Sir Sean Connery denies links to GoldenEye property

Following yesterday's story, speculation that the original screen Bond, Sir Sean Connery, has expressed interest in one of its villas is unfounded, the actor said today.

But if James Bond is not "coming home", as some reports put it, plenty of real-life celebrities are converging on Goldeneye, now owned by the music entrepreneur Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records - reports The Scotsman.

Perched on the lush northern coast of Jamaica, Goldeneye, the birthplace of the world's most famous fictional secret agent, once gave Ian Fleming respite from English winters and a tempestuous life. The secluded Jamaican hideaway to which he retreated to write his Bond novels, and where he entertained glamorous guests such as Noel Coward, Errol Flynn and Katharine Hepburn, is being converted, at a cost of $50 million (�27.1 million), into an exclusive holiday resort.

Currently run as an exclusive hideaway hotel and patronised by the likes of supermodel Naomi Campbell and "Caribbean pirate" Johnny Depp, the estate, in the coastal village of Oracabessa, is about to be made over by Blackwell into a deluxe resort village, its designer lagoonside villas and beach cottages nestling among private beaches, caves and tropical forest.

While numerous celebrities who already relax at the estate's "Fleming House" have expressed an interest, Sir Sean Connery said yesterday that while he wished the venture well, he himself would not be buying one of the properties.

"I wish Chris every success with it," says the 75-year-old actor, who lives in the Bahamas. "He was a gofer on Dr No and he's still a friend of mine.

"I was only at Goldeneye to shoot Dr No [in 1961] and I haven't been back since. But my wife and I had dinner the other day with Chris and his mother, and he told me he was going ahead with it."

Blackwell, who grew up in Jamaica, has known Goldeneye since his childhood visits. His mother, Blanche Blackwell, reportedly had an affair with Fleming, who later recommended Chris as a location scout when the first Bond film, Dr No, was being made in Jamaica.

Blackwell bought the estate, with its mile of idyllic coastline, in 1977, after one of the brightest stars of his Island label, Bob Marley, considered buying it but dismissed it at the last minute as being "too posh". Today, his Island Outpost Group owns a portfolio of boutique hotels and exclusive resorts in the Caribbean which, apart from Goldeneye, includes Strawberry Hill in Jamaica's Blue Mountains, Jake's, on the island's Treasure Beach, and Pink Sands in the Bahamas.

According to a spokeswoman for Island Outpost, work on the new development will start this summer and should be completed by the end of next year. The estate will sprout some 80 brand-new properties, ranging from one-bedroom "cove huts", with a starting price of �320,000, to lagoon villas overlooking the Caribbean, which will command more than �1.3 million.

Prices are yet to be confirmed for 36 "Bond Suites", due to be completed by the winter of 2008. and the resort will also feature the Caribbean's first seawater spa.

Aiming at what they describe as "a select international clientele", the developers - marketing the project, naturally, as "a licence to chill" - are already offering preview tours there, starting at �1,115 for a three-night stay.

"Chris Blackwell is good friends with a lot of people," adds the Island Outpost spokeswoman, "and there is certainly an interesting mix of buyers looking into the Goldeneye cottages and villas.

"The interiors will be stunning: they've been designed by Barbara Hulanicki of Biba fame [the legendary London boutique], where some of the 1970s Bond girls bought their outfits."

It was in the late 1940s that Commander Ian Lancaster Fleming, not long out of his wartime job with naval intelligence, built Goldeneye on its secluded site and managed to negotiate a deal with his then employers at the Sunday Times that allowed him two months off in the year, when he could retreat to his Jamaican haven. And it was there, in 1952, having recently married Lady Ann Rothermere (former wife of the newspaper tycoon Lord Rothermere) that he typed out a novel about a coldly efficient but stylish secret agent.

"It was a dark, clean-cut face, with a three-inch scar showing whitely down the sunburned skin of the right cheek. The eyes were wide and level under the straight, rather long black brows. The hair was black, parted on the left, and carelessly brushed so that a thick black comma fell down over the right eyebrow. The longish straight nose ran down to a short upper lip below which was a wide and finely drawn but cruel mouth..."

Casino Royale, the first 007 novel, was published the following year. A dozen more, plus two short story collections, would appear between then and the mid-1960s.

While Fleming's wartime intelligence work had been done from behind a desk, he led an otherwise eventful and hedonistic life, treasure-hunting in the Caribbean and the Seychelles, smoking too many of his Morland Specials, drinking too much and generally indulging in the kind of expensive tastes which are reflected in his stories.

From Bond's vodka martinis, "shake, not stirred", to the exquisite taste of stone crabs served with melted butter, Fleming, who died on a Kent golf course in 1964, went all out to stimulate even the reader's taste buds.

However, his own cooking wasn't always up to the standards he set in his fiction. His neighbour and frequent guest at Goldeneye, Noel Coward, once said of his host's ineptitude in the kitchen: "Ian Fleming's cooking always tasted to me like armpits. This is odd when you consider the fine cuisine served up in the Bond books."

Such complaints are unlikely to be levelled at the cuisine currently served at Goldeneye in its current role as an exclusive hotel, still boasting Fleming's bulletwood desk and with its own private beach .

Naomi Campbell favours one of the estate villas, Johnny Depp is another visitor, while other guests have included Bono, Kate Moss and Sting (who supposedly wrote his massive 1983 hit Every Breath You Take there).

What Ian Fleming would have thought of the changes being planned for his Jamaican haven can only be speculated. So far as the man who first played his hero on screen is concerned, however, a "Bond Suite" may sound a little too much like a busman's holiday.

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