After a week of mysterious mishaps, including the destruction of 007’s Aston Martin, the rumours are starting to fly that the latest Bond film has been hit by a jinx.

Shooting by Lake Garda, in northern Italy, of Quantum of Solace was suspended yesterday after a series of near-fatal accidents to a driver and two stuntmen.

The first occurred early on Saturday when Jonathan Dunn Fraser, an employee of Aston Martin, was delivering the DBS sports car to the film set. As he was driving along the gently winding lakeside road he inexplicably lost control of the car, which smashed through a guardrail and into the lake.

In a second accident, on Monday, during shooting of a car chase, a stuntman was injured.

On Wednesday, in the third and most serious accident, two stuntmen were badly injured during filming of a chase scene involving a lorry and a car. The driver of the car is in a critical condition at a hospital in Verona.

The scene was being filmed by the production’s second crew, and neither Marc Foster, the director, nor Daniel Craig was present.

Shooting was immediately suspended and it was decided to stop filming yesterday as well, to allow police to investigate the accident.

A week ago there was another calamity when a man on a bicycle who had stopped by the set to watch filming suffered a heart attack and died.

Mr Dunn Fraser said that he did not know why the Aston Martin had skidded off the road. “I was at the wheel and I remember the road was wet,” he said. “I wasn’t going fast. Suddenly the car went off the road. Then I sank into very cold water.” In that spot the lake is 52m (170ft) deep.

Mr Dunn Fraser said that he must have lost consciousness because the next thing he knew he was upside down, in the car, at the bottom of the lake. “I was shaken but not stirred,” he wryly told the media, and said that he had been able to kick one of the doors open and swim to the surface. He was then taken to hospital.

“I’m very lucky to be alive,” he said. “I thought my lungs would burst before I reached the surface, and my chest still hurts. Apart from that I just have a few bruises.”

The Aston Martin, which sells for £134,000, was one of six being used for the film and was to have been used the next day for a press conference to promote the new 007 film.

Talk of a jinx

— When 11 extras fell from a moving lorry on the set of Tom Cruise’s film Valkyrie last year, it gave renewed weight to claims that the film was jinxed. The German Government, in part because of Cruise’s link to Scientology, also banned the crew access to several key filming sites

— Rumour associates nine cast and crew deaths with The Exorcist, below, and William Friedkin, the director, is believed to have been driven to soliciting the aid of an exorcist for the film set itself

— The filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie was blighted by the deaths of My-ca Le and Renee Chen, child actors who were killed when a helicopter spun out of control on set

— Brandon Lee’s death on film during the shooting of The Crow has become the stuff of legend but the footage did not, as is often claimed, end up in the final cut

Sources: Times archives

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