Many people recognise him as ‘the Aussie James Bond’. Most people wouldn’t recognise him at all. George Lazenby, born in Goulburn, New South Wales, was the boy from the country who became – for a fleeting moment – the biggest film star in the world. The story goes that Lazenby, a male model and non-actor who would replace Sean Connery as 007 in 1969’sOn Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was discovered by producer Albert Broccoli in a London barber shop and invited to audition for the role.
“The Broccoli story was bullshit,” Lazenby says down the phone from his home in Santa Monica, California. At 74 years of age, he remains an enthusiastic character, and you get the feeling he’s used to holding a crowd – something he’s done time and time again since his sole appearance as Bond. “I’ll tell you how that happened – when I was up for Bond [already], I knew Kurt the barber where Broccoli went to, and Sean Connery went, to cut their hair. I had a French haircut – I had sideburns, I looked like a French guy ’cause I was modelling in France.” Hearing ahead of his audition that Connery went to Kurt’s, Lazenby did the same, and though the producer was sitting in the shop at the time, they didn’t meet. “Apparently when I walked out, Broccoli said, ‘That guy would make a good Bond. He looks like a successful businessman’ – that was the line – and when Broccoli went back to Kurt after I got the job, he said, ‘You know that guy you said would make a good Bond – that’s the guy you got!’ And Broccoli said, ‘What?!’ And then they used that line, that I was discovered in a barber shop.”
Bond fans’ obsession with the legend of Lazenby’s casting is no surprise – OHMSS is counted by devotees as one of the strongest films in the entire 23-film series, even if Lazenby was the first alternative to Connery’s legendary portrayals. In fact, perhaps the most celebrated line of Lazenby’s Bond is when, spurned by the customary Bond girl, he quips, “This never happened to the other fella.”
“That was my line,” Lazenby explains. “When I was doing the stunts, hanging 3,000 feet off the ground on a wire or jumping out a helicopter 20 feet off the ground, I said, ‘Bet you the other fella never had to do this.’” It’s true, he adds – Connery would call for a stunt double at the slightest hint of danger. OHMSS director Peter Hunt told Lazenby to repeat the line to camera and it made the cut, though it’s long been understood the pair had a poor working relationship. “I remember someone telling me,” says Lazenby, “someone said, ‘Peter, do you think he should be jumping out of the helicopter?’ Because every time someone else jumped out it would go up about five feet, and I was the last one out. And [Hunt] said, ‘Geez, if we kill him, we get another shot!’”
As a lad growing up in Goulburn and then Queanbeyan, near Canberra, Lazenby first saw Bond onscreen in 1962’s Dr. No, and immediately knew – like any other impressionable young man – that he’d love to be Bond in real life. However, he nearly didn’t make it through childhood at all. “I grew up as a sick child, I was only 18 months old and I was peeing backwards into my kidney – it took them 168 surgeries at St. Vincent’s Hospital to figure out that I was doing that … I grew up thinking I wouldn’t be here very long. So it gave me a different attitude to life, I guess. Not too many people know that. I’ve only got half a kidney, would you believe?”
It hardly suits the narrative of the playboy who supposedly fit the character of Bond more for his lifestyle than his acting skills. And while he went against doctors’ orders not to drink – “I drank myself under the table for about 15 years,” he laughs – Lazenby wasn’t the ladies’ man legend perceives him to have been. “I was a bit rough and ready before Bond,” he says. “They refined me a lot.”
Ultimately, Lazenby didn’t feel comfortable with the acting lifestyle either. “I’d never been an actor, never met an actor, and they took a liking to me. So they changed my accent, they changed my walk, they taught me how to act, I suppose – and then it was the hardest work I ever did in my life … I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing this for?’ I had much more fun before I was Bond,” he chuckles.
These days, Lazenby spends his time on the golf course, and appearing occasionally on TV shows like the US sitcom Legit. He’s writing an autobiography, which rumour says will be titled The Other Fella – “It could be called that, and it could be called something else” – and will visit Sydney as part of the Supanova convention this week. But the question that Bond fans always come back to is just how an untrained actor, raised in Australia and working as a model in Europe, convinced the filmmakers at audition that he was the man to play the world’s most famous secret agent.
“I went and got a suit where Connery got his; I had a Rolex watch,” Lazenby says. “I walked in and leant against the wall and I looked at the casting director, and he looked back at me and said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I heard you were looking for James Bond.’”
See George Lazenby at theSupanova Pop Culture Expofrom Friday June 13 until Sunday June 15 at theSydney Showground. Also appearing will be Stan Lee, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jon Heder, Ming-Na Wen, Rose McGowan and heaps more.
