To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Sean Connery’s first appearance as agent 007 in Dr. No, a blockbuster charity sale offers iconic memorabilia ranging from Timothy Dalton’s tuxedo to Daniel Craig’s Aston Martin DB5. Here’s a sneak preview
On the trail of the SPECTRE villain Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), Bond — played by Sean Connery for a fourth time — visits the Bahamas. The pair come face to face in the elegant Café Martinique, near Nassau.
After defeating Largo in a string of expensive baccarat hands in the café’s casino, Bond invites his opponent’s companion, Domino (played by Claudine Auger), for a drink. Outside, on the casino’s terrace, he coolly orders beluga caviar and champagne.
This menu is one of five made for the scene; the other four remain in the EON archive. It comes with a red cord and tassel, and a two-page paper insert that, alongside the caviar, lists several dishes mentioned in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. These include the eggs and cream that 007 enjoys in Goldfinger (1959) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), and steak tartare, which he describes as ‘delicious’ in From Russia, With Love (1957).
Sir Roger Moore’s third appearance as James Bond saw 007 unite with KGB Major Anya Amasova, played by the American model and actress Barbara Bach, to defeat the megalomaniac Karl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens) and thwart his plans to create a new underwater civilisation.
At Cairo’s Mujaba Club, Amasova glides through a Moorish arch in this navy evening dress with Swarovski-studded neckline and straps, then orders Bond a vodka Martini, ‘shaken, not stirred’, before he has a chance to.
Amasova still has the dress on the following day when the pair come face to face with Stromberg’s henchman, Jaws (Richard Kiel), at the Great Hall of Columns in Karnak, some eight hours’ drive south along the Nile. During the ensuing fight, it is the unflappable Amasova who secures an all-important roll of microfilm from the metal-toothed assassin and drives the pair to safety.
Amasova’s wardrobe was conceived by the society dressmaker Baroness Franka Stael von Holstein — who also dressed Ava Gardner and Princess Anne — and costume designer Ronald Paterson.
A Fabergé egg appeared in Ian Fleming’s 1963 short story The Property of a Lady. The tale sees Bond sent to attend the sale of an egg in London, where its price is being deliberately hiked by overbidding as a pay-off for the consignor — a Soviet informer and triple agent.
After being serialised in Playboy, the plot was adapted for the 1983 film Octopussy. Bond — played for a sixth time by Sir Roger Moore — is dispatched to an auction room to swap a Fabergé egg with a replica. He then engages in a bidding war for the duplicate with an exiled Afghan prince named Kamal Khan, played by Louis Jourdan, raising the price to half a million pounds. ‘Let’s see how badly he wants it,’ Bond quips during the sale.
The green-and-gold eggs in question were commissioned by Peter Lamont, the film’s production designer, who asked the jewellers Asprey to craft two pieces in the manner of Fabergé that resembled the Russian Coronation Egg made in 1897.
Timothy Dalton’s first outing as Bond sees him become entangled in a web of defecting Russians, American arms dealers and Middle Eastern drug lords.
In one of Dalton’s most memorable scenes, he deploys a medley of his Aston Martin’s ‘optional extras’ in a bid to evade Russian soldiers in Bratislava and escort the cellist — and Soviet assassin — Kara Milovy, played by Maryam d’Abo, to safety.
After unleashing laser cutters and rocket launchers, Bond turns the car into a sled, then pushes its self-destruct button in a final effort to thwart his pursuers.
With no other means of escape, Bond and Milovy ride her cello case down the mountain and across the border into Austria, waving a passport at frontier guards as they hurtle past.
The cello case sled as it appears in The Living Daylights, 1987. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS © 1987 Danjaq, LLC and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.
This cello-case sled is one of three made by the film’s special effects team for filming in Austria. The other two are in the EON archive.
In Timothy Dalton’s second appearance as Bond, he donned this tuxedo for an undercover trip to Isthmus City, the power base of the villain Franz Sanchez, played by Robert Davi, and his international drug cartel.
Dalton’s tuxedo comes complete with a shirt, bow tie, braces and cummerbund. It was acquired by costume designer Jodie Tillen from Battaglia, once the largest boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, which counted Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire among its clients.
It was made by the Florentine tailors Stefano Ricci and is labelled ‘Stefano Ricci for Battaglia Beverly Hills’. The trousers are annotated in pen, ‘Timothy Dalton W 33¾, L 33½’, and the jacket’s lining is signed by Dalton himself.
The lot includes a set of 40 chips from the Casino de Isthmus City, where Bond wins big on the blackjack table. His luck changes, however, when the croupier is replaced by Sanchez’s girlfriend, Lupe Lamora, played by Talisa Soto.
The Casino de Isthmus City chips included in the lot
The same poker chips were later reused in GoldenEye (1995), at the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco, still bearing the Casino de Isthmus City logo.
Pierce Brosnan kicked off his third Bond film with an unforgettable, 14-minute-long pre-credit sequence that included a now-legendary speedboat chase on the River Thames in London.
The action begins with Bond launching his stealth speedboat — which Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn, tries to tell him isn’t finished yet — via a secret door in the side of MI6’s headquarters. He then pursues the enemy, who is in her own speedboat with a rear-mounted machine gun, eastwards to the Millennium Dome.
The boat builder Riddle Marine of Idaho, USA, constructed 15 Q Jet Boats for the sequence. One, which was used for most of the chase, was fitted with a powerful 5.7-litre V8 engine that produced 300 brake horsepower. Another had Vickers air mortars attached to its hull, enabling stuntman Gary Powell to perform a mid-air barrel roll.
The version in the sale is a special-effects model, rigged to open its front weapons hatch to reveal a pair of smart torpedoes that lock onto the enemy’s moving boat.
Daniel Craig reprised his role as Bond for a third time in Skyfall. In search of the origin of a mysterious casino chip, which will ultimately lead him to the former MI6 agent-turned-villain Raoul Silva, played by Javier Bardem, Bond visits Macau.
Shortly after arriving at a casino called the Floating Dragon, Bond is set upon by bodyguards and thrown into a pit containing a hungry Komodo dragon.
The casino’s interior, along with the lizard’s enclosure, was created in Pinewood Studios, just west of London. The monumental Chinese lion statues were among its most recognisable features.
Despite looking like well-weathered ancient bronze, the statues were in fact plaster, created by the film’s art department in collaboration with the sculptor Jonny Moore. Initially, miniature models were made in clay, before the design was perfected and scaled up to produce finished versions more than a metre and a half high. This is one of just two full-size sculptures used in the film.
According to the 007 producer Michael G. Wilson, there are few greater synergies in the world of filmmaking than James Bond and the Aston Martin DB5.
Aston Martin’s iconic grand tourer was initially released in 1963, and first appeared in Goldfinger the following year. Since then, it has featured in seven more Bond films, often customised with an array of Q’s gadgets, including oil sprayers, revolving number plates and ejector seats.
This particular car, made specifically for No Time To Die, is so far the only DB5 stunt car to be released for public sale by Aston Martin and EON Productions.
It has a 3.2-litre petrol engine and manual gearbox, as well as bespoke braking and suspension systems specially designed by Aston Martin and the film’s special effects supervisor, Chris Corbould, for a chase sequence through the rugged streets of Matera in southern Italy.
On top of that, it’s fitted with some of the bespoke gadgets Bond deploys in order to escape from SPECTRE operatives, including a pair of machine guns hidden behind working headlights. The carbon-fibre body panels even have mocked-up signs of damage from Bond’s scrapes amidst the action.
For a man constantly on the move — and with an impeccable wardrobe — reliable luggage is crucial. For Daniel Craig’s final Bond instalment, costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb worked with Globe-Trotter, a company that has been producing luxury travel cases since the 19th century.
Daniel Craig beside the Globe-Trotter custom luggage in No Time To Die, 2021. NO TIME TO DIE © 2021 Danjaq, LLC and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.
The resulting custom luggage was crafted in ocean-green and black leather. The cases were made especially for the scene in No Time To Die where Bond and Madeleine Swann (played by Léa Seydoux) arrive at their rock-cut hotel room in the Italian hilltop town of Matera, as Bond prepares to visit the grave of his ex-lover, Vesper Lynd.
Two sets of luggage were made. Only this set, which is signed by Daniel Craig on the mushroom-coloured interior lining, will be made available to the public.
In 1942, while working as a naval intelligence officer, Ian Fleming was sent to Jamaica for an Anglo-American summit. Falling in love with the island, he declared that one day he would be back there for good.
Four years later, Fleming purchased 15 acres of a former donkey racetrack on Jamaica’s north coast. There, on a headland overlooking a private beach, he built GoldenEye, the Caribbean home where he would write all 14 James Bond books.
Ian Fleming at his desk in the villa at GoldenEye, where he wrote all 14 of the Bond books. Photo: © 2000-2006 Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG. All Rights Reserved
After Fleming’s death, the house was purchased by Bob Marley, who then sold it to the founder of Island Records, Chris Blackwell. Blackwell still owns the house, and has kindly donated a five-night stay to the auction.
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Now known as the Fleming Villa, the house is the jewel in the crown of the luxurious GoldenEye resort, and sleeps up to 10 guests. It has a private beach and swimming pool, tennis courts, a media room, a team of butlers and housekeepers and an executive chef. Most important of all, however, is the original small corner desk where Fleming made literary history on his typewriter.
GoldenEye and its surroundings featured in the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and later in Live and Let Die (1973). More recently, the first details of No Time To Die (2021) were announced at the resort.
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