How Bond nearly came from Prussia with love

Published on Sunday 11 March 2007 00:59

A VETERAN German actor has revealed how one of his country's top thriller directors planned to make Bond films before Sir Sean Connery hit cinema screens as 007.

Joachim Fuchsberger, who starred in German action and detective films in the 1950s and 1960s, was asked to play Bond but a funding crisis in West German cinema meant that the project could not go ahead.

In an interview with the Hamburg-based magazine Stern, Fuchsberger - now 79 - described how his country's top thriller director, Horst Wendlandt, met him in the late 1950s to discuss the possibility of turning the Bond books into a film. Wendlandt wanted Fuchsberger to play Bond.

Fuchsberger said: "I told [Wendlandt], you have to make it in colour. And then there are the exotic locations. It's going to be really expensive.'"

In the event the first Bond film, Dr No, was produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli for $1m (about 357,000 at the time) in 1961.

Fuchsberger added: "I think that Sean Connery is for me the best Bond, he played the role brilliantly. Whether I would have played the role the same, I'm not so sure. Everyone has their own way of playing different roles."