Guy Hamilton

Died: April 20, 2016

GUY Hamilton, who has died aged 93, played a major role in establishing James Bond as one of cinema’s most popular series and he had personal involvement in covert wartime missions himself, operating out of Scotland.

Hamilton is widely credited with perfecting the Bond formula of guns, girls and gadgets, exotic locations and darkly humorous one-liners. He directed four Bond films, beginning with Goldfinger (1964). He also directed Sean Connery’s return as 007 in Diamonds are Forever (1971) and the first two Roger Moore films Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man With the Golden Gun (1974).

During the Second World War he worked with real-life secret agents. He was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and was one of the officers responsible for landing special operatives behind enemy lines.

He sailed out of Dartmouth to France and from Aberdeen to Norway, ferrying operatives to and fro and picking up escaped POWs and shot-down pilots. In 2009 he returned to Aberdeen for the first time since the war when he gave a talk at the university.

We met and had dinner together and after a few glasses of red wine he launched into a series of amusing stories about James Bond and Sean Connery, though he was more reticent about details of his own wartime experiences, which had to be teased out of him.

He went with the rowing boats that landed agents on enemy territory and on one occasion he and his crew got stuck in France. Hamilton added, matter-of-factly, that a gunboat came back for them a month later, glossing over the fact that all that time they had to keep one step ahead of a massive Gestapo manhunt. He received the DSC, the Distinguished Service Cross, for his wartime service.

Mervyn Ian Guy Hamilton was born in 1922 in Paris, where his father was press attaché at the British embassy. He entered the film industry at 17 and worked as a clapper-boy at studios in Nice. He fled France when war broke out, worked briefly for a newsreel company in England and joined the Navy in 1940 when he was 18.

He was on his way back to Aberdeen from a mission when he heard news of VE Day on the radio. A tall, dapper figure even in his eighties, he recalled: “We arrived in Aberdeen and everybody was drunk. There was nobody in the harbour to catch the rope.” He remembers going into town and the famous music-hall entertainer Will Fyffe singing I Belong to Glasgow on the balcony of one of the main hotels.

After the war Hamilton learned directing as Carol Reed’s assistant on several films including The Third Man (1949), on which he stood in for star Orson Welles on several long shots. He was also John Huston’s assistant on the notorious location shoot for The African Queen (1951), where his duties included looking after Katharine Hepburn’s private toilet.

He wrote and directed the classic POW film The Colditz Story (1955) and had the chance to direct the first Bond movie Dr No (1962), but family reasons prevented him from committing to a long location shoot in Jamaica.

The first two Bond films had been big hits, but Goldfinger took Bond’s success to a new international level and was one of the highest-grossing films in North America in 1965.

Hamilton enjoyed working with Connery, but had a job persuading him that a golf match between Bond and Goldfinger could be exciting. “Sean had never swung a golf club in his life and thought it was upper-class and not particularly interesting,” he said.

Connery of course went on to become a devotee of the game and when they were reunited on Diamonds are Forever the proximity of golf courses became a consideration in the choice of locations.

A wartime grounding in espionage might seem the perfect preparation for a James Bond, but Hamilton said: “My wartime experiences have got bugger all to do with Bond. James Bond is fantasy land.”

He maintained real-life agents were more like Harry Palmer, the downbeat anti-hero of a series of Len Deighton novels. Palmer was played by Michael Caine in several films, including Funeral in Berlin (1966), which Hamilton directed. However Hamilton admitted that the comic one-liners in the Bond films reflected the ironic sense of humour of real-life agents.

Hamilton’s other films include Battle of Britain (1969) and the Agatha Christie adaptations The Mirror Crack’d (1980) and Evil under the Sun (1982).

An early marriage, to the English actress Naomi Chance, ended in divorce and he married the Algerian actress Kerima, one of the stars of Outcast of the Islands (1951), on which he was assistant director. They lived on Majorca for many years and she survives him. They did not have children.

BRIAN PENDREIGH