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Charles Dance on
Ian Fleming:
“For me a part like this means endless personal research. I worked for
months and months on Fleming. Any character as enigmatic as Ian
Fleming is immediately attractive to me. Most people’s knowledge of
Fleming is limited to whatever information they might have gleaned
from the James Bond films. Those films of late have moved so far away
from anything to do with Fleming that I thought it might be quite
informative for me and for an audience to see those bits of Fleming
that certainly influenced the writing of the first Bond book, CASINO
ROYALE – the book he was most happy with. Any character that is not as
he appears to be is immediately attractive to Fleming. He had very
definitely a public face and private face, and the two were totally
and utterly different. Hopefully there is an opportunity to
demonstrate this. He is also somebody who realised his fantasy of
himself in novel form: Bond is a fantasy of Ian Fleming. Bond finds
himself in situations that Fleming was in. He just took them a stage
further – and put them into the realms of fantasy. |
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There isn’t an angle
about Fleming that isn’t interesting. He was an intriguing man but I
am no particular admirer of his personal habits. He was a womaniser
who drank half a bottle of gin and smoked 70 to cigarettes a day. To
work with Don Boyd, a maverick and survivor of the British film
industry, was a big plus too. He is a superb director and the
experience of working with him was one that I would love to repeat.”
“My very first movie
was in the 007 film For Your Eyes Only in 1981. It was a small
role and most of it was cut out. It was also the first acting job I'd
taken for the money and regretted having done so almost the moment I
started.” “I didn't enjoy a single moment and the only good thing was
becoming friends with Roger Moore.”
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Don Boyd:
“Right from the start of this project I wanted Dance. The face, the
height, the build … physically he’s extraordinarily like Fleming. He
has the same air of precision combined with melancholy reserve that
people who knew him say Fleming had – and of course there’s the sexual
charm, Fleming was terribly attractive – to men as well as women.” |
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Julian Fellowes:
“I have never before played such a high-profile person and I had to
lose three stones for the part. My mother’s cousin Lady Dudley
Williams actually knew [Noël] Coward and dined with him several times.
On one such occasion they were both approached by an autograph hunter
and she couldn’t understand why she was asked for hers, ‘Sign the menu
darling they think you're Gertrude Lawrence’. So she signed. So it
could be that somewhere there is a menu floating about with the
signatures of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, alias Lady Dudley
Williams. Ian Fleming’s wedding took place on a rock and he [Coward]
sang a calypso to the couple. To do the scene I had to be physically
carried out to the rock and then I had to make up my own tune to
Coward’s words, as the original tune was made up on the spur of the
moment.” |
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Marsha Fitzalan (Loelia
Westminster) and Patrick Ryecart (Ivar Bryce) were
married in real life, and Goldeneye was the first time in 12
years of marriage that they had acted together. Marsha: “We are not
quite Michael Dennison and Dulcie Gray. I had been asked to play this
a long time before, but Patrick only came in at the last-minute. It
was wonderful. Just like a second honeymoon. We walked hand-in-hand
along the beach and swam together. Oddly enough I am distantly related
to the character I play through my father.”
Patrick Ryecart:
“It was Bryce who introduced Fleming to the beauty of Jamaica. He was
the only Englishman ever to work in the American Secret Service and
knew much more about undercover work than Fleming did.” |
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Writer Reg Gadney:
“So much of [TV drama] is unmemorable and goes under the bridge unnoticed.
Increasingly in order to gain any attention, a television drama has to be
an event of some sort. I was somewhat reluctant, initially, to devise the
screenplay of Ian Fleming's life. One was aware of the ghost and myth of
James Bond. But having claimed the freedom to approach Fleming's life and
his preoccupation with his alter-ego, I felt the story of Fleming's own
dreams took one into previously unexplored territory. It seems to me an
exciting tale that deserves to be told with a certain wryness, and greatly
worth the telling. It is in no way a black and blue, heavyweight
psychological life story. I don't believe in this drama-documentary
business anyway. I hate the phrase 'drama documentary'. What's Hamlet,
or what's Henry V? Are those drama-documentaries? In my view its
either a drama or it isn't. If it’s based directly on fact, then we go in
knowing that. It either works as a film or it doesn't work at all. Most of
the work I do is fairly exotic, though one is always slightly wary of
writing about people who are very powerful personalities who everybody
knows of.” |
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"When I began work on Kennedy, I was asked
if I wanted to meet Jackie Onassis, and I declined. I felt the same way about the Fleming
story. If you do that you are putting yourself in a very difficult
position. If your film has had family approval, everyone thinks it’s a
whitewash. If you consult them and they don't approve of what you've
written, then they sue you. I wrote Goldeneye as I think Fleming
might have written it himself. Entertaining, exciting, sad in parts, but
not without a few laughs.” |
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ABOVE: The Daily
Express May 29, 1989 devoted two pages to the production of
Goldeneye, then filming on location in Jamaica... and
‘shamelessly’ included the 007 MAGAZINE logo [used from 1989-2001]
as part of their layout!
BELOW: The 26 August – 1 September 1989 edition of the weekly
listings magazine TV Times
devoted a two-page spread to Goldeneye upon its first
screening on the ITV network at 7.45pm on Sunday August 27, 1989. |
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The original broadcast of
Goldeneye at 7.45pm on Sunday August 27, 1989 on the ITV network
was widely covered in the media, with many newspapers including the
Daily Mirror [pictured below left] devoting full-page coverage to the
screening. The production of Anglia's £2-million Ian Fleming biopic was
also deemed newsworthy, and was featured in several publications in the
months prior to the broadcast, with The Mail on Sunday YOU MAGAZINE
[pictured below right] showcasing Charles Dance on the cover of the June
25, 1989 edition, accompanied by a four-page editorial on the making of
the film. Goldeneye was generally well reviewed and Charles Dance's
performance as Ian Fleming singled out for praise. |
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Goldeneye was
released on VHS videotape in the UK in May 1991, and later on DVD in
Germany. Largely unseen since its BFI screening in 2013, Goldeneye
has more recently been broadcast on Talking Pictures TV – a British
free-to-air vintage film and nostalgia television channel. |
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ABOVE (top left)
Original 1991 UK VHS videotape release of Goldeneye (1989),
and (top right) a promotional DVD version given away free by the
Daily Mail newspaper in 2007. Note the title is now
displayed as ‘GOLDEN EYE’ presumably to avoid any connection with
the 1995 EON Productions film starring Pierce Brosnan as James
Bond. |
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