British director helmed three Bond films, Alfie
LONDON — Director Lewis Gilbert, whose dozens of movies included three James Bond thrillers — You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker — and the Swinging London classic Alfie, has died at 97, colleagues said Tuesday.
The Bond fan site From Sweden With Love said he died Friday in Monaco. Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson said Gilbert was “a true gentleman” whose Bond films “are considered classics within the series.”
The British Film Institute’s filmography lists 33 features directed by Gilbert between 1947 and 2002, making him the most prolific of British filmmakers. But, he acknowledged, most people remembered him for his 007 thrillers.
“When I go around the world now when I’m working it’s amazing — they’re not interested in any of my films until I say James Bond,” Gilbert told the BBC in 2010. “And the minute I say James Bond, they practically genuflect.”
Gilbert’s first Bond film was You Only Live Twice with Sean Connery in 1967. He returned a decade later to direct Roger Moore as 007 in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.
Born in London in 1920 into a family of vaudevillians, Gilbert got his start in the movies as a child actor before joining the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He made his directing debut making documentaries while seconded to the U.S. Army Air Forces’ film unit.
His first postwar credit as director was for The Ten Year Plan, a documentary about housing; his first feature as director was The Little Ballerina in 1947.
Gilbert’s early output ranged from cheap-and-cheerful British noir dramas such as Once a Sinner, Wall of Death and Cosh Boy, to the stirring Second World War dramas Reach for the Sky, Carve Her Name With Pride and Sink the Bismarck!
In 1966, he directed a young Michael Caine as a London manabout-town in Alfie, which was nominated for five Academy Awards.
Gilbert was undaunted by the Bond thrillers’ scale and special effects. He recalled in 2010 that The Spy Who Loved Me featured “the biggest set that had ever been built in England, maybe in the world.”
“If I did anything with the Bonds, I think I made the humour work very well with Roger,” Gilbert told BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs.
“It’s no good trying to make him the great physical thing that Sean was. It’s far better that he won everybody over with his sense of humour.”
In the 1980s, Gilbert changed gear, directing Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, both character-driven stories of workingclass women adapted from stage plays. His last film was Before You Go, a 2002 family comedy that also starred Walters.