Bondtastic... The bizarre secrets of the 007 moviesActors put forward for the Bond role in the late Sixties included Michael Jayston (who now stars in ITV's Emmerdale), and the young Timothy Dalton, who was just 22 in 1968. In the Seventies, United Artists executives suggested Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds for the role.
Connery told an interviewer in the Seventies that he never missed a Carry On film. He also confided that he had read only two of Ian Fleming's Bond novels and that he considered Fleming 'a snob, but terrific company'.
In the original Dr No novel, Honey is threatened with being eaten alive by crabs. This was also going to happen in the film, but the idea was abandoned because the live crabs that had been flown over for the scene had been put in a freezing cargo hold and could barely summon the energy to move.
At the Royal premiere of Moonraker, the scene where Drax sets his dogs on doomed PA Corinne made Prince Philip leap from his seat and cry: 'Don't go into the woods, you stupid girl!'
Many were puzzled by the title Die Another Day. The phrase came from the poem cycle A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman: 'But he who fights and runs away/lives to die another day... '
There was some embarrassment at For Your Eyes Only's Royal premiere, which was used as a fundraising event for the Year of the Disabled. The film featured as its opening scene a villain in a wheelchair being picked up by Bond's helicopter strut and then being dropped down an industrial chimney.
