Inhalt

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Contents

Preface

Longitude 78 West & Dr No

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live and Let Die

Waiting in the Wings During the Roger Moore Years - Billington versus Warbeck

The Living Daylights

The Background Rumblings of the Timothy Dalton Era

Goldeneye

Casino Royale

Speculation After Spectre

Epilogue

References

Also By The Same Author

PREFACE

The enduring success of the James Bond franchise has made the casting of a new Bond actor a very big deal in the film and entertainment industry. Tabloids and entertainment clickbait sites love nothing more than constantly speculating (wrongly of course!) on who the next Bond actor might be. Taking on the part of James Bond is like playing the lead in Hamlet, Doctor Who, or Batman. Others have played the part before you and others will play the part after you. Speculation about the next incumbent is therefore inevitable, unavoidable, and endless. It is a constant background hum even when someone else actually has the part.

More people have walked on the moon than played James Bond. Despite the longevity of the franchise the Bond actors themselves remain a small and exclusive club. There are however dozens of actors who might potentially have played James Bond through the decades if only fate hadn't intervened. Michael Billington thought he had the part two or three times in the 70s and 80s but the late return of Roger Moore each time foiled his ambitions. David Warbeck claims that he signed to play James Bond in the early eighties but the film he was supposed to make was abandoned when Roger Moore decided to return as 007. John Gavin DID actually sign to play Bond in Diamonds Are Forever but got the elbow when Sean Connery chose to return. Richard Johnson was offered the part of James Bond in Dr No but declined because he didn't want to be constricted by a long term film contract.

There are many sliding doors moments like this in the Bond franchise where an alternative actor (rather than the one we actually got) could easily have been cast. So how many actors have tested to play James Bond? The answer to that question is an awful lot. When the part of James Bond is being cast it sometimes feels like every actor in Britain and the Commonwealth is up for the part. Literally hundreds of actors have read, auditioned, or simply been interviewed about playing the part of James Bond.

How many of these actors came close to bagging the part? Who might have played Bond if Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig hadn't been cast? In the book which follows we will leave no stone unturned and attempt to answer that very question. There is a fascinating alternative cinema universe where the Bond actors are completely different from the ones we ended up with in our own familiar movie dimension. In this book we will explore what that alternative James Bond universe might potentially have looked like.

LONGITUDE 78 WEST & DR NO

The first screen adaptation of James Bond was a 1954 CBS version of Casino Royale as part of Climax Mystery Theater. Barry Nelson portrayed 'Jimmy' Bond - an American card shark. This one hour production obviously wasn't tremendously faithful to Ian Fleming. Bond eventually managed to escape from such curiosities and become a juggernaut movie franchise on the silver screen. The James Bond film franchise (based of course on the popular series of spy thrillers written by Ian Fleming) launched in 1962 is a very special and unique series quite unlike any other. When it began no one could have possibly dreamed of the success and longevity it would enjoy. There had been franchises before Bond - like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, The Falcon, Jungle Jim, Frankenstein, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Bulldog Drummond, Hopalong Cassidy, and many others. As the Bond series began, thrifty but fun franchises like Godzilla and the Carry On films were already becoming popular in their respective countries.

The Bond franchise created by producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman however was completely different. Previous film series operated strictly on the law of diminishing returns and lowered the budgets accordingly. They sought to extract every last penny out of their licenced property without actually spending any money. The Bond series reversed this tradition. Each new Bond film was bigger than the one that came before. More lavish, more expensive, more spectacular. It was a gamble that paid off handsomely. Adjusted for inflation, the most successful James Bond film of all time is 1965's Thunderball. Thunderball marked the peak of sixties Bondmania but the series would still go on and on with enduring success and seemingly without end.

In the 1970s a new era of Bond was launched with the unflappable and urbane Roger Moore. Moore went on to make seven films (a record that is unlikely to ever be broken) and proved that the Bond franchise was a perfectly viable ongoing commodity even without Sean Connery. The Bond franchise, with periodic recasting of the lead, could potentially go on forever. James Bond is much bigger than the actor who happens to be playing him. It is a brand as famous as any in cinema. James Bond is completely indestructible. So who else could have played James Bond aside from the six actors we've had at the time of writing? As we shall see, the list of potential Bonds is larger than you might expect.

Although the James Bond franchise was famously established by the producing duo of Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, they could easily have been beaten to the 007 goldmine by the maverick Irish film producer Kevin McClory. Before the birth of the James Bond movie franchise by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, McClory had worked with Ian Fleming on plans for what would have been the first movie featuring James Bond. The screenplay for this proposed Bond film was called Longitude 78 West. Fleming later used Longitude 78 West as the basis for his novel Thunderball. All hell broke loose because Fleming foolishly didn't give McClory or Jack Whittingham (who had also worked on Longitude 78 West) any credit. The inevitable court case which followed left Kevin McClory with the legal right to make a James Bond film based on Thunderball.

Way back in the late 1950s though, McClory was very nearly out of the gate first when it came to deducing the cinematic potential of Ian Fleming's Bond novels. McClory commissioned spectacular art for this proposed new Bond film and the iconography of that art (lavish locations, danger, beautiful women) is indistinguishable from the official Bond imagery of the 1960s. Kevin McClory was confident that Bond could be a big hit on the silver screen and poured all of his ideas and energy into the project. The film was never made in the end but somewhere in an alternative cinema universe now sits a late 1950s Bond film based on an early Thunderball treatment.

It is said that Ian Fleming and the financial backers began to get cold feet about Kevin McClory in the end and suspected he would be out of his depth producing a movie. The project was shelved and Fleming decided (in what was obviously a big mistake) to use the Longitude 78 West treatment as the basis for a new novel he planned to call Thunderball. But who would have played James Bond in this aborted Longitude 78 West film? The number one choice was Richard Burton. Ian Fleming remarked in private correspondence at the time that Burton would make a terrific James Bond and play the part better than anyone. Kevin McClory and Ivar Bryce (a businessman involved in financing the movie) were not inclined to argue. They thought that Burton would be perfect casting too.

At the time Richard Burton was in his mid-thirties and already a star. He had critical acclaim and could more or less pick and choose his projects as he pleased. Though he had read some of Fleming Bond novels and enjoyed them, Burton's interest in 007 did not extend to playing the character in a proposed film. Burton felt that agreeing to appear in a spy adventure caper would be undemanding and pointless at this stage in his career. Burton of course had no way of knowing what an incredibly lucrative phenomenon the Bond films would become. To him, appearing a James Bond film adaptation would just be like making any other film. In this, Burton was completely wrong. Bond films were anything but any other film. They ushered in a new era of cinema and created the modern action adventure movie. James Bond was as big as The Beatles in the 1960s.

Not that Richard Burton had any way of knowing this. Would he even have wanted to do it though, even if he had known how popular the character would be? Burton had no particular desire to be bigger than The Beatles. He would have enough media attention of his own cope with - especially when Elizabeth Taylor entered the super magnified orbit of his life. Besides, there is no way of knowing if James Bond would have been so popular if it had been launched in the 1950s with Richard Burton. While all the promotional art suggests that Kevin McClory had a good grasp of what a Bond movie should look like there is no way of knowing what sort of film he would have delivered. Would a late 50s Bond film have had the swagger, fun, humour, panache, and lavishness of the Bond series launched by Broccoli and Saltzman only a few years later? It is highly doubtful - at the first attempt anyway.

There is no doubt that Richard Burton would have been a very different Bond to the one played by Sean Connery. Connery deduced that the Bond films were (enjoyably) ludicrous so his James Bond was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Connery's Bond has his moments of genuine danger and suspense (the train fight with Red Grant for example or laying at the mercy of Goldfinger's laser on that table) but for the most part he's fairly unflappable and having a good time. The biggest difference between the James Bond books written by Ian Fleming and the James Bond film franchise created by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman was humour. The films gave Bond (played by the peerless and charismatic Connery) deadpan quips and witty lines. Humour became an essential part of the franchise.

Sean Connery and Roger Moore had impeccable timing when it came to dispensing the trademark Bond quips. Richard Burton was unlikely to have approached James Bond in the same spirit. Burton would have played it much straighter and been more of a blood relative to Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig than Connery and Moore. Not to say that Sean Connery couldn't be tough and dangerous, he obviously could, but his Bond relied on wit and charm as much as his fists or whatever weapons Q branch had supplied. Richard Burton in the late 1950s would have presented a somewhat more plausible and realistic screen version of James Bond. Burton probably would have made it all seem less flippant.

There is certainly no question that Richard Burton would have been very good but would this have been the right Bond at the wrong time? The appeal of the James Bond franchise was that it offered pure fun and escapism. You could forget your troubles for a few hours and be in all of these exotic locations having an adventure with 007. Would the desire of Burton to get more of a grasp on the character and connect it somewhat more to the real world have impinged on the pure fantasy appeal of the movies? Of course, we have no way of knowing how Burton would have played Bond but it's probably safe to assume he wouldn't have done it as a parody or a light hearted tongue firmly in cheek sort of caper.

Despite the gravitas and acting chops of Richard Burton it's hard to see how his Bond could possibly have been as popular than the one played by Sean Connery. That late 1950s version of Thunderball with Burton as James Bond would be a fascinating relic of the era and Bond universe today but would it have kickstarted the James Bond phenomenon in the same way that the early Connery films did? That is simply impossible to say with any degree of certainty but it seems doubtful.

Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory were very interested in Alfred Hitchcock directing their proposed late 1950s Bond film. In many ways, Hitchcock was the perfect person to bring Bond to the screen given his own background in suspense, espionage, and spy adventure thrillers. Fleming and McClory were so keen on acquiring the services of Hitchcock they were even prepared to let Jimmy Stewart play James Bond in the film if this is what it took to hire the legendary Hitch. Thankfully, none of this came to pass. Alfred Hitchcock decided that he did not want to direct a James Bond film and so the unlikely (not to mention eccentric) prospect of James Stewart playing James Bond was never seriously threatened on the general public. It's hard not to think that Stewart as Bond would have been rather like casting Terry Thomas as Indiana Jones. The part was simply all wrong for him. As we shall see though in the pages that follow, Stewart was by no means the last American actor to be linked to the part of James Bond.

Another actor under consideration for the part of James Bond in Kevin McClory's proposed Bond film was Dirk Bogarde. At this time Bogarde was in his late thirties and the most popular film star in Britain. He was best known for the Doctor series of comedy films. Bogarde was not terribly happy in the mainstream though and eager to do different things. He was intent on breaking free from a contract he had at Rank and wanted to play more challenging and daring roles. Bogarde would do all of these things in the 1960s and establish himself as a serious actor. He was fantastic in films like The Servant and Victim.

The main problem that Kevin McClory would have faced casting Dirk Bogarde is probably the fee. Bogarde, because of his immense popularity at the time, would not have been cheap and he wasn't exactly short of work. It is entirely possible that Bogarde would have made the Bond film if his fee had been agreed by all parties but what sort of Bond he would have made is difficult to say. Though he was still boyishly handsome, Bogarde lacked the raw machismo of Sean Connery (or even Richard Burton for that matter) and it's hard to see him playing Bond as a quip machine in the same effortless manner that Connery and Roger Moore did. It's not impossible to see Bogarde having a Timothy Dalton quality to his Bond and playing the agent as more of a quiet thinker.

Another actor that Kevin McClory had on his list of potential Bond actors was his friend Richard Harris. Harris was in his late twenties at the time and had only just begun what would be a long and acclaimed film and television career. A very young Richard Harris playing James Bond is a rather far out and fascinating prospect given the intensity and energy that he brought to his film roles as a young man. Richard Harris didn't really fit the cinematic Bond template soon to be established by Broccoli and Saltzman but there is no doubt that his Bond would have been very compelling. It seems pretty evident though that Harris was not at the top of the list. There were other actors they liked more and - most importantly - were more bankable. This project (had it gone ahead) obviously would have received a considerable boost in profile and publicity with someone of the stature of Richard Burton or the popularity of Dirk Bogarde involved. Richard Harris would not have brought these qualities to the table at the time.

An actor championed by Fleming to be the first James Bond was Peter Finch - an Australian actor who was based in England (where he was born). Finch was in his forties and a prolific film actor. He later won a posthumous Oscar for the 1976 film Network. While he was competent and would have been a safe pair of hands it's hard to see how a Peter Finch Bond would have set the pulses racing in the same manner that Sean Connery's did or Richard Burton might have. Fleming was also allegedly amenable to the idea of Trevor Howard playing James Bond. While there is no question that Howard was a great figure of cinema and a fine actor, he doesn't seem like a very daring choice to play Bond. Fleming seemed to concede in private notes that Howard might be a little too mature and austere to bring 007 to life. Howard felt like someone who should be playing M rather than Bond.

The actor Terence Cooper was also in contention to play Bond in McClory's film. Cooper later played one of the many James Bonds in the 1967 spoof Casino Royale. He later played a number of parts in Australia and New Zealand. Cooper was tall and dark-haired and looked fairly Bondish in Casino Royale. He wouldn't have been a bad shout for the part. Kevin McClory is later said to have later approached Laurence Harvey to play James Bond in his planned 1960s version of Thunderball (which obviously didn't go ahead). Laurence Harvey was a Lithuanian-born English actor in his early thirties. He had appeared in films like Room at the Top and The Manchurian Candidate. Harvey was a stylish looking man who was handsome in a slightly cruel sort of way. He could be both charming and caddish - which would appear to be two very 007 qualities. The one doubt about Laurence Harvey is whether he could have been believably tough as 007 because he was a rather emaciated looking man. One suspects he would have needed to put on some weight to be a credible Bond.

Cubby Broccoli was very shrewd in the way that he handled Kevin McClory. He brought McClory in as a co-producer on EON's 1965 film version of Thunderball and made McClory agree not to produce a Thunderball film of his own for at least ten years. Broccoli probably presumed (not unreasonably) the James Bond series wouldn't even be around in ten years time. Once the ten years were up though, the Bond series was still around and Kevin McClory set about making his own Bond film. McClory's plans to make a Bond film in the seventies called Warhead were frustrated but his long threatened unofficial renegade Bond film finally arrived in 1983 with Never Say Never Again.

When the proposed late fifties Bond film was abandoned (eventually to descend into bitter legal battles in court), this paved the way for others to bring James Bond to the big screen. The James Bond books were turned into a movie franchise in 1962 by New York born film producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli and Canadian producer Harry Saltzman. Before he became a film producer, Cubby Broccoli had a spell selling coffins. He was also a Christmas tree salesman at one point. Dr No was eventually chosen to be the first film adaptation.

"Harry Saltzman held the option on Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories," said Broccoli, "and I offered him a partnership. He considered them a bit of nonsense. I thought they offered all the basics in screen entertainment: a virile and resourceful hero, exotic locations, the ingenious apparatus of espionage and sex on a sophisticated level. It’s true they had been around for a long time, and none of the leading British and American producers had made a serious pitch for them." Cubby Broccoli used to be a business partner with the famous American producer Irwin Allen. When Cubby told Allen he wanted to option the Bond books, Allen told him the Fleming novels were awful and wouldn't even be worthy of television. He was obviously completely wrong about that.

Ian Fleming's James Bond books were very popular because their blend of sex, sadism, and dangerous adventure felt like something new and even risque at the time. British readers loved the James Bond books in the 1950s because the exotic nature of the novels was an escape from the lingering post-war austerity they still experienced. Fleming once wrote that the James Bond books were written for 'for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds'. Bond's code number '007' was apparently inspired by a bus route in Kent which was often taken by the author Ian Fleming. The literary Bond suffers from "accidie" - this is Fleming's definition of boredom and the deadliest of all sins for James Bond. The profile of the Bond novels got a huge boost when President John F. Kennedy named From Russia With Love as one of his books of the year.

As part of the deal with Ian Fleming to bring James Bond to the big screen, it was agreed that EON (the company created by Broccoli and Saltzman to produce the movies - EON means Everything or Nothing) would have permission to write original Bond films if they exhausted the Fleming stories. This was obviously a shrewd agreement on the part of the film producers. When the Bond movie franchise began, Ian Fleming was allowed to sit in on production meetings and had final script approval.

The James Bond movie franchise tended to cherrypick titles, character names, and scenes from the Fleming books rather than adapt them wholesale. To give an example, the 1979 film Moonraker has little to do with Ian Fleming's 1955 novel of the same name - aside from the villain having the name Hugo Drax. The movie is about a villain who wants to create a new utopia in space whereas the book is about a secret government missile project on the Kent coast that James Bond has to investigate. Bond films tended not to be very faithful to the books at all. When they were actually more faithful (see On Her Majesty's Secret Service as the most example) the artistic results were plain to see.

Broccoli and Saltzman had finally managed to put in a deal in place for the first Bond movie to be produced but now they had the not inconsiderable task of finding the right actor to play Bond. This would be their first experience of what you might describe as the 007 casting circus. The casting of a new Bond involves hundreds of interviews, readings, auditions, and screen tests. There is no particular science about it. The process simply has to find an actor who everyone (the producers and the studio) can agree upon. The lack of a specific criteria for what sort of person they wanted was evident in the eclectic sweep of the Dr No casting calls. Mature and famous actors were approached to play James Bond in Dr No but so were inexperienced unknown young actors too. No one really seemed to have a firm idea of who they wanted.

When the first James Bond film was being planned, Ian Fleming sent Broccoli and Saltzman a memo with his own thoughts about the approach they should take. 'Atmosphere: To my mind, the greatest danger in this series is too much stage Englishness,' wrote Fleming. 'There should, I think, be no monocles, moustaches, bowler hats or bobbies or other "Limey" gimmicks. There should be no blatant English slang, a minimum of public school ties and accents.' Fleming wanted the Bond films to feel modern and bold. Broccoli and Saltzman shared this vision. Cubby Broccoli's own take was that Bond films should be set 'five minutes into the future'. They should exist in a world that is more or less our own but heightened slightly.

It is often said that Ian Fleming wanted Roger Moore to play James Bond in Dr No but any evidence for this is hard to verify. Moore said that he wasn't approached for Dr No at all - although Cubby Broccoli wrote in his memoir that Roger was a person they briefly discussed in casting discussions but then dismissed because they felt he still looked too boyish and callow. At the time Roger Moore was in his early thirties and on the lower rung of the studio system in Hollywood. Roger's attempt to become a star in the United States, despite frequent work, did not gain much traction and he eventually returned to England to play Simon Templar on television - thus setting him on a 'long way around' path to James Bond in the future.

One name at the top of the list for 007 was the Northern Ireland born Hollywood actor Stephen Boyd. Boyd was about thirty years-old and had appeared in films like Ben Hur and The Bravados. Boyd was handsome, urbane, cool, and had a fantastic deep voice. In fact, there was a Connery-esque quality about Boyd. You easily picture him playing James Bond in the 1960s. Alas though, Boyd was not interested in the part and declined the invitation to be considered for Dr No. He later appeared in films like Fantastic Voyage and Shalako (with Sean Connery). Sadly, Stephen Boyd died far too young in 1977.

The James Bond series did invent the big budget action franchise but even Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had their own influences. The Bond series was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's masterful 1959 suspense thriller North By Northwest. North By Northwest was in many ways the first James Bond film. It has a suave leading man, adventure, action, varied locations, panache, urbane villains, suggestive humour. The helicopter sequence in From Russia With Love is clearly inspired the cropdusting sequence in North By Northwest. The Bond producers were so inspired by North By Northwest that they even tried to persuade Cary Grant (who was a friend of Cubby Broccoli) to play James Bond in Dr No. Grant, who was in his early sixties at the time, wisely declined this offer though because he felt he was far too old for the part and wanted to retire from acting anyway.

The search for Dr No's James Bond actor relieved an awful lot of publicity in the British newspapers and the Daily Express even ran a competition to find the perfect Bond. A number of male model types and aspiring actors were run through their paces and the winner was judged to be a twenty-eight year-old model named Peter Anthony. Anthony's photographs were passed onto Broccoli and Saltzman and he was invited to do an official test. Nothing came of this (though he looked terrific it was obviously Anthony's acting inexperience which provided the biggest obstacle to his James Bond dream) but Anthony was invited to test again for Diamonds Are Forever nearly a decade later so Broccoli and Saltzman must have liked him.

The other finalists in the Express competition were salesmen Gordon Cooper and Anthony Clements, a former teacher named Frank Ellement, and an engineer named Michael Ricketts. Another finalist was a stuntman named Bob Simmons. Simmons would (in a fashion) become the first Bond because it is him and not Sean Connery we see in the gunbarrel intro for Dr No. It was reported in the media in 1961 that Broccoli and Saltzman were having a rather difficult time trying to find their James Bond for Dr No and had the pushed production back to give them time to conduct a more thorough search. None of the famous names they approached seemed terribly keen and there was still a sense that they didn't know quite what they were looking for. Some of the actors they tested were very young but they still hadn't ruled out casting someone more mature and famous. The net was being cast very deep and wide in the hope that the right person might magically emerge and suddenly win everyone around.

The producers were quite keen on Patrick McGoohan as a James Bond candidate for Dr No. McGoohan was well known at the time for playing John Drake in the television series Danger Man. McGoohan was not only a competent actor but also a proven leading man (albeit on the small screen rather than cinema) who brought an enjoyably offbeat wit to his parts. Broccoli and Saltzman were disappointed to learn though that Patrick McGoohan had no interest in playing James Bond and considered Bond to be morally dubious. "It has an insidious and powerful influence on children," said McGoohan when asked why he had turned down the chance to be James Bond in Dr No. "Would you like your son to grow up like James Bond? Since I hold these views strongly as an individual and parent I didn’t see how I could contribute to the very things to which I objected." McGoohan would later become best known for creating and starring in the surreal television classic The Prisoner.

As the search rumbled on, Ian Fleming continued to float names which were not terribly realistic or very forward thinking. Fleming suggested that Trevor Howard (again) or Stewart Granger might make a good Bond but both of these names were more of past bygone eras than a modern new franchise for the Swinging Sixties. This was equally the case with Edward Underdown - who Fleming also suggested. Most of the names that Fleming proposed were simply too old for the part (which does tend to suggest that Fleming saw James Bond as a mature sort of character). The handsome if slightly sinister looking Undertown, who later had a small part in Thunderball and was a prolific film actor, was in his fifties and nearly thirty years older than some of the young actors they were looking at. Undertown clearly wasn't a great candidate on the grounds of age alone.

Another person who is sometimes linked to the part of Bond in Dr No is Michael Redgrave. Although a fine actor, Redgrave was already in his fifties and so would have also been a pretty pointless person to pursue on the grounds of age alone. What the producers needed was an actor capable of making sequels (if the film was successful enough to earn sequels that is) and Redgrave wasn't that person. Rex Harrison is another actor said to have been suggested by Fleming but this is difficult to verify. Harrison, like Redgrave, was simply too old to be a serious candidate. There wouldn't be much point in hiring an actor as a one-off. EON definitely needed to start thinking about younger actors.

Another mature actor who was courted to play Bond in Dr No was James Mason. Mason was offered a three film contract but declined the offer because he didn't want to be contracted to a series of spy caper films. James Mason was in his fifties and although suave and a terrific actor he was already far too old for the part. Equally unrealistic from an age point of view was David Niven - who Fleming continued to suggest. One can only presume that some of these names were floated on the grounds that the producers and Fleming thought it might be easier to sell the film with an established and well known actor attached. Deep down though they must have known that what they really needed was an exciting young actor who came with no baggage and therefore would be accepted by audiences as 007 straight away.

Another of Fleming's suggestions was Richard Todd. Todd was in his early forties at the time so slightly more realistic in terms of age than some of the other candidates. He was known for films like The Dam Busters and The Hasty Heart and a very old-fashioned type of leading man. Despite his ability to play stiff upper lipped war heroes, it's hard to see how a Richard Todd version of James Bond would have launched the series into the stratosphere in the manner that Sean Connery did. Todd just seemed too old fashioned for sixties Bond mania. It all became academic in the end anyway as Richard Todd could not be considered for Dr No due to scheduling commitments on other films. He was simply too busy to throw his hat into the Bond casting circus.

A very plausible candidate was the beefy Australian actor Rod Taylor. Taylor was in his early thirties at the time of Dr No and was handsome (in a dated 1960s male model type of way) and likeable. He had just made The Time Machine and was soon to feature in The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock. He had a television show called Hong Kong at the time of Dr No - which was an attempt to turn Taylor into a big star. Taylor was approached about becoming the first ever big screen James Bond but he rebuffed the interest. This was something he soon came to regret. "I refused because I thought it was beneath me," said Taylor. "I didn't think Bond would be successful in the movies. That was one of the greatest mistakes of my career! Every time a new Bond picture became a smash hit, I tore out my hair!" For whatever reason Rod Taylor never really became a big star in the end. That obviously wouldn't have been the case if he'd done James

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 18.11.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7554-0009-7

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