Licence to swagger: How macho act won Bond role for Sir Sean
The man walking into the casting office was dressed shabbily in unpressed clothes.
Hardly the perfect choice to play the suave James Bond. Yet when Sean Connery left the offices of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and they watched him swagger to his parked car, they knew they had their man.
On October 5, 1962 the first of the James Bond film series, Dr No, based on the novels by Ian Fleming, was released.
The process to bring the movie to life from Fleming’s books was arduous after the author sold the film rights to Saltzman for a modest $50,000 – originally the project was meant to be a TV movie to promote tourism in Jamaica.
When it came to making a big-budget movie, producers recognised the need for a magnetic figure for the role of the rakish spy.
Initially Cary Grant was suggested but given there were a number of books in the series, and the feeling Grant would only stick around for one movie, the idea of casting him was soon dropped.
Richard Johnson, who went on to star in Khartoum, was considered, as was Patrick McGoohan, Richard Todd and Edward Underdown.
Roger Moore was briefly in the running, before it was decided he was slightly too young for the role.
Eventually producers turned to Connery who, despite his appearance, had a macho, devil-maycare attitude. The former Edinburgh milkman “put on an act and it paid off”.
The budget for the entire film was just £14,500 which even in the early ’60s was pretty small; it translates to around £350,000 today, and £2,000 of that £14,500 went towards the stylish opening credits.
A lack of budget explains some of the changes from Fleming’s book. There was no scene where Bond tackled a giant squid, for instance. The scene where 007 rescues Honey Ryder (played by Ursula Andress) from being eaten by crabs had to be changed when the crustaceans delivered to the film set proved to be frozen.
In the famous sequence where Andress emerges from the ocean, she is wearing a bikini outfit fashioned from British army webbing; it was sold in 2001 at an auction for $61,500, and the scene was later voted as the sexiest in cinema history.
Critics at the time of the film’s release in 1962 were divided, however. Time magazine called James Bond a “blithering bounder” and a “great hairy marshmallow”. Even The Kremlin weighed in, calling Bond the personification of capitalist evil. Audiences however lapped up Dr No and secured a sequel, as well as laying the foundations of a movie franchise which has spawned 27 movies in total.
Between 1962 and 1967, Connery played 007 in Dr No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice, the first five Bond films produced by Eon Productions.
He returned to play him again in 1971 in Diamonds Are Forever, and again in 1983 in a non-Eon remake of Thunderball, Never Say Never Again.
Connery went on to win an Oscar for The Untouchables in 1987 and was knighted in 2000.
The UK Film Distributors’ Association highlighted the impact of the series, calling it “the backbone of the UK movie industry”.