So how did I land role of Bond...? By being 007 double!
WHEN George Lazenby stepped into Sean Connery’s shoes to play James Bond, he was also wearing the Scottish actor’s suit.
With no previous acting experience, the star-struck Australian used-car salesman went to extraordinary lengths to emulate his hero in his bid to secure the coveted 007 role.
Ahead of auditions for the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Lazenby had his hair cut at Connery’s barber and borrowed a Rolex watch like the one worn in Goldfinger.
He even managed to bag himself one of Connery’s suits after the star forgot to pick it up from his tailor in Savile Row. Now 77 and appearing in a new documentary called Becoming Bond, Lazenby, pictured below, reveals: ‘I copied Sean Connery’s look to a T, and even went to his tailor to get one of his suits. It was a place on Savile Row, and I asked them to make me one like Connery wore. They told me it would take six months but, when I was on my way out of the door, they found one that he had left there.
‘I took that. I put a Rolex watch on like he wore. I got my hair cut at the same barber he went to. Now I look back at it and say: “How the f*** did I do that?” I mean, the reasons that I wanted to be Bond were simple. I looked up to Sean Connery as an actor, and I thought that I would get laid a lot more.
‘The strange thing is it actually had the opposite effect. Short hair and suits didn’t get you laid in the late 1960s. Everyone was wearing bell-bottoms.’
Perhaps that was why Lazenby decided he’d had enough of playing Bond after just one outing as 007, opposite Diana Rigg. Despite being offered a multi-million pound contract to continue, he quit.