James Bond and Me

The other day I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of the play Adventure Story by Terence Rattigan. It chronicles the life of Alexander the Great, played in the original 1949 production at the St James’s Theatre, London by Paul Scofield. I myself had, so to speak, understudied Mr Scofield in a 1980s amateur production of Ring Round the Moon, in which he had created the role of the twins in the original UK production which opened at the Globe Theatre in January 1950. (Perhaps this was his next West End part after he had finished playing Alexander?) Anyhoo, as I cast my eye down the cast list I was delighted to note a couple of names which had since gone on to much greater things.

In fact, whenever I’m watching an old film from the fifties or sixties, I always like to study the credits at the start to see if I recognise any of the names. I don’t know about you, but I find it comforting to note that, for instance, the second unit director on The Third Man (1949), Guy Hamilton, ended up directing the Bond films Goldfinger (1964), Diamonds are Forever (1971) and Live and Let Die (1973). They might not have been the best of the bunch, and at least one of them was probably the all-time worst, but in the end he could be said to have Made It in The Biz, indicating that with a bit of luck and a following wind – not to mention the willingness to put in a shit ton of hard work – there might be hope for us all.

(He was also, incidentally, the man whose shadow Holly Martins chases down the street after that famous doorway reveal of the duplicitous drug runner. It was supposed to be Orson Welles but Welles was off that day, or throwing one of his wobblies or something, so it was Hamilton who drew the short straw, assumed the tetchy star’s bulky overcoat, and headed off at pace into the frosty Austrian night.)

Similarly, arthouse darling Nicolas Roeg, he of Don’t Look Now (1973) The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Castaway (1986) – not the Tom Hanks Cast Away (2002) where Tom Hanks talks to a bloody baseball, but the one where Amanda Donohoe spends an inordinate amount of time walking around with nothing on in front of Oliver Reed – had been a camera operator on Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959) (it wasn’t his greatest adventure, by the way, not by a long shot), in which Sean Connery playing a villain succumbed to an arrow in the chest courtesy of Gordon Scott’s ape man; did second unit photography on Lawrence of Arabia (1962); and was DP on John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1967).

Glancing at the cast list for the latter you also see such familiar names as Bryan Mosley as ‘Barker’, before his days on Coronation Street as ‘Alf Roberts’; Dave Swarbrick as ‘Fiddler at Barn Dance’ (credited as David Swarbrick), shortly before he would achieve everlasting fame as fiddler with iconic folk-rock group Fairport Convention; and among ‘Rest of cast listed alphabetically’ we even find Robert Powell playing (uncredited) ‘Man at Harvest Dance’. He may not have known it but he was just a few short years away from his breakout role as Tobias Wren in TV’s doomy drama series Doomwatch (1970), before marriage to the alluring Barbara Lord, beautiful Babs, from Pan’s People must have made him the happiest of men (ask your father).

Elsewhere on this site, while talking about my days as an amateur actor (here), I discuss the importance of finding the roots of your character with reference to the performer who first played your part in the original production. These cast lists are invariably printed at the front of the playscript and they are invaluable insights into how the director and the author originally envisaged the character. Take Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (Lyttelton, April 1993): the second you know Rufus Sewell is playing the tutor Septimus Hodge, Harriet Walter is playing Lady Croom, Felicity Kendal is Hannah Jarvis, Bill Nighy is Bernard Nightingale and Samuel West is Valentine Coverly, you can immediately picture how the scenes would at least look and probably sound as you read them. (On this line he would probably do that, on that line she might put the emphasis there, and so on.)

And this, I contend, is the very opposite of type-casting or taking an easy option where the artist humps, so to speak, their familiar baggage onto the stage with them. No matter how good an actor is technically, they are still presenting themselves physically on stage, it is still their actual presence the audience is reacting to, and people have their own distinct and unique ways of doing things. When they have certain physical looks and attributes too, you can anticipate specific modes of behaviour. In extreme cases these can be fairly obvious – the likes of Dwayne Johnson and Dave Bautista, for instance, are never going to be the nervy computer geek clicking away in the background are they? No, they’re always going to be the ones stopping the CGI trains with their bare hands and taking on seventeen zombies at once. Similarly if Charlize Theron walks in, with Ana de Armas on one aide, Scarlett Johansson on the other and Rachel Weisz bringing up the rear (with Kate Winslet and Helena Bonham Carter carrying the luggage), you can be pretty sure they’re not there merely to unblock the sink or re-upholster the furniture.

Yet, while even the best actors inevitably bring with them the kind of personality they are known to portray best on stage or screen, sometimes it can take them a while to develop the necessary characteristics. Everyone has to start somewhere, and it’s down the bottom of these cast lists in the front of these playscripts that some lovely moments of recognition can occur. This mildewed copy of Rattigan’s Alexander, for instance, featured several names which became more prominent as the decades went on. The first of these was ‘Palace Official’ Walter Gotell. He would appear in TV’s Softly Softly: Task Force in the seventies as a high-ranking cop, though he was much more likely to turn up as a nasty German or a bolshy Balkan in such series as The Saint and The Baron and The Champions. Nowadays of course he’s probably more immediately recognisable as the terrifying Russian heavy in From Russia With Love (1963) who kills off Vladek Sheybal’s chess master by kicking him with a poisoned toe-cap. His lugubrious foreign-looking features obviously hit the spot with the film producers as well because he was back in Bondage again for 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me this time as General Gogol, a role he would reprise in Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), A View to a Kill (1985), and The Living Daylights (1987).

Further down among the Greek Soldiers we find listed one Stanley Baker. I first became aware of him through Zulu (1964), which I saw on its first-run release at our local cinema, the Rex, in North Street, Bristol, and it was probably the first big-screen film to make a lasting impression on me. It was, for a start, the red of the tunics, so startlingly bright, and obviously hot, and completely inappropriate against that landscape. Then again, this red was of a completely different saturation compared to the paler but even more dangerous red of the flames that burned the carts of the British platoons in the aftermath of Isandhlwana in the opening sequence, and brought down the wattle and daub hospital building during the night of the Rorke’s Drift siege. And different again from the duller but still more ominous staining of blood from a bullet wound or a spear thrust, seeping unstoppably into vivid uniform and bright bandage and dark trouser and parched, dry, indifferent earth, “too dry to hold a man in his grave” as the gaunt but tender Private Thomas (Neil McCarthy) puts it, more or less.

(A sign as to how young and innocent I must have been at the time is that when we went to see it a second time I remember saying as we walked down our hill, “That native dancing at the start is a bit boring though, Dad,” and my dad replying, “But that’s the best bit, Rob,” and my mum sighing, “Oh Bill.” My older brother said nothing. That was us in a nutshell, basically.)

Back again amid the Alexander cast list, among the three Persian Soldiers right at the bottom, one recognises two of the three names (with apologies to David Oxley whose likeness, I’m afraid, does not ring a bell). But the name Terence Longdon certainly does. Yes of course, obviously we all remember him as the doughty-looking Drusus in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), but either side of that he cropped up in a couple of Carry On films, which is more than Charlton Heston or Stephen Boyd ever did, and I have a crystal-clear memory of him as some kind of airline pilot in some kind of black and white TV series from the early sixties. Why do I remember that? Maybe my mother fancied him or something. I do remember one of the very first Airfix kits that my dad made for me before I got older and learned the knack myself was a small white airliner, maybe a BAC 111, which I used to fly in front of the screen mimicking some take-off sequence which must have been playing behind the credits or something. I distinctly remember pushing it across the comfy chair my dad was trying to sit down in one Saturday teatime when the thing was just coming on. Anyway, further research indicates this must have been the BBC’s Garry Halliday, billed by IMDb as a kids’ show which ran from 1959 to 1962, and if you’re going to write a kids’ show about a commercial airline pilot why wouldn’t you call him Garry Halliday?

And I’ll tell you another thing, the cast list for this show on IMDb also bills one Frederick Treves as Nigel Fox, and Frederick Treves is also the name of the third Persian Soldier billed alphabetically after Stanely Baker and David Oxley in the cast list of the original run of Alexander the Great in 1949. You might recognise him if you look him up, one of those splendid old British actors who used to turn up in loads of things, never really starring but always lending staunch support as a local landowner or a doctor or a vicar or a diplomat or a titan of industry or something. In an episode of Mr Bean he played a judge at a dog show. I remember seeing him as real-life hunter and tracker Jim Corbett in a mid-80s series called Natural World, and this must have been somewhere around the same time that I saw him in the flesh at our local Sainsbury’s buying groceries wearing a similar multi-pocketed gilet which probably sparked the recognition. I can only assume he was in town acting at the Bristol Old Vic or the Little Theatre or something. I certainly never approached him to find out, of course. I liked his style (he always had a twinkle), I admired his work, and I’ve always been a complete groupie when it comes to famous people, but you never want to go introducing yourself to them do you? What if they tell you to eff off?

(Incidentally, on his bio page, IMDb says Frederick Treves is known for, among other things, The Elephant Man (1980) and of course I was about to start hooting about what a gaffe that was, because they must have been thinking of the real-life surgeon who tended John ‘the elephant man’ Merrick who, by a strange coincidence, also happened to be called Frederick Treves, played so masterfully in the film by Anthony Hopkins, nothing to do with this actor who simply happened to have the same name you see, ho ho ho, perfectly understandable mistake, of course, but you know, do your research, IMDb. And then I checked the cast list of The Elephant Man and found that not only did Anthony Hopkins play the surgeon Frederick Treves (to perfection), but the actor Frederick Treves, lower down, played a character called ‘Alderman’. (Or he might have been playing ‘an alderman’.) Either way, there’s a lesson there somewhere.)

But then again, such coincidences must be more common than you might think in the relatively small pond that is the acting profession. Actors and technicians and agency staff must be bumping into each other at parties and on the set and in the canteen all the time. In my Proscenium days, whenever we were setting the performers’ bios for the back pages of the programme, it was odds-on every actor under thirty had either been in The Bill, or Casualty or EastEnders, and those who hadn’t been in any of them had been in all of them. This is perhaps not surprising, given those shows’ voracious appetite for infinite numbers of walk-ons, from delivery drivers to police officers to schoolteachers to shop assistants to parking wardens to petty pilferers. Within the even tighter confines of all those similar-looking TV action shows of the sixties, the number of actors who could look appropriately sinister while at the same time managing the all-purpose eastern accent must have been rather more limited, though the faces look no less familiar. Flick through the cast lists of all those creaky old action series like Danger Man, The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, Department S, Jason King, The Persuaders!, The Protectors et al, and you’ll see the same names coming round again and again: wonderful character actors of the old school, like Martin Benson, Roger Delgado, Edward de Souza, Willoughby Goddard, Harvey Hall, Oscar Homolka, Frederick Jaeger, Duncan Lamont, Ferdy Mayne, George Murcell, Derek Newark, Patrick Newell, Steve Plytas, George Pravda, Godfrey Quigley and so many more. Even if the names don’t mean much these days, I’m sure the faces would, for those of us of a certain vintage.

A small world indeed then. But repeat performances by the same gallery of RADA stars all playing a similar guttural heavy are not the only things these shows have in common. In fact, it’s amazing how often the common link seems to be James Bond. In Ivanhoe, for instance, the late-50s TV series where Roger Moore played Sir Walter Scott’s swaggering hero, his sturdy sidekick Gurth was played by Robert Brown (who happens to look a bit like the aforementioned Walter Gotell). Fast forward twenty-five years and there is Mr Brown again, cropping up alongside Roger Moore’s Bond, this time playing his superior M in Octopussy (1983), having already appeared as an Admiral Hargreaves in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). I often wonder whether a lot of such serendipity is simply down to the stars themselves using their clout to recruit old friends and colleagues from the past whom they know and trust and will enjoy working with again, or simply want to give a leg-up to in the event they might be facing hard times? If the latter, then it gives one an even warmer glow, to know that not everybody in the entertainment business needs to be an egotistical bastard.

And such Bond connections continue even into the original cast of Alexander with which this piece began. The man himself Sean Connery, pre-Bond, played the part of the all-conquering Macedonian in a TV production in 1961, and it’s the kind of part you can imagine he would have shouldered with typical grace and aplomb. In fact, there are few sights on the big screen more exciting than Sean Connery, in his prime, on the move. He walks like a panther and runs with perfect balance and efficiency. But even then, the three moments in the Bond films where he is at his best are, for me, much more subtle and throw-away than any of the big action sequences, yet they bespeak the control and confidence of that suave characterisation to perfection.

The first is in From Russia with Love (1963) when he and Ali Kerim Bey are going down into the underground cisterns of Istanbul to spy on the Russian embassy. Kerim Bey tosses Bond a torch and Bond catches it. That’s all. But the no-fuss economy with which Connery’s Bond does this says as much about his physical control as would watching him do a five-minute gymnastics routine. Then there’s that moment in Thunderball (1965) where he needs to cause a distraction at the health resort so he sets off the fire alarm. But it’s the way he does it. He’s walking – no, he’s sauntering – down a corridor and then suddenly his elbow darts out and hits the button in its glass box on the wall. I don’t think he’s even looking. So nonchalant, so easily aware and in command of his environment and everything in it. The third memorable moment comes in You Only Live Twice (1967). He’s been brought aboard a British submarine – in Hong Kong harbour, is it? – wrapped up in the shroud in which his supposedly dead body was committed to the waves. They cut the canvas open and he’s lying there in full dress uniform wearing a breathing apparatus. From his supine position he requests permission to come aboard and then he stands up to his full 6’2” height. That’s all he does, just gets up off the floor from a lying position, but how many of us would be able to achieve that with quite the same measure of facility? It’s a fluid and instinctive movement, or swift sequence of movements, the fee planted just right, the supporting hand placed just so, and it’s over almost before you know it but suddenly there he is, effortlessly dominating the frame.

Not all the actors who first came clumping on humping a spear across those draughty stages of the fifties and sixties would go on to such world-beating domination, but a surprising number of them did, and it’s fascinating (to me at least) to find out where some of them started out. And for those of us lesser mortals who followed them meekly but determinedly onto the amateur stage, it’s good to know that, with a bit of luck and a following wind, anything might be possible. At least we could always take our cue from the quality actors who had preceded us.

And I’ve just remembered that John Barry, who wrote all the best Bond themes, also managed to find the time in between From Russia with Love and Thunderball to compose the music for Zulu, starring Stanley Baker and ‘introducing’ Michael Caine… the same Michael Caine composer John Barry once shared a flat with in Cadogan Place in the sixties, and who would go on to star alongside their old mucker Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King in 1975. Alexander got it wrong: there are more worlds to conquer. But this will do for now.