Register Now!

Joanna Lumley Remembers: When Edina Met James Bond

Posted by Phil Nugent

It turns out that Joanna Lumley has a peculiar habit of dropping in on long-running spy-adventure franchises at strange moments in their histories. She stood in for Diana Rigg/Honor Blackman/Linda Thorson in the mid-1970s TV series The New Avengers, a retread of the classic 1960s show that also featured an extra, young male cast member (Gareth Hunt) so that he could handle any chores that might tax Patrick McNee's delicate heart rate. And in 1969, when she was 22, she appeared in the first James Bond film not starring Sean Connery, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. For those of you who may have trouble keeping one movie's world-domination plot straight from another's, that's the one where Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas with his earlobes pinned back, takes over a clinic in the Swiss alps and "cures" a bunch of girls of their allergies by hypnosis. In the process, he also turns them into unwitting time-release bombs in a biological-terrorism scheme as part of his plot to force the world's powers to grant him amnesty for all his past crimes and the right to be addressed as "Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp" by anyone who can get the words out with a straight face. Lumley played one of these girls. "I was sent to meet Harry Saltzman, the American who co-produced the Bond films with Cubby Broccoli, in South Audley Street," she recalls. "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."

Lumley's role was not large; her character is called simply "The English Girl", and she only has a couple of lines, one of them being the immortal "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.") She didn't even get to go to bed with Bond, which is just as well, since the actress who did had to deliver a breathless post-coital monologue on the bother of having an allegery to chickens when your family operates a chicken farm. (Has it never occurred to you, Elspeth dear, that your allergy is your body's way of telling you something? Damn it, you're a beautiful girl, now kick the dust of that chicken farm off your penny loafers and get out into the big wide world and enjoy life! Sorry, where was I?) Still, Lumley is proud to be associated with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, because "the Bond film aficionados put it in the top three ever made, if not at the very top." Just because Lumley knows some off-the-wall Bond aficionados does not make their judgement incorrect. On Her Majesty's has most of the elements of a superior Bond movie, including thrilling wintry chase scenes (the film was directed by Peter R. Hunt, whose whiplash action editing was an essential part of the first wave of Bond films), an unusually classy romantic soundtrack number performed by Louis Armstrong, and a top-flight supporting cast that includes Diana Rigg as the woman who would (briefly) be Mrs. Bond, Gabriele Ferzetti as her way-cool gangster dad (who gets to punch her out before delivering the line, "Hey, you spare-a da rod and you spoil-a da child!"), and Ilse Steppat as Blofeld's female-tank sidekick. If the movie is actually underrated a bit, it's because of the presence, or rather the lack of same, of George Lazenby, the colorless Australian male model who got to stand in for Connery while he was in the bathroom for four years. According to Lumley, there were also "grim garlic-related stories" of the difficulties between Rigg and Lazenby, and I'd love to know whether this is supposed to be a veiled accusation that one of the leads is a vampire or just an indirect way of hinting that somebody's breath was not ideally suited to the kissing scenes. There's also an adorable recollection of how producer "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." My guess is that today she could strip and do interpretive dance just out of camera range and nobody would say shit, either.

Related Stories: The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs
+ DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
Posted Oct 21 2008, 12:00 PM
Filed under: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

No Comments