The first Bond girl Eunice Gayson kicks off Bond 50 Blu-Ray tour

The first Bond girl Eunice Gayson kicked off the Bond 50 Blu-Ray tour of the UK on Monday at Eilean Donan Castle in Wester Ross, in the Scottish Highlands, which stood in as a temporary MI6 headquarters in the 1999 film "The World Is Not Enough".

She set a digital timer on a golden briefcase containing the first copy of Bond 50 Blu-ray at 10:07am before traveling in an Aston Martin DBS to Lochgilphead in Argyll where scenes in "From Russia With Love" were filmed.



Gayson said: "It's been a wonderful experience right from the word go. First of all I was in a long-running show playing the lead in the Sound of Music, and when you're in a long-running show the one thing you long to do is something different during the run. So when Terence Young the director rang me up I was thrilled. I had worked with him before and he said 'for some reason you always bring me luck'.

"I was supposed to play the original Miss Moneypenny but of course I couldn't because of the show. When I was offered it I thought 'oh no'. So then they wrote the little part of Sylvia Trench. But I had the honour then on the first day's shoot of the first film Dr No of asking (Bond) to identify who he was. And of course his reply was 'the name's Bond, James Bond'. So I had that lovely scene with Sean that I wouldn't have had if I was Miss Moneypenny."

Sean Connery was nervous on their first day shooting and accidentally said the line "the name's Bond, James Connery", Gayson said.

"It was a big turning point in Sean's life, in anyone's life. We all knew he would make it big one day but he, I think, didn't know that until he made a big success. We didn't know of course it was going to be the massive success that it has been," she said.

"In my opinion, that first Dr No saved the British film industry because it was really rather in the doldrums. And they made so much money with that, they realised 'hey, we could have an industry again'. It was an exciting time."

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