fruits, nesting in excavated burrows. James Bond was especially interested in the nesting behavior of birds and studied this topic at length. He chose the Jamaican tody as the cover of the first edition of “Birds of the West Indies” (1936). It has a very small geographic distribution and its population seems to be steadily decreasing in the last decade.
  
  
  The Jamaican Tody, Todus todus.
  (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
  
  Jamaican Poorwill (Siphonorhis americana)
  
  Also known as Jamaican pauraque, this nocturnal bird is a species of nightjar, of the family Caprimulgidae. The family name comes from the Latin caprimulgus (goatsucker) and reflects the absurd folk “lore” that these birds sucked milk from goats.
  
  Very little is known about the Jamaican poorwill – it had been extinct long before Bond’s studies, since 1859. It was driven to extinction by introduced rats and mongooses, alongside the usual human-caused habitat destruction. Since the birds nest on the ground, their eggs are easy prey for these introduced mammals. Nevertheless, there are some recent (1998) records of caprimulgids from the regions of the Milk River and the Hellshire Hills in the country, but they remain unconfirmed. Thus, a very small population of poorwills might still exist in these remote regions. Curiously, Bond had also previously alluded to the possibility of a surviving population of these birds on the semi-arid Hellshire Hills.
  
  
  The Jamaican poorwill, Siphonorhis americana.
  (Source: Rothschild, 1907.)
  
  Jamaican Blackbird (Nesopsar nigerrimus)
  
  The Jamaican blackbird (family Icteridae) is the only species in its genus and all of its names are rather misleading. Firstly, it is not an actual blackbird (Turdus merula, family Turdidae), which is a species of thrush. Nevertheless, the family Icteridae is popularly known as “New World blackbirds”, so we can let this one slip. As for the scientific name, the genus name comes from the Greek neso (island) and psar (starling) and, as one might guess, this bird is completely unrelated to true starlings (family Sturnidae). Finally, the specific epithet (see Salvador, 2014, for a crash course in species’ scientific names) means simply “very black”, which might not be so descriptive of a “blackbird” after all.
  
  
  The Jamaican blackbird, Nesopsar nigerrimus.
  (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
  
  Nevertheless, a local Jamaican popular name for this bird is “wild-pine sergeant” and is more accurate than the other names. These birds feed on insects they find in tree bark or bromeliads (locally known as “wild-pines”) and are adapted to climbing trees, similar to woodpeckers. They inhabit the montane forests of Jamaica and are arranged in pairs of birds, each pair occupying a vast territory. The severe deforestation caused by mining, forestry, charcoal production and agriculture has led to an extreme habitat loss incompatible with the blackbirds’ large territories. The species is thus considered endangered, but only some very shy efforts have been made towards its preservation.
  
  Sad Flycatcher (Myiarchus barbirostris)
  
  The sad flycatcher (together with the lesser Antillean pewee, Contopus latirostris) is commonly called little Tom-fool by the Jamaican people, for its habit of refusing to fly away when threatened. This flycatcher species inhabits the forests of Jamaica and, as their name imply, feed on insects. In fact, the genus name comes from the Greek muia (fly) and archos (ruler), while the specific epithet refers to the presence of rictal bristles. These bristles are modified feathers (that look like mammals’ whiskers) projecting from the beak; they not only provide tactile feedback (as whiskers do), but also supposedly protect the birds’ eyes as they consumes their wriggly insect prey.
  
  
  The sad flycatcher, Myiarchus barbirostris.
  (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
  
  To avoid confusion, we must note here that the sad flycatcher is part of the group known as “New World flycatchers” or “tyrant flycatchers” (the family Tyrannidae). The “Old World flycatchers” belong to another family, Muscicapidae, which is only distantly related to the Tyrannidae.
  
  Jamaican Crow (Corvus jamaicensis)
  
  This bird is locally known as “jabbering crow” of “gabbling crow”, for it can produce a variety of jabbering sounds (besides the common “caw” of crows). Their incessant jabbering may also sound like indistinct human languages and, to the British, rather like Welsh people, which led to the birds being nicknamed “Welshmen” in a typical bout of Brit humor.
  
  The Jamaican crows live mainly in the country’s uplands, but may come down to the lowlands during the dry season. They feed mainly on fruit and invertebrates, but may occasionally eat other birds’ eggs and nestlings.
  
  
  The Jamaican crow, Corvus jamaicensis.
  (Source: Internet Bird Collection, IBC155934.
  Courtesy of Ken Simonite.)
  
  
  
  YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
  
  Bond’s work with the Caribbean avifauna set the basis for ornithology in the region and most of his insights have been continuously proved accurate. As such, his influence in science shall remain relevant for a long time to come. Well, at least until humans have extinguished all the bird species in the region – unfortunately, birds live only once and Jamaica has already lost three of its endemic species. Meanwhile, the other Bond also remain a relevant figure in popular culture and imagination, with his over-the-top stories, exotic locations, strange villains, Bond girls, fancy suits, weaponized cars and a number of crazy gadgets. James Bond has thus the (somewhat dubious) honor of having his name twice immortalized in History, as a brilliant ornithologist and as a womanizing superspy. (We believe the latter is better remembered than the former though.)
  
  But for those of you thinking that a birder’s life is much duller than a spy’s life, some words from the naturalist and writer Alexander F. Skutch (1904–2004) might change your mind or at the very least make you revisit your beliefs: “our quest of them [birds] takes us to the fairest places; to find them and uncover some of their well-guarded secrets we exert ourselves greatly and live intensely.”
  

  REFERENCES
  
  Avibase. (2015) Bird Checklists of the World. Jamaica. Available from: http://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/checklist.jsp?region=jm&list=clements (Date of access: 02/Apr/2015).
  
  Bond, J. (1993) A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies. Fifth edition (Peterson Field Guides). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.
  
  Bond, M.F.W.P. (1966) How 007 Got His Name. Collins, London.
  
  Cassidy, F.G. (2006) Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica. University of the West Indies Press, Kingston.
  
  Clements, J.F.; Schulenberg, T.S.; Iliff, M.J.; Roberson, D.; Fredericks, T.A.; Sullivan, B.L.; Wood, C.L. (2014) The eBird/Clements checklist of birds of the world. Version 6.9. Available from: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist/download/ (Date of access: 02/Apr/2015).
  
  Chancellor, H. (2005) James Bond: The Man and His World. John Murray, London.
  
  Cruz, A. (1978) Adaptive evolution in the Jamaican Blackbird Nesopsar nigerrimus. Ornis Scandinavia 9(2): 130–137.
  
  IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). (2014) The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Available from: http://www.iucnredlist.org/ (Date of access: 03/Apr/2015).
  
  Lederer, R. & Burr, C. (2014) Latin for Bird Lovers. Timber Press, New York.
  
  MI6-HQ. (2015) MI6 – The Home of James Bond 007. Available from: http://www.mi6-hq.com/ (Date of access: 02/Apr/2015).
  
  Parker, M. (2015) Goldeneye. Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica. Pegasus Publications, Winnipeg.
  
  Parkes, K. (1989) In Memoriam: James Bond. The Auk 106(4): 718–720.
  
  Rothschild, W. (1907) Extinct Birds. An attempt to unite in one volume a short account of those birds which have become extinct in historical times – that is, within the last six or seven hundred years. To which are added a few which still exist, but are on the verge of extinction. Hutchinson & Co., London.
  
  Salvador, R.B. (2014) Geeky nature. Journal of Geek Studies 1(1-2): 41–45.
  
  Skutch, A.F. (1977) A Bird Watcher’s Adventures in Tropical America. University of Texas Press, Austin.

  1927: Lois Maxwell is born--Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. (She dies 29 September 2007--Fremantle, Australia.)

  
  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/oct/01/guardianobituaries.film
  Lois Maxwell
  Actor who played Miss Moneypenny in the Bond films
  Tim Pulleine | Sun 30 Sep 2007 19.03 EDT
  

  Lois Maxwell, who has died in Australia from cancer aged 80, was a screen player of long-term range and experience who will nevertheless be remembered for a single role, albeit one that she performed no fewer than 14 times. In the celluloid annals of James Bond, agent 007, from their inauguration in Dr No with Sean Connery in 1962, until A View to a Kill, Roger Moore's final outing in the role in 1985, an essential component, even if brief in terms of screen time, was that of Maxwell's Miss Moneypenny, personal assistant to Bond's spymaster M, and an unfailing provider of ambiguous verbal jousting with Bond himself.

  
  Maxwell, born Lois Hooker, a surname which could hardly go unchanged for a career in the performing arts, grew up in Ontario, Canada, and moved while still in her teens to Hollywood, where she achieved early if modest success. She appeared in The Decision of Christopher Blake (1947) and the following year a supporting role in That Hagen Girl won her recognition as most promising newcomer in the Golden Globe awards. Her capacity to make an impression in the film was enhanced by the fact that the starring roles were essayed by an adult Shirley Temple and a callow Ronald Reagan.
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  She enlisted as a soldier in the Canadian army, and became part of the Army Entertainment Corps, travelling through Europe during the second world war, performing music and dance numbers to entertain the troops. She enrolled at Rada and during the 1950s became a familiar face in British cinema. With one or two exceptions, however, the films in which she was featured belonged to that category of formulaic B feature crime stories that have now largely disappeared even from the schedules of night-time television.
  
  Often these films featured fading Hollywood stars, so that in Kill Me Tomorrow (1957) she was sidekick to Pat O'Brien, as a drunken American reporter caught up in chicanery, while in Lady in the Fog (1951), she had been back-up to Cesar Romero as another such reporter, albeit relatively sober. Shortly before the Bond producers beckoned, she had played, if only in the modestly functional role of a nurse, in one of the major movies of its time, Stanley Kubrick's 1961 Lolita.
  

  When Dr No appeared in 1962, it may have been comparatively modest in production values when set beside its successors, but it immediately established a brand image. It had been undertaken with the clear intention of inaugurating a series, and, to this end, the introduction of supplementary characters with sustaining roles in addition to Bond himself was part of the formula. Thus the figures of Bond's chief M and the latter's secretary, Miss Moneypenny, represented a significant part of the package. M was played for the first 11 films, up to his death in 1981, by the character actor Bernard Lee, and Maxwell was cast as "Moneypenny", as she was always known, though aficionados will know that her first name was Jane.
  
  Maxwell was then 35, neither girlish nor matronly, and projected in the role what one critic has aptly termed a "coolly appraising" personality which seemed ideally to embody the notion of a worldly-wise elder sister to Bond, with her coquettishness not quite concealed beneath a veneer of Whitehall propriety.
  
  Richard Maibaum, who contributed to the screenplays of many Bond movies, once recalled that Ian Fleming had told him in a "bemused" way: "The pictures are so much funnier than my books." Maibaum added: "He really didn't understand that we were trying to make them funnier."
  
  Thus, anyway, the string of one-liners and double entendres for which the series eventually became all but notorious; thus, too, the ritual badinage between Bond and Moneypenny, hinting, in dialogue that by the standard of the time was mildly salacious, at an unrequited mutual fondness.
  
  With the huge box office success of Bond, Maxwell seldom strayed away from the franchise, though in 1967 she perhaps ill-advisedly made an appearance in an Italian spy spoof, Operation Kid Brother, starring none other than Sean Connery's brother Neil. With Roger Moore's discarding of the Bond mantle in 1985 and the subsequent revamping of the series, Maxwell's services were dispensed with. However, she continued to work in film and television, her final movie being The Fourth Angel (2001), with Jeremy Irons and Forest Whitaker.
  
  Moore, who became a friend of Maxwell in private life, and paid tribute to her sense of humour, suggested that she would have loved to take on the role of M - which did acquire feminine form in the guise of Judi Dench.

  Maxwell's husband, TV executive Peter Marriott predeceased her. She is survived by a son and daughter.
  
  · Lois Maxwell, actor, born February 14 1927; died September 29 2007

  1956: Ian Fleming writes to publisher Michael Howard.

  Forgive this tropic scrawl.
  I'm sitting in the shade gazing out
  across the Carribean and it is heroic
  that I am writing at all.

  1964: James Bond 007 - Liebesgrüße aus Moskau (James Bond 007 - Greetings from Moscow)
  released in West Germany.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  2015: Louis Jourdan dies at age 93--Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California.
  (Born 19 June 1921--Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.)

  
  Louis Jourdan obituary
  
  French film actor who found stardom with Three Coins in the
  Fountain and Gigi, and whose later roles included a villain in the
  James Bond movie Octopussy
  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/15/louis-jourdan
  Michael Freedland | Sun 15 Feb 2015 18.15 EST
  
  
  Louis Jourdan and Leslie Caron in Gigi, 1958. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
  
  For audiences in the 1940s and 50s, Louis Jourdan’s incredible good looks and mellifluous Gallic purr seemed to sum up everything that was sexy and enticing about Frenchmen. As a result, he became the most sought-after French actor since Charles Boyer. Though perhaps this hampered him, stymying opportunities to extend his dramatic range, any actor who was constantly in demand by both French studios and Hollywood producers had a lot to be grateful for.
  
  When Jourdan, who has died aged 93, played the consummate bon vivant in Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi (1958), he became an international celebrity. The film, which co-starred Maurice Chevalier and Leslie Caron, won nine Oscars, including best picture. Though the best-known of its Lerner and Loewe numbers was Chevalier’s Thank Heaven for Little Girls, the title song went to Jourdan. He later widened the breadth of his work, and in old age was still one of the most handsome men on the screen, even if the films themselves seldom amounted to much.
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  He was born in Marseille, one of the three sons of Henri Gendre, a hotelier who organised the Cannes film festival after the second world war, and Yvonne, from whose maiden name, Jourdan, Louis took his stage name. The family followed Henri’s work, which accounted for the ease with which he was later able to perform overseas. He was educated in France, Turkey and Britain, where he learned to speak perfect English with an accent that he was clever enough to realise he should keep superbly French.
  
  Jourdan, who knew from early on that he was going to be an actor, studied under René Simon in Paris. Admired for his dramatic talent and a certain polish that no one could readily explain, he was cast in his film debut, Le Corsaire (1939), which starred Boyer, though the outbreak of the second world war prevented its completion. He went on to appear in L’Arlésienne (1942) before his career was interrupted by the Nazi occupation of France.
  
  His father was arrested by the Gestapo, and Louis and his two brothers were active members of the resistance, whose work for the underground meant that he had to stay away from the studios. But it also resulted in his becoming a favourite of the resurgent French postwar film industry. At a time when many had worked on films that had served to help Marshal Pétain’s propaganda campaign – and stars such as Chevalier were being accused of collaboration – it was easy to promote a star who had actively worked against the Nazis.
  
  In 1946, Jourdan married Berthe Frédérique (known as Quique) and went to Los Angeles, having been persuaded by the movie mogul David O Selznick that he would be able to make more of himself in Hollywood than he ever could in Paris. He shone in his first American film, The Paradine Case (1947), directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Gregory Peck. This was followed by Max Ophüls’s masterly Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), based on the story by Stefan Zweig. Jourdan played the debonair, womanising pianist with whom Joan Fontaine falls hopelessly and tragically in love. He invested the performance with a vulnerability that saved his character from being simply caddish.
  
  In Minnelli’s 1949 film of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, he starred as the lover of the adulterous anti-heroine, played by Jennifer Jones. He returned to France for Rue de l’Estrapade (1953) and La Mariée Est Trop Belle (The Bride Is Too Beautiful, released with the title Her Bridal Night, 1956), the latter with Brigitte Bardot, while in Italy he appeared in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), its title referring to the Trevi fountain in Rome. His image as the light romantic lead was burnished in that film, and his status as such was sealed by Gigi, which made him the No 1 pin-up of sophisticated American women.
  
  He had a similar role in Can-Can (1960), which starred Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine and Chevalier. There followed continental roles in Hollywood productions: as a playboy in The VIPs (1963) and a fashion designer in Made in Paris (1966).
  
  He had made his Broadway debut, playing a repressed gay man embarking on marriage, in an adaptation of André Gide’s The Immoralist, in 1954. The production co-starred Geraldine Page and James Dean, before Dean’s movie breakthrough. The following year, Jourdan returned to the New York stage in Tonight in Samarkand. He soon let it be known that he wanted more serious film roles and was not getting enough of them. In 1961 he took the lead in Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo and, in 1975, he appeared in a British TV movie production of Alexandre Dumas’s novel, this time playing De Villefort to Richard Chamberlain’s Count. Two years later, he was D’Artagnan in The Man in the Iron Mask on TV, again opposite Chamberlain.

  He played Dracula in a 1977 BBC TV adaptation and a “charming” villain, Kamal Khan, in the James Bond adventure Octopussy (1983), but few of his later roles showed the range of his talents. Certainly, Swamp Thing (1982) and The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) were not the sort of movies that the Gigi star would want to be remembered for. In the mid-80s he returned to Gigi, this time in Chevalier’s role, for a touring show; he replied to the criticism that he lip-synched songs by saying: “If I sang them live, the fragile little voice I have would go.”

  Jourdan’s final film appearance came as a suave villain in Peter Yates’s caper about a rare bottle of wine, Year of the Comet (1992). In 2010 he was appointed to the Légion d’Honneur.
  
  His wife died last year. Their son, Louis Henry, died in 1981 from a drug overdose. He is survived by a nephew and a niece.
  
  • Louis Jourdan (Louis Robert Gendre), actor, born 19 June 1921; died 14 February 2015
  • This article was amended on 16 February 2015. Louis Jourdan was born in June 1921 rather than 1919, and so died at the age of 93.

  2018: Dynamite's much-delayed comic book release of Casino Royale (once scheduled for this date, plus 17 October 2017, etc.) now stands to be published 13 March 2018.

  

  2020: BOND 25 planned release date in the UK, US, and Turkey. (Later shifted to 8 April 2020.)