The release of Quantum of Solace, the 22nd James Bond film, takes me back 40 years, to my own dalliance with Bond, being brainwashed by Blofeld, and two months of luxurious captivity a hilltop hideaway in Switzerland.

It was 1968, I was 22, George Lazenby had been picked to play James Bond for the first (and last) time, and I was about to become a Bond Girl.

I got my part in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service at a time when there were masses of films being made. London was swarming with actors rushing from audition to audition, and we were all getting work. I was sent to meet Harry Saltzman, the American who co-produced the Bond films with Cubby Broccoli, in South Audley Street. It was a very hot day. The lift had broken. He arrived in his Rolls-Royce, after lunch, and since his office was on the top floor, I had to follow him up the stairs. At the top, he was so out of breath he was almost speechless. He just managed to say, “Ya have da part”. I said thank you, and went away again. I often wondered why he hadn’t told me in the lobby downstairs, but the whole thing was utterly thrilling.

I knew it wasn’t going to be a big part, but I didn’t care. I was going to be one of Blofeld’s “Angels of Death”: according to the plot, these were girls handpicked from every corner of the Earth for their beauty and, bizarrely, their food allergies. In Blofeld’s lair we were hypnotised and trained like Pavlov’s dogs. On Blofeld’s command, we would all go into a trance; then when we returned to our various countries he could trigger us through radios hidden in powder compacts to release deadly germs that would bring the world to its knees. There were 12 of us: I was “The English Girl”.

Sean Connery had made five Bond films and did not want to do any more, so a great hunt had been launched for the new James Bond. Perhaps they picked up from Fleming’s books that Bond is a sort of cipher, on to which you can project anything, so long as he looks the part: so they fixed on this handsome broad-shouldered Australian called George Lazenby, forgetting that usually to work on the big screen you have to have some experience.

He had been tipped in at the deep end: the critics savaged him for not being an actor, but he was a model, and that is what he was from the beginning. Grim garlic-related stories emerged of differences with his leading lady Diana Rigg, who was more used to Stratford and Shakespeare.

Even so, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and George’s performance, remain undated. All the Bond film aficionados put it in the top three ever made, if not at the very top. Making that film was huge fun, and it left a lasting impression. I was in Switzerland for two whole months. These days tiptop, above-the-title stars might film for two months, but everyone else is lucky to be there for a day and a half. They said it was good for the crew’s morale to have lots of lovely Bond girls around, so that is what we did. It was like entering Bond’s world. At the Palace Hotel in the wonderful Bernese Oberland, we put on full make-up every morning, got dressed and took the cable car up to Blofeld’s lair. Blofeld was played by Telly Savalas with his earlobes glued back because, as everyone knows, Blofeld had no earlobes. There was a Swiss catering company, and it produced incredible food, elevenses, twelveses, oneses. I never ate anything, because I knew if I started I wouldn’t stop.

There were no cars up there, just Bond’s Aston Martin, which had been airlifted in. The film took over a slice of the Alps, including the village and everyone in it, for five months. Cubby Broccoli would come on set and say “Is everybody happy? Is anything going wrong?” He often had his little daughter with him, who used to talk during filming but no one was allowed to say “shush”. That was Barbara Broccoli, who now runs the film franchise.

The Angels of Death were mostly glimpsed in the background. If you mashed all my bits together you would be lucky to get two minutes. We each had about one line. Mine was directed at Bond, who was masquerading as a Scot. I had to say: “I know what he’s allergic to”, because he was plainly allergic to girls since he wasn’t a bit impressed by our charms. I also had to say: “Oh goody, egg nog on Christmas Eve, just like we have at home.” I said quietly that we don’t have an eggnog tradition in Britain, but it was an American film so I had to say the line anyway. I felt like a traitor.

Like many people, I discovered the James Bond books through the films. I was far too young for the books when they first came out, and in the 1960s we were all reading Dostoevsky and carrying Polish newspapers under our arms to show how clever we were.

It was in the 1980s that I really came to love the Fleming books. For a start, the books are the right length – in other words short – about 60,000 or 70,000 words. These are page-turners you can put in your pocket and devour in one munch. With Fleming you never get: “And then the carriage trundled off towards Bath where they would spend the next two months”, where you think: “Right, I can put the bookmark in there and go and do something else.”

He was also a wonderful descriptive writer. You get the drip, drip of a place, whether that is the stink of a casino at three in the morning, or the fresh scent of water rippling over a flat white beach.

There is not a man in the world who does not think he would love to be that incredibly skilled, brave, resilient and attractive man; and there is not a woman who would not fall for the charms of someone who is brusque and tough, but caring. It is always the girls who lead him on; he doesn’t pounce on them unless, of course, they have it coming.

One has to remember that when the Bond books were written the Iron Curtain had descended, and that made for terrifying gaps in the world we didn’t know about, full of malevolence, with great borders you couldn’t cross. There was an uneasy ignorance of foreign lands and something less accessible about the world, which today you can explore at the push of a button. That made Fleming’s dark landscapes all the more exciting.

He was engaging with poor people in a flat, exhausted postwar country, living on grey stew and plum duff, with no money or desire to travel. Here was a world filled with sports cars and champagne, special drinks that made you think: “What is it about that particular gin?” In Bond’s world, it seemed to matter how your coat was cut.

Fleming was a complicated personality: a ladies’ man with an amusing sardonic face, impeccable connections and lazy elegance. He had an upper-class drawl and was as fit as a flea, which is always very attractive. He was capable of great sweetness, which you see in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which he wrote for his son Caspar.

But the more I learnt about him, the more I found him to be a solitary man. The loss of his father, who died in the trenches, left him under the lonely shadow of his immense, dead hero and he seemed to be happiest in the company of his inner head. He enjoyed being with people such as Noël Coward, who was sour and amusing and good fun, and the rafts of friends who turned up to visit the Flemings in Jamaica, but in reality I think he was a loner. His pastimes and pleasures were solitary: golf, cards, cars, writing . . . the things he loved most were lonely; and there is also a loneliness to James Bond, which is part of his allure.

— Joanna Lumley presents Ian Fleming: Where Bond Began, on Sunday (19) at 6.10pm, BBC 1

Shaken and stirred

— Despite his reputation as a bachelor, James Bond is a widower. His wife, Tracy, is killed by Blofeld shortly after their wedding in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

— Rowan Atkinson’s first film appearance was in Never Say Never Again (1983), in a bit-part as Nigel Small-Fawcett, a bumbling British embassy official. Atkinson went on to spoof Bond twice, once in a long-running series of television adverts and again in 2003’s Johnny English

— Bob Holness, who became the presenter of TV’s Blockbusters, starred in a 1957 radio adaptation of Moonraker

— Another Way to Die, the theme song for Quantum of Solace, is only the sixth Bond theme that does not share a title with the film in which it features

Source: IMDB; Times Archive

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