From advertising pork faggots to a 'Swingometer' star's dreams of glory... Here the author of a new book about how James Bond conquered the cinema screen reveals a host of surprising facts about the franchise.
Swiss actress Ursula Andress had to have her voice dubbed by Monica Van Der Zyl for her iconic role as Honey Ryder in Dr No because producer Albert R. Broccoli thought Andress sounded like 'a Dutch comedian'.
Before New York actor Joseph Wiseman was cast as Dr No, screenwriters thought the character a little antiquated and Fu Manchu-like, so they briefly considered making the evil scientist a monkey instead.
Daniel Craig in Casino Royale - the only Bond movie with no dancing women in its opening sequence
Gert Frobe's performance as Goldfinger was made all the more memorable because this highly respected German actor spoke very little English and did not understand a word of the script. Before shooting the classic golf match scene, neither Frobe nor Connery had ever played the game before.
Halle Berry was delighted to be a 'Bond babe'
Goldeneye actress Izabella Scorupco demanded that she be called a 'Bond Woman' because she thought the term 'Bond Girl' was demeaning. But seven years later, in 2002, the Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry, above, said that she was delighted to be described as 'a Bond babe' when she starred in Die Another Day.
Harold Sakata, who portrayed Oddjob in Goldfinger, later reprised the role in a US television advertisement for cough mixture in which he inadvertently karate-chopped someone's house to the ground.
President John F. Kennedy was a huge fan of From Russia With Love. So was his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Bond's CIA friend Felix Leiter has been portrayed by seven actors, more than 007 himself. Perhaps the best known is Hawaii Five-O's Jack Lord who appeared in Dr No.
Actors put forward for the Bond role in the late Sixties included Michael Jayston (who now stars in ITV's Emmerdale), and the young Timothy Dalton, who was just 22 in 1968. In the Seventies, United Artists executives suggested Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds for the role.
Just before he got the Bond role, male model George Lazenby was due to star in an advertising campaign for roll-on deodorant. The Bond producers bought up the adverts to protect the 007 image.
Crabs were scrapped from Dr No
Spartacus star John Gavin was signed up for the role of 007 after George Lazenby quit, but he was paid off when Sean Connery decided to return one more time for Diamonds Are Forever.
Connery told an interviewer in the Seventies that he never missed a Carry On film. He also confided that he had read only two of Ian Fleming's Bond novels and that he considered Fleming 'a snob, but terrific company'.
Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, the Bond crew would always take lunch together at the Pinewood studios canteen; but alcohol was banned after two second-string actors became the worse for wear and held up an afternoon shoot.
Bond girl reject: Julie Christie
Among those who have composed Bond songs that were never used are Pulp (with Tomorrow Never Dies) and Alice Cooper (who made his own idiosyncratic version of The Man With The Golden Gun). Pulp also recorded a breathy cover version of All Time High, the opening song from Octopussy.
Boxer Muhammad Ali visited the Pinewood set of The Man With The Golden Gun and was so excited that he promised to dedicate his next fight to the film's villain, actor Christopher Lee. Ali duly did.
In the original Dr No novel, Honey is threatened with being eaten alive by crabs. This was also going to happen in the film, but the idea was abandoned because the live crabs that had been flown over for the scene had been put in a freezing cargo hold and could barely summon the energy to move.
Julie Christie was originally considered for the part of Domino in Thunderball but producer Harry Saltzman turned her down because he thought her bust was not ample enough.
Producer Harry Saltzman was often taken aback by the Bond songs. Paul McCartney's Live And Let Die was initially considered outlandish; eight years previously, Dionne Warwick's Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was vetoed as the opening song for Thunderball; and Shirley Bassey's raunchy rendition of Diamonds Are Forever prompted Saltzman to shout that the song was obscene.
The influence of the Bond films is so great that Nasa was thrilled to let 007 give the world its first view of the Space Shuttle in Moonraker - two years before the launch of the real thing.
Among the surprisingly literary screenwriters of Bond movies have been Roald Dahl, who wrote the script for You Only Live Twice, and George MacDonald Fraser, who wrote the screenplay for Octopussy. The author of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, wrote a putative script for The Spy Who Loved Me, but the only element retained from his version was the submarine-gobbling supertanker.
Roger Moore starred in a double-decker chase in Live And Let Die
At the Royal premiere of Moonraker, the scene where Drax sets his dogs on doomed PA Corinne made Prince Philip leap from his seat and cry: 'Don't go into the woods, you stupid girl!'
For the double-decker bus chase in Live And Let Die, new 007 Roger Moore was trained at Chiswick bus depot in West London. Staff there told him that if Bond didn't work out, he was more than welcome to a job.
For her role in A View To A Kill, American star Tanya Roberts insisted on having a crate of shampoo and beauty products shipped over from California.
In The Living Daylights, Dalton makes his romantic pounce on Kara (Maryam D'Abo) in the same Viennese ferris wheel from which Harry Lime looked down in the classic thriller The Third Man.
Composer John Barry provided the most iconic scores for Bond, racking up the music for 11 films. Younger pop acts idolised him, though he described A-ha, who performed The Living Daylights title song, as 'a pain in the a***'.
Bond audition: Peter Snow
Many were puzzled by the title Die Another Day. The phrase came from the poem cycle A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman: 'But he who fights and runs away/lives to die another day... '
Many of the spectacular St Petersburg scenes in GoldenEye were filmed by the side of a canal near Watford.
Jane Seymour was cast in the role of tarot priestess Solitaire in Live And Let Die after producers saw her in the BBC shipping saga The Onedin Line. Roger Moore kept his socks on during his love scenes with Seymour.
For The World Is Not Enough, the production team were initially denied permission to film a boat chase on the Thames in front of the real MI6 building. Shrewdly, they contacted the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Then they got the go-ahead from no less than Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.
Garlic: Diana Rigg
According to Press reports in 1968, Diana Rigg was paid twice as much as co-star George Lazenby for On Her Majesty's Secret Service. There were also rumours that they were at war and that she deliberately ate garlic before their love scenes. Rigg said this story began when, during lunch, she joked: 'George, I'm having garlic, so I hope you are too.'
Though the Soviets loathed Bond - they invented a Bulgarian literary equivalent in the Sixties who defeated 007 in a straight battle - they greatly admired producer Albert R. Broccoli. In the Seventies, he was invited to Moscow for talks on producing a blockbuster there but it never materialised.
In 1968, among the many candidates who auditioned to succeed Sean Connery was Peter Snow, the gangling BBC TV presenter famous for his General Election swingometer. One reason he did not get the job was, apparently, that he was too tall. Snow has said that, in any case, he might have been better cast as Q.
Following Quantum Of Solace, only two more original Fleming titles are left, both from 007 short stories: Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity. Try getting a song out of that.
Casino Royale was the first Bond film in which dancing women did not feature in the opening title sequence.
The director of Casino Royale, Martin Campbell, directed episodes of the comedy Minder in the Eighties.
In GoldenEye, Bond and Natalya hunt down villainous Trevelyan in the Caribbean and end up in a pretty little resort called Guantanamo.
There was some embarrassment at For Your Eyes Only's Royal premiere, which was used as a fundraising event for the Year of the Disabled. The film featured as its opening scene a villain in a wheelchair being picked up by Bond's helicopter strut and then being dropped down an industrial chimney.
Sir Richard Branson's 'blink and you miss it' cameo in Casino Royale was apparently excised from the copy of the film screened on British Airways flights.
• Sinclair McKay is the author of The Man With The Golden Touch - How The Bond Films Conquered The World, published by Aurum Press at £18.99. To order your copy at the special price of £17.10 with free p&p, call The Review Bookstore on 
0845 155 0713
.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment