Not sure where to put this.
On the face of it, it's not Bond-related. But Albee does have tenuous Bond connections.
Albee was a critically acclaimed American playwright, best remembered for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1962). The 1966 film version starred Richard Burton and Liz Taylor.
Albee's 1971 play "All Over" is rightly acclaimed as one of his major works. Albee seems to have enjoyed a late-career revival with his play "Three Tall Women" which I recall was one of his more accessible and successful plays.
Okay, so he never wrote Bond.
... but Harry Saltzman did hire Albee to write a screenplay based on the life of Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Tony Richardson, with whom Saltzman had previously worked, was hired to direct. Saltzman was not pleased with the script: he called it amateurish, claiming it had too many silent scenes. Saltzman shut down production in the summer of 1970, weeks before the cameras were to start rolling. Instead he plunked the production money into Technicolor shares. Talk about throwing good money after bad. This, as we all know - or should know - was the beginning of the end for Saltzman. Others claim that Saltzman had overextended himself and did not have the funds to make the film, despite allegedly having already spent one million dollars on it - in today's funds that's 6.17 million dollars. It was around this time Saltzman got into legal trouble with his ill-fated science-fiction musical "Toomorrow" starring Olivia Newton-John long before she became famous. Apparently Saltzman had not paid cast or crew. So director Val Guest got an injunction stopping the film from being shown.
We all know that actor-playwright Noel Coward and Ian Fleming were close friends and Jamaican neighbors. Edward Albee and Coward were casual acquaintances. Albee greatly admired Coward's plays, 'tho Coward was mixed about Albee's - he thought them maddening: so nearly good but so bloody pretentious. Not at all offended, Albee took Coward's criticisms in good humor.
At Carnegie Hall on December 1, 1999, "the cream" of the stage and cabaret world gathered to celebrate actor-playwright Noel Coward's life and works. Albee told the audience that Noel Coward resembled "James Bond's gay uncle."
That's the great thing about Bond. It always leads somewhere interesting. Never mind "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." How about "Two Degrees of James Bond"?
