Bowie, the Bond baddie
QUESTION Various actors have turned down the role of James Bond. What well-known names have declined a chance to play Bond villains? ROGER MOORE’S Octopussy (1983) is often cited as one of the worst films in the Bond franchise. In fact, it is a good-natured, occasionally thrilling, romp with some fine villains and a rare fleshed-out part for the Bond girl. But financially it was a flop.
Bond producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Salzman called for a script and a villain who would satisfy the needs of the MTV generation. For their next movie, A View To A Kill (1985), writers Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum were commissioned to create a villain based on a rock star.
To that end, the producers courted David Bowie to play the role of the geneticallymodified Nazi industrialist, Max Zorin. With his power suits and bleached blond locks, the role naturally fitted Bowie’s Eighties persona.
When he declined, they turned to another blond rocker, Sting. He also turned them down and they eventually chose actor Christopher Walken, who put in a wonderfully deranged performance.
In an interview with New Musical Express, Bowie quashed rumours that Sting had been approached before him. ‘Yes, I was offered that,’ he said. ‘After Sting? I rather think it was the other way about. I think for an actor it’s probably an interesting thing to do, but I think that for somebody from rock it’s more of a clown performance. And I didn’t want to spend five months watching my double fall off mountains.’
The film did, of course, feature a rock star, the fabulous Grace Jones, who neatly summed up Walken’s performance as ‘lean, mean, blond and suavely narcissistic’.
There are other examples. In the early Sixties, Orson Welles was considered as Auric Goldfinger, but he wanted too much money, so they cast German actor Gert Frobe, largely on the back of his menacing performance as a child killer in the German film Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened In Broad Daylight, 1958).
Anthony Hopkins turned down two roles. Originally Goldeneye (1995) was to feature a sixtysomething former MI6 chief named Augustus Trevelyan.
Hopkins passed and the screenplay was rewritten for a thirtysomething operative renamed Alec Trevelyan. This was offered to Alan Rickman, who turned it down (having had his fill of playing villains in Die Hard and Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves), so the role was eventually awarded to Sean Bean.
Hopkins was later offered the role of the villain in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, media baron Elliot Carver. He accepted, but eventually left the production on account of uncertainty regarding the film’s ever-changing script. The part was taken up by Jonathan Pryce. Oliver Barton, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. QUESTION Was Winston Churchill ever wounded in action? BY THE age of 25, Churchill, who had joined a cavalry regiment after attending Sandhurst (where he was accepted after his third attempt) had seen significant action in India and the Sudan.
In 1899, after he failed to get himself elected to Parliament in an Oldham byelection, he went to South Africa as a journalist. He eventually re-enlisted in the Army, although his foolhardy attitude and prior combat experience made him a headache for military commanders.
Churchill was famously captured by the Boers and escaped by climbing out of a latrine window. Amazingly, he was never injured in his adventuring years, though shrapnel and bullets frequently whizzed by his head.
Of his disregard for bullets, he wrote: ‘I am so conceited, I do not believe the gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.’
He often spoke of the thrill of being in the firing line — ‘There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result’ — and he was regularly in danger: ‘ I could not help reflecting that the bullet which had struck the chestnut [horse] had certainly passed within a foot of my head. So at any rate I had been “under fire.” That was something. Nevertheless, I began to take a more thoughtful view of our enterprise than I had hitherto done.’
Ironically, Churchill was wounded in action in his other line of work — as a politician. In a fiery debate in 1912 over the Home Rule Bill, Ronald McNeill — Conservative MP for East Kent, more or less an Ulster Unionist representing an English constituency — lost his temper with Churchill.
Speaker James Lowther was obliged to suspend the debate, and as Unionist MPs trooped out of the chamber, Churchill taunted them by waving a white handkerchief. An infuriated McNeill hurled the Speaker’s copy of Standing Orders Of The House Of Commons across the floor at The First Lord Of The Admiralty’s head.
It was a good shot, striking him firmly on the forehead and, according to Alexander Mackintosh’s memoirs, drawing blood.
Only with great difficulty were Churchill’s parliamentary colleagues able to restrain him from retaliating. Robert Sanders, a Tory whip, noted in his diary that ‘it would have taken very little to make a general fight’
Kenneth Bailey, Leeds. QUESTION Did Gandhi fight in the Zulu War? FURTHER to the earlier answer, it might surprise some, but Gandhi, like many other Indians, supported the British Empire well into World War I.
In exchange for their help in that terrible conflict, they expected Dominion status like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. They did not get it — to a great extent because it might weaken British authority and the difficulty of handing power to one religious faction, in a country of many minorities.
When it became impossible to resist the demand for independence, power was handed to the Hindus on a plate, leading to the division of the country and terrible slaughter.
It would have been far wiser to have confronted this difficult problem sooner rather than later and kept influential people such as Gandhi on side.
Roland Kennard, Hardelot, France. QUESTION Is there any contemporary reference to a Roman vomitorium, where Roman feasters would supposedly make themselves sick so they could eat more? FURTHER to earlier answers, when the new Bolton Wanderers Reebok Stadium was being built, a plan was displayed in the local newspaper. The word ‘vomitorium’ stood out. It was, in fact, correctly used as ‘a passage to facilitate the movement of spectators’.
I had a letter published in the Bolton News saying that I had thought the vomitorium was a place the fans went when they ‘imbibed too much lager’. I probably wasn’t too far out.
Mrs Shirley Myerscough, Westhoughton, Gtr Manchester.
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