Ian Fleming and Goldfinger
He was, of course, the gold-obsessed megalomaniac in the James Bond book of that name. He was also, unforgettably, played by Gert Fröbe in the 1964 film containing the most famous hero-villain dialogue in movie history.
“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr Bond. I expect you to die.”
And Ian McKellen has now brought new life to Goldfinger in a new BBC Radio 4 adaptation, playing the arch crook with silky menace and an indefinable accent. Where others have made Goldfinger into caricature, there is something chillingly believable about McKellen’s portrayal of the super-villain. Which is oddly appropriate, as Goldfinger was, in some senses, real. Ian Fleming famously based his characters on people he had met, several he had not and some he merely wanted to annoy. “Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” he said.
Bond himself was inspired by the people Fleming came to know as an officer in the Naval Intelligence Department: “He was a compound of the secret agents and commando types I met during the war.” M was modelled on Admiral Sir John Godfrey, Fleming’s brilliant but irascible boss in naval intelligence. Miss Moneypenny was based on several secretaries in the secret services.
Fleming was a magpie writer, picking up whatever caught his eye and packaging it into fiction: names, places, meals, journeys, catchphrases and, above all, people. Sometimes the individuals he turned into fiction took deep and justifiable offence. In Diamonds are Forever he named his homosexual villain “Boofy”, the nickname of a close friend and relative by marriage, Arthur “Boofy” Gore. The real Boofy was livid.
Like Bond himself, Auric Goldfinger — treasurer of Smersh, the richest man in England, expert marksman, gold-loving murderer and golf cheat — is based on at least three people, including an American minerals millionaire, a First World War German spymaster and a blameless architect who just happened to be named Goldfinger. In the novel Goldfinger, the seventh in the James Bond series and published in 1959, Fleming sketched a biographical background. Auric (the adjective for gold) Goldfinger is a 42-year-old expatriate Latvian, 5ft short, with blue eyes, red hair and a penchant for painting his women gold, so he can make love to the metal he adores. There is no doubt that Fleming borrowed the name from Ernö Goldfinger, a well-known Hungarian-born architect. Fleming’s golfing partner, John Blackwell, was related by marriage to the real Goldfinger and disliked him: he probably encouraged Fleming to appropriate the name...
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http://commanderbond...quicknews/57703 - The Times
