Author author / Ian Fleming / James Bond - a tickt to distant joys XLISTO

AUTHOR AUTHOR

Ian Fleming

James Bond – a ticket to distant joys

'Ian Fleming's novels offer the opportunity to glimpse, even to revel in, how things used to be before progress and equality spoiled all the fun'

Jonathan Freedland
Fri 28 Sep 2012 22.55 BST

 

Sidney Reilly

James Bond is From Odessa

By Brian Mefford -
July 18, 2016

From Ukraine with Love: Hollywood’s favorite British spy, James Bond, was inspired by the great Odessa born adventurer.

 
Everyone knows the world’s most famous secret agent, James Bond. British author Ian Fleming’s hero has been a box office star for more than half a century. Bond is celebrated around the globe for his brilliant mind, wild adventures, and debonair charm. “Women want him, and men want to be him”. What most people don’t know is that James Bond has his origins in Odessa, Ukraine.

Former Tatler cover girl Naomie Harris launches the Michael Kors Collection

 

TATLER, DECEMBER 2020

 Txema Yeste

Former Tatler 

cover girl Naomie Harris

 launches the Michael 

Kors Collection 

x 007 capsule

The name's Kors, Michael Kors

The New Review Q&A / Naomie Harris / 'I want to play Elizabeth Bennet'

Chandler Tregaskes
22 September 2021

007 fans have been eagerly awaiting the release of the franchise’s 25th instalment since late 2019, but now, after several setbacks, the much loved movie series hits the big screen next week. To coincide with this, the marvellous Michael Kors has collaborated with everyone’s favourite spy on an accessories collection championed by former Tatler cover star Naomie Harris, aka Miss Moneypenny.

Classic James Bond posters up for auction

 

No Time to Die, 2021

Poster for the long-awaited new film starring Daniel Craig, estimate £100-£200

Classic James Bond posters up for auction – in pictures

Sotheby’s in London is hosting an auction of Bond memorabilia in November, including hundreds of classic posters covering the entire series of films from the forthcoming No Time to Die to Dr No, Sean Connery’s debut in the role in 1962. Connery, who was voted the most popular Bond in a Radio Times poll in August, died at the age of 90 on Saturday.

Sarah Gilbert
Sun 1 Nov 2020 11.46 GMT

Goldeneye, 1995

Two posters produced for the US market. The film was the first to star Pierce Brosnan as Bond. Estimate £300-£500

A View To a Kill, 1985

Poster featuring Roger Moore and Grace Jones and signed by Moore, estimate £1,400-£2,600

Casino Royale, 1967

French poster created by Georges Kerfyser, estimate £3,000-£5,000

Obituaries / Sean Connery

Sean Connery

Sir Sean Connery obituary

Scottish actor for ever associated with his role as the first screen James Bond

Ronald Bergan
Sat 31 Oct 2020 16.28 GMT

Last modified on Sun 1 Nov 2020 00.41 GMTIt would have been easy for Sean Connery, who has died aged 90, to bask in the fame and riches his most famous role brought him and never do film work again. But to his credit, almost from the beginning of his success as James Bond, he was up for more challenging assignments. However, having turned his back on his alter ego, and no matter what else he did, Connery would continue to be associated principally with Ian Fleming’s secret-agent hero, and remain the actor against whom all the subsequent James Bonds are measured – to their disadvantage.

As the critic Roger Ebert put it: “Basically, you have Connery, and then you have all the rest.” Connery himself was more down to earth. “There’s nothing special about being an actor,” he once remarked. “It’s a job like being a bricklayer, and I’ve never stopped being amazed at the mystique people attach to my business.”

There is about most of his performances, whether as rulers or slaves, a rough, down-to-earth quality. “His vitality may make him the most richly masculine of all English–speaking actors; that thick rumbling Scotsman’s voice of his actually transforms English – muffles the clipped edges and humanises the language,” wrote the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael.

My favourite Bond film: Goldfinger

Goldfinger has the most sinister villain and best soundtrack but it's the inept fumbling of 007 that truly sets this Bond film apart

Anne Billson
Tue 2 October 2012

The first time I laid eyes on James Bond, he had just emerged from the ocean with a fake seagull on his head. He then blew up a drug lord's laboratory, peeled off his wetsuit to reveal an immaculate white DJ, snogged an exotic dancer, clocked in her eyeballs the reflection of a bad guy sneaking up behind them, tipped said bad guy into the bathtub, threw an electric heater in after him, and quipped: "Shocking, positively shocking!" All this, and the credits hadn't even started. My 12-year-old self thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Many years later, Goldfinger (1964) remains not just my favourite Bond movie, but the standard by which all other Bond movies must be judged. It has Sean Connery, of course, and the best theme song, incorporating Shirley Bassey and lashings of John Barry brass.

James Bond / Golfinger / Review by Peter Bradshaw

James Bond

Goldfinger

4 / 5 stars4 out of 5 stars.

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 27 Jul7y 2007

"Y

ou ekshpect me to talk?" - "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to DIE!" Then why doesn't Goldfinger just shoot 007, an army of pedants have asked, instead of setting up this elaborate laser-beam creeping up to Sean Connery's penis? Perhaps he's just a procrastinator like the rest of us. Here is a revival of what could be the best Connery Bond, from 1964, facing up to sinister bullion-dealer Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) with his plan to detonate a nuclear bomb inside Fort Knox. It has Shirley Bassey's operatic theme, the Aston Martin and Shirley Eaton, killed with that magnificently macabre gold paint.

It also has, I fear, the most sexist scene in cinema history. "Man talk," says Bond to his masseuse as Felix Leiter arrives for a conference, dismissing her with a smack to the bottom. (My theory is that a feminist art director made Connery wear that bizarre poolside terry-towelling hot-pants suit in revenge.) Sir Sean was the screen Bond who tried most to replicate the worldly connoisseurship of Fleming's original; he embarrasses M with a superior knowledge of brandy, and as for drinking improperly refrigerated Dom Pérignon: "That's like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!" Earmuffs? Well, 007, you grumpy old square: in those days, action movies were addressed to an older generation. And Connery's Bond was the last action hero to wear a three-piece suit.

THE GUARDIAN

Honor Blackman

Honor Blackman: an elegant, witty star who never took herself too seriously

With memorable roles in Goldfinger and The Avengers, Blackman became an icon of British cinema through her formidable, no-nonsense persona

Peter Bradshaw
Monday 6 April 2020

‘M

y name is Pussy Galore.” “I must be dreaming.” The cool appraising glance of Honor Blackman falls on Sean Connery’s preposterous, smirking Bond as he awakens aboard Auric Goldfinger’s private jet, and she becomes that rarest of things: a Bond girl who is allowed to introduce herself by name, and perhaps unique as one who is as old or older than Bond.

Honor Blackman, James Bond's Pussy Galore, dies aged 94

Actor also known for role in Avengers praised as ‘hugely prolific creative talent’ by family

Simon Murphy
and Andrew Pulver
Mon 6 Apr 2020 18.57 BST

Honor Blackman, the actor best known for playing the Bond girl Pussy Galore, has died aged 94.

Blackman, who became a household name in the 1960s as Cathy Gale in The Avengers and had a career spanning eight decades, died of natural causes unrelated to coronavirus.

Blackman’s family called her an “adored mother and grandmother” who possessed “an extraordinary combination of beauty, brains and physical prowess”.

How we made / Brosnan on GoldenEye / Crazy stunts and thigh-crushings from Xenia Onatopp

How we made

Pierce Brosnan on GoldenEye: crazy stunts and thigh-crushings from Xenia Onatopp

A tank flattened a camera, M called him a sexist dinosaur and his fights with Onatopp were so rough they needed a padded cell … the Irish actor recalls his 007 debut

Interviews by Phil Hoad
Monday 4 February 2019

Pierce Brosnan, actor

The first film I saw when I came to London as a boy was Goldfinger, which starred Sean Connery as 007. In Ireland, I had been brought up on a diet of Old Mother Riley and Norman Wisdom, so it was a bedazzling moment, seeing this lady covered in gold paint. I ended up getting a toy car with an ejector seat, but I didn’t have any aspirations to be James Bond. The character who really captured my imagination was Oddjob, Goldfinger’s bowler-hatted henchman.

I was originally offered the role of 007 for The Living Daylights. I’d done all the photos with the iconic gun pose and my late wife and I were about to toast our new life with a bottle of Cristal when my agent called and said: “It’s fallen through.” It was because I couldn’t get out of Remington Steele. The role went to Timothy Dalton instead but, by the mid-90s, the franchise had been dormant for six years because of a rights dispute. I heard rumblings that the part was available, but ignored them because I didn’t want to put myself back in that emotional vortex. Then I met the producers Cubby and Barbara Broccoli and, a week later, they called and said: “You’re in.”

The sceptics were out in full: the world felt there was no need for another James Bond. So the challenge was enormous. I didn’t want to get caught between what Sean and Roger had done. Yet, at the end of the day, my take was a little bit of what both had brought to the role. I leant towards Sean’s style, but I couldn’t deny Roger because GoldenEye was in the tongue-in-cheek style people had become used to.

It was a demanding role, physically and emotionally. I did a lot of wirework and fight sequences. They created a padded cell for the fight in the bathhouse with Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), so we could go at it pretty hard. The most arduous fight was the one with Sean Bean, on the ladder over the giant radio telescope at the end. He and I spent six weeks constructing the sequence, working on it during our lunch breaks and at the end of the day with a stunt coordinator. But carrying myself as Bond was as much a mental as a physical thing. You have to hold the stage. You go in to win, full tilt to the finish line.

GoldenEye’s success was a great relief. I was prepared for the attention. Once you have that brand, you’re stamped as a Bond. It was a great irony playing a British cultural icon as an Irishman. I had a quiet chuckle to myself.

Martin Campbell, director

It’s exciting breaking in a new Bond. I did Daniel Craig’s first one, too. You’ve got something to work with. The producers had been checking other people out just in case. I think they may have looked at Mel Gibson and Ralph Fiennes. But it was obvious Pierce was the right person. You couldn’t get a better-looking Bond. Put him in a tuxedo and it’s game over, mate.

 

The guy on the crane crossed himself before the stuntman jumped 700ft

It was budgeted at $55m, which is ludicrously little by today’s standards. I think United Artists had doubts about how the audience would respond after the big gap since the last film. The press had been asking if Bond was still relevant. We decided we had to address this, so we introduced Judi Dench as M, and had her call him a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. The girls, too, were very independent – in the past, they always hung on to Bond’s coat-tails. I loved Famke Janssen’s orgasmic thigh-crushing as Xenia Onatopp.

With Bond, we used to say: “What’s never been done before action-wise?” It’s quite difficult after 16 films. GoldenEye’s bungee jump off a dam at the start was my idea. We used the Contra dam in Switzerland, which is bloody terrifying. There was no digital manipulation: the stuntman Wayne Michaels just did the 700ft jump. As they were doing the countdown, he saw the guy on the crane crossing himself. He did it perfectly the first time. I guess he didn’t want to do a second.

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 Director Martin Campbell (left) with Brosnan and Joe Don Baker on the set of GoldenEye in 1995. Photograph: Allstar/Eon Productions/United Artists

We were getting very tight on budget by the time we got to the tank chase through the streets of St Petersburg, so we built replica streets in the studios at Leavesden. We had three or four Soviet battle tanks, T-55s, the proverbial unstoppable force. You just let the bloody thing go and it knocks anything down. One crashed through a wall, ran over a Panavision camera and flattened it. A couple of companies turned us down for the bit where it smashes through a drinks truck. Perrier ended up getting a good ad out of it. GoldenEye was probably the first Bond film to really cash in on product placement.

I turned down Pierce’s subsequent Bond films. There’s always a madman taking over the world and a control room that has to be blown up. The producers felt the last of the Brosnan Bond films, Die Another Day, had got too fantastical, with the invisible car and the ice palace. They decided there had to be a complete rethink. That’s how Casino Royale came about.

THE GUARDIAN

My favourite film aged 12 / GoldenEye

My favourite film aged 12: GoldenEye

The first 12-rated Bond film – and power-thighed assassin Xenia Onatopp in particular – seemed impossibly glamorous if you were just old enough to be admitted to the cinema

Catherine Bray
Friday 17 April 2020

Her name’s Onatopp. Xenia Onatopp …

Famke Janssen’s GoldenEye character is a transparently ludicrous fantasy of a sexy, so-called “strong female character”; the definitive bad-ass Bond babe with thighs that can (and do) crush a man to death, and a line in double-entendres to make a drag queen blush. Let’s face it, she practically is a drag queen – that flamboyant makeup, even when dressed in full military garb; the constant outfit changes; the pantomime orgasm every time a powerful weapon shoots its load (and yes, that is the calibre of double entendre we’re dealing with here).

The definition of perfection … 
‘We went at it pretty hard’ … Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp with Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in GoldenEye (1995).

She is the reason Goldeneye was so important to me in 1995. She joined the pantheon of clippings from magazines that adorned my bedroom wall, the shrine to everything I considered attractive, aspirational or both. Between 1995, when Goldeneye came out, and my leaving for university in 2001, the lineup evolved. Blur and PJ and Duncan came down, replaced by pictures from FHM and Maxim, replaced in turn by clippings from Kerrang! of Marilyn Manson, Dexter from the Offspring and Davey Havok from AFI. But Xenia remained a constant, her image bleached by the sun over time until the red lipstick became pink.

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In short, to my 12-year-old eyes, Onatopp was the definition of the perfect woman. GoldenEye was the first Bond film I saw at the cinema (the Tower Park leisure centre in Poole, a magical place where a sign used to boast that “a galaxy of entertainment awaits”), which may have had something to do with my infatuation. In one cinema trip, Bond went from something one might half-watch on television on a bank holiday to a transporting slice of silver-screen fantasy.

While the intention of BBFC certificates may be to primly prescribe a minimum viewing age, they also often function as a guide to the ideal age to see the film in question. That’s very much true of GoldenEye, which was the first Bond film to make use of the 12 certificate. While, to fully grown Bond fans, this may have signalled a toning down of the franchise (the previous entry, Licence To Kill, was a 15), to us 12-year-olds it meant something sophisticated and grownup had been created specially for us – like when the drinks industry invented alcopops. And I was only just 12, only just allowed to see something so hard and cool and dangerous, so I was desperately excited while trying hard to pretend it wasn’t a huge deal, like all cool people.

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 Cool and dangerous … Pierce Brosnan. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

And boy, did GoldenEye deliver. From the opening action sequence with Bond diving off the massive Contra dam, to Sharpe from ITV (Sean Bean) getting killed in the line of duty (or was he?), to the first heady thrums of Tina Turner’s still unbeatable Bond number, I was hooked. Even the opening credits were insane: a Hugh Hefner fugue state in which ladies open their mouths and guns come out. Are the guns sexy? Are the ladies sexy? What is going on?! I wasn’t sure, but I was riveted.

I rewatched GoldenEye a few weeks ago, chatting all the while with a group of friends over WhatsApp. It was the first full week of lockdown and we figured it’d be a fun watch. It was, although there was also a fair bit of tedious exposition and some fun but unnecessary padding with Robbie Coltrane and an American guy. In my mind’s GoldenEye, the film is nothing but suspenseful set-pieces and drama, and, of course, that big, man-crushing crush. But isn’t that always the way when you look back at being 12? Nobody remembers the tedious exposition and unnecessary padding; when you look back it’s all suspenseful set-pieces and drama. And of course, the crushes.


THE GUARDIAN