‘Sean Connery? Never heard of him’: why nobody thought Dr. No would be a hit

It’s hard to imagine the time when Bond existed solely in the pages of a paperback, but before Dr. No was released in cinemas 60 years ago today, confidence in Ian Fleming’s literary creation for the big screen was at rock bottom.

Belief in the franchise was so low that Sean Connery’s initial outing in the tux was propped up by a measly budget of $1 million, just one 15th of what was spent on Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia that same year. Budgeting issues also meant a general sense of anxiety pervaded the set. If only they’d known that the 007 franchise would go on to take over $7 billion worldwide, become the fifth highest ever grossing film series and one of the most recognisable film brands in the world.

“The thing about Dr. No was that nobody, and I don't care who says otherwise, nobody, had any idea whether that film was going to be a success or a failure,” remembers Norman Wanstall, sound effects designer. For Wanstall and others looking to make their name on the set, the low budget ended up being fortuitous. Twenty-seven during filming, Wanstall began as an assistant but was promoted to head of sound effects by film editor Peter Hunt in what the designer remembers as an unprecedented move for someone of such a young age, and a bellwether for the thriftiness of production on Dr. No.

“I don’t think anyone in the history of films was promoted like that,” laughs 87-year-old Wanstall down the phone from his Midlands home. “It was absolutely unheard of. I was totally bewildered. But once I knew that Peter Hunt meant it, I think I had the confidence to say, ‘Okay, give me a room of my own and an assistant and I’ll do the job.’”

Fear over what the public would think of Bond’s first ever screen outing meant even the likes of producer Harry Saltzman were visibly nervous once filming had wrapped. At one preview screening, Wanstall remembers Saltzman standing outside looking shifty. “I’ve never seen anyone with such concern on his face,” he recalls. “The worry was very very distinctive.”

But those screenings revealed positive responses from audiences, and Dr. No took in a handsome $43 million at the international box office. Reviews were mixed, but at least financially, Connery’s Bond had staked his claim to film history. Quite something for the character Ian Fleming dreamed up at the bar of The Connaught and while snorkelling in the azure-blue sea outside his private residence in Jamaica. “They all filed out with a smile on their face, and I could see the man changed. He realised he’d got a hit,” Wanstall recalls of Saltzman following that landmark screening. “That was quite a moment.”

“Quite a moment” might be the grandest understatement of 20th century film. Shot in Jamaica and London the same year it was released, the film starred another relatively unknown actor, Ursula Andress, alongside Connery and Joseph Wiseman as the villainous Dr. No. Perhaps most famously, it features the iconic beach scene in which Andress emerges from the ocean carrying conch shells singing a patchily dubbed ditty. Bond wakes on the beach and spies her as she remarks: “What are you doing, looking for shells?” “No, I’m just looking,” retorts Bond. Creepy by today’s standards, the scene established the idea of the Bond girl and inspired many homages. Most notably, Halle Berry in Die Another Day, who emerges from the sea with the same sultry glamour evoked by Andress.

The low production budget meant “going slowly and unsurely” with the filming of scenes, remembers Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records who worked as a location scout for Dr. No in Jamaica and recalls a similar feeling of trepidation as Wanstall. He recommended the Laughing Waters beach location to producers (where Andress rose from the water), and notes that filming that history-making scene only lasted a few hours. But the rushes for the beach scene prompted a change in fortunes. “Frankly, the whole thing changed in that scene when Ursula walked out of the water,” he says. “Everybody jumped up, Cubby Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, the director, everybody jumped up with excitement and Cubby Broccoli called back to London to get the bigger budget. And that’s what they did.”

Wanstall remembers the early rushes of Andress reaching Pinewood from Jamaica for the editing suite, and a conveyor belt of “chaps you’d never seen before” making excuses to look at the images. “He’d come in with a script under his arm or something to make it look as though he was somebody,” he recalls. “They always used to ask the same thing. They used to say, ‘Could we see something of Ursula Undress?’ That’s what they called her, Ursula Undress. They’d obviously heard that this woman was sensational and she was coming out of the water in a bikini and that used to make me smile, actually. If anyone ever wanted to see anything, I don't know who these people were, friends or executives, it was always Ursula they were interested in.”

Earlier in the shoot Wanstall, who created the sounds for Dr. No’s metal hand and the nuclear reactor explosion, had even been reprimanded for spending too much money on props. “I thought, this is so unfair, I’m professionally doing the job you promoted me to do”, he says. But the eventual success of Dr. No meant initial budget qualms became mythologised as the franchise blew up. “On From Russia With Love, suddenly it all became very professional and money wasn’t mentioned,” Wanstall remembers.

Dr. No helped Andress become one of the major pin-ups of the 1960s. She was rumoured to have had eyes for Elvis on the set of Fun in Acapulco and among her other acting credits, she starred opposite Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in the Western comedy 4 for Texas. Andress also shot for Playboy seven times, giving some insight into her level of fame, once justifying that work by saying she took the shoots “because I’m beautiful.”

And it’d be a mistake to presume that Andress’ Honey Ryder character was entirely driven by, or is now bolstering, the male gaze, reminds Mark O’Connell, queer Bond expert and author of Catching Bullets: “When the lazy detractors argue the days of Ursula Andress emerging from the surf in a bikini are out-moded and sexist, they overlook how the actress herself co-designed the two-piece swimsuit, that women across the world then clamored for a bikini, and that the hot alpha that is Sean Connery is often topless, in wet denim pants and the deliberate centre of women's – and some men's – attention too,” he says.

Andress is the only remaining Dr. No lead alive since the death of Connery in 2020, but she rarely speaks to the press. I telephoned her one boiling hot August morning and the 86-year-old picked up, but told me: “No interviews, no appearances”. Then she hung up. Bond insiders say she responds best to an Italian speaker as she lives just outside of Rome, but she understood my English and I had got my answer.

I did track down the Jamaican actor Marguerite LeWars, née Gordon, who played Annabel Chung, one of Dr. No’s operatives in pursuit of Bond which established the villainous Bond girl trope. I wanted to hear more stories from the set, particularly from a female perspective. Gordon, who won Miss Jamaica in 1961, recalls a slapdash approach to casting her significant role.

The then-22-year-old was working as a check-in assistant at Kingston Airport while director Terence Young was location scouting. Gordon recalls being given a bottle of Dior perfume and being asked to sign a contract to star in Dr. No by Young himself as she was checking his bags onto a flight. “I said: ‘How can you give me a contract, you don’t even know if I can act?” recalls Gordon. “I said: ‘Take back your perfume. I do not take gifts from strange men because I don't know who you are at all.’ He said: ‘Well, just come to a reading.’”

Gordon was initially wary because Young asked her to audition for Miss Taro, a role which went to the actor Zena Marshall and required being dressed in only a towel and kissing Connery. “I said: ‘What? Who is this man?’ They said: ‘His name is Sean Connery.’ I said: ‘I’ve never heard of him.’ They said: ‘He’s going to play James Bond,’ and I said: ‘I’ve never heard of him.’” Gordon wasn’t alone: before Bond Connery had mostly worked on small TV and theatre productions, but was nothing close to a household name.

Gordon remembers Connery as an immensely warm and supportive co-star, particularly during one shoot where she made the Scotsman go through seven takes before she got her lines right. Director Terence Young “throws off his cap and stalks off the set,” after a third take, remembers Gordon, but Connery “put his hand on me,” the 82-year-old remembers. “He said: ‘Marguerite,’ in his wonderful Scottish accent, ‘Why are you so nervous?’ I said: ‘You’d better take your hand off my knee, you’re making me even more nervous.’

“Then he said: ‘Let me tell you about self confidence. I have an acronym I will give you. P if you physically look the part, which you do, you look good. E is for efficiency – you know your lines were perfect in rehearsal. And P if you have the right type of personality.’ He said that's the secret of self-confidence. And I never ever forgot it. My only regret is I never saw Sean again for the rest of my life.”

There was also an old-fashioned approach to casting for the picture which meant Gordon was required to look Chinese for her role. “They put Durafix glue and two elastic bands and tied them behind my ears so that my eyes would be slightly tilted,” Gordon recalls.

In the summer of 2022, just months ago, Gordon shocked the Bond community by alleging that Terence Young had sexually assaulted her on set. In the interview, the 82-year-old, who’s married to media mogul Ken Gordon and these days writes fiction about the “empires” of the Caribbean, describes how Young touched her during a long remote drive and she hit him back, bringing the first MeToo allegation to Bond. Perhaps she was “the innocent one” on set, she wonders. “But he knew the type of person I was, all the things I’d refused to do. I wouldn’t take his perfume, how dare he think I would acquiesce to this?”

Gordon alleges Connery and Andress were in the same car as her and Young prior to the incident and she says of Connery: “I think he was disappointed in Terence Young because he looked very surprised and his famous eyebrows raised. I could see his face, his body language, like, ‘Marguerite why?’ I don’t know what Terence told him. He looked very shocked.”

Gordon’s allegations – an unwelcome yanking of Dr. No back into the limelight – are a stain on Bond’s legacy as fans of the franchise look to the future. A new 007 – who will be in his 30s, according to the producers – will be announced next year.

Kim Sherwood, the first female writer of Bond, whose debut Bond novel pays homage to Johanna Harwood, the female scriptwriter from Dr. No who has largely been cut out of Bond history, believes we need Bond’s “symbol of strength and hope now more than ever.” She imagines our need for Bond “will only increase as we face new challenges and that’s one of the unique things about Bond.”

“Conceived by Fleming as a character shaped by World War II, facing crises of the Cold War, but as a character, he is malleable enough to adapt as we adapt and as the world adapts.”

But as we think about the future it pays just as richly to look to the past: with a strong narrative arc, the exotic locations, the girls, the boys, and the oddball villains, Dr No stands up as well today as it did in 1962.