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THE blond Bond era began in style last night when the world’s most successful film franchise took over Leicester Square for the world premiere of Casino Royale.
The charity gala boasted a glittering guest list, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh rubbing shoulders with Bond girls, a Bond villain and a Bond songstress — Dame Shirley Bassey, who sang the theme songs to Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker.
For Daniel Craig, the British actor whose casting in the role provoked a storm of criticism from Bond purists, the night marked a personal triumph.
Once derided as a pasty, ugly wimp with none of the debonair charm required for the part, he arrived last night at the Odeon Leicester Square buoyed by rapturous reviews.
The positive critical reception for his performance appears to have all but stamped out the bitter campaign against him, which peaked with the creation of danielcraigisnotbond.com, a website calling on fans to boycott the film.
Craig looked stirred but not at all shaken by his reception from fans who had camped out since early yesterday morning. They saw him arrive like his on-screen character, dressed to kill, in a bespoke single-breasted three-piece Dunhill suit.
Dismissing the suggestion that he had sought to answer his critics with his performance, he said: “I just set out to make a good movie. It’s got everything you need for a Bond movie and much more.”
He added that his predecessor in the role has been a valuable source of support. “Pierce [Brosnan] has been fantastic. He just said ‘go for it’.”
Whatever the colour of his hair, Craig shares at least one trait with 007. Asked how he celebrated winning the part, he said: “I quickly mixed myself a very large vodka martini.”
Craig, 38, was born in Chester and raised in Liverpool. He studied drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and, after brief appearances in TV series including Boon and Heartbeat, he made his breakthrough in the TV series Our Friends in the North.
In recent years he has concentrated on films, including Road to Perdition, Munich, Sylvia and Layer Cake.
Casino Royale is loosely based on Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, published in 1953, but has been updated to reflect contemporary preoccupations, terrorists supplanting the Soviet Union as the main enemy.
It also marks a return to the grittier Bond envisaged by Fleming, and a move away from the increasing reliance on dazzling special effects and gimmicks in recent films.
The 21st instalment of the Bond series has been one of the most controversial but, judging by the devotion of fans in Leicester Square, the controversy will prove as short-lived as many of Bond’s girlfriends.
Joe Storey, 41, a social worker from Thurrock in Essex, queued from 10 o’clock yesterday morning for a glimpse of the cast. Clutching a sign proclaiming “Blond but still Bond. Good luck Daniel, your true fans support you,” he said that nobody he had met yesterday opposed Craig’s casting.
He said: “The anti-Daniel Craig people wouldn’t dare turn up today.”
Mark Witherspoon, 37, a graphic designer from Sevenoaks in Kent, said he had seen the film at a preview screening last week. “It’s the real Fleming Bond at last. It’s got a good story and some fantastic, tense, action sequences. Daniel Craig is excellent. He looks like he really could kill someone, and you don’t notice his hair.”
On the internet, too, Daniel Craig is triumphant. One correspondent on the fan website commanderbond.net commented: “He’s a fine actor and I think he’s going to be even better than Sean Connery and Roger Moore put together.”
However, a contributor to another fan site, absolutelyjamesbond, pointed out that, no matter how good Craig might prove to be in the role, he may never be able to surpass Connery’s defining performance in many fans’ eyes.
“From all the reviews, I think DC will be the best Bond since Connery, but Craig is interpreting a character that was formed by Connery. All the others have had to follow that template, and whoever follows Craig will have to as well.
Among the stars joining the cast and the royal party at the 60th royal film performance last night were former Bond girls Maryam D’Abo and Michelle Yeoh, ex-Bond villain Sean Bean, Paris Hilton, Keira Knightley and Elton John.
Three Leicester Square cinemas showed the film, with all funds raised going to the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund, the charity of the film and television industries.
THE REVIEWS
THE TIMES
Every decade gets the Bond it deserves and we are living in some pretty scary times. Craig is up there with the best: he combines Sean Connery’s athleticism and cocksure swagger with Timothy Dalton’s thrilling undercurrent of stone cold cruelty
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Craig’s Bond has been rebooted as a man not quite secure within his own tuxedo and the result is a nervier character. It could have been off-puttingly dark but Craig holds the screen: When this Bond laughs there is a sense of relief
THE OBSERVER
By the end of a curiously back-to-front film, when he finally gets his theme tune and introduces himself — “Bond. James Bond” — he, like the creaky franchise itself, seems profoundly unsure whether he is coming or going
THE SUNDAY TIMES
It has been stripped of exotic locations, extravagant gadgetry, bikinied beauties and larger-than-life villains. So what's left? Not much.
DAILY MIRROR
Daniel Craig is brilliant, oozing the kind of edgy menace that recalls Sean Connery at his best. It’s everything that makes Bond Britain’s finest cinematic export — slick, fast-moving and pulse-poundingly exciting. The best since GoldenEye
THE GUARDIAN
This is not exactly back-to-basics Bond. The franchise is still apparently stuck with branding and concealed advertising, as well as the naff euro-trash hotels, with receptionists who get their plug in — “Welcome to the Hotel Splendide!” — as plonkingly as they used to greet the winning couples on TV’s Blind Date in the 1980s.
THE LEGACY
The latest Bond car is the Aston Martin DBS, following in the tracks of the famous Aston Martin DB5 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger
