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‘That’s Our Bond!’
What it took to turn a relatively little-known, working-class actor named Sean Connery into the high-living, suave James Bond.
The biggest question of all, of course, was who would play Agent 007; producers Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli had come to United Artists with a plan to make a whole series of Bond films, so whoever got the part would have to be able to carry multiple movies. In June 1961, Sean Connery had finished filming the comedy On the Fiddle at Shepperton Studios, where he played a soldier with the strength of five men but the brains of only half of one, and was rehearsing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the BBC with Claire Bloom in the title role. The writers were trying to utilize the real-world tension between East and West after the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion early in 1961, and they anticipated the Cuban missile crisis, which started in October the following year and put the world on the brink of nuclear war.
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