MICHAEL BILLINGTON – THE BOND THAT NEVER WAS

     He was 17, unemployed and spent most of his time driving around the streets of Ruislip and Rayners Lane on his white Triumph motorcycle trying to look like his idols and picking up numerous speeding tickets at the same time.

     It was these unpaid speeding tickets that led Michael into the acting profession. He went to his older sister for some money to pay the fines but she would only give him the money if he helped her out. The Amateur Dramatics group that she attended wanted some “bodies” to fill up the stage in a production of “No No Nanette”. Michael agreed, “I couldn’t sing, dance or act, but they gave me a role anyway so I just showed off a bit”. He went to study engineering in London but returned to acting and eventually thought it might be fun to “give it a go” professionally. Michael found some acting workshops and his career started from there. He started out with a job at The Windmill Theatre, which featured vaudeville-type acts, including playing straight man to Danny La Rue for a year!  He also appeared in the West End production of “Incident At Vichy” with Alec Guinness & Anthony Quayle & eventually worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. By the mid 1960’s he had acted in a number if stage productions but was desperate to become a film actor.

     Michael’s first real acting job was at the BBC in a twice-weekly 30 minute “soap” about life at Brentwich, a fictional Second Division football team in a series called “United” Filmed at the Victoria Ground, the home of Stoke City, but despite attracting audiences of 6 million, the series was viewed a disappointment by the BBC and it was cancelled after 147 episodes and all episodes were subsequently wiped and none survive today. Michael played the replacement goalkeeper with marital problems but he and his on screen wife’s contracts were not renewed and after 13 weeks they were released from the show. His performances between the sticks however prompted the football coach on the series to encourage Michael to take up goalkeeping as a profession but he wanted to stick to acting, if the offer had come nowadays with the multi-millionaire lifestyle footballers now enjoy, he might have made a different decision! So Michael received his first paycheck, he can’t remember what he spent it on “but I’m convinced I had a damn good time with it”. It was around this time that he was first asked for his autograph, during a Charity Football Match in which the cast of “United” played an old International XI team. Children surrounded him at the interval asking for his autograph and then asking “Who Is It?” not really knowing who he was.

     1969 brought an appearance in a TV production of Alfred The Great and in several episodes of the Second Series of Hadleigh starring Gerald Harper. Then while attending the Cannes Film Festival, Michael called his London flat to discover that Sylvia Anderson had personally called looking for him. She wanted to see him about a regular role in a new TV series called U.F.O. so he returned to England and filmed a screen test for the role of Colonel Paul Foster.

     The screen test however didn’t go without its mishaps. “I remember the director suggesting that I should take a brief pause before I entered Straker’s office through the automatic doors.” recalled Michael, “I did this but before I had the chance to enter the office the stagehand opening the doors closed them, thinking I was inside, which of course I wasn’t. Everyone collapsed into fits of hysteria. This relaxed us all a bit and the scene went as well as could be expected”. Although about 5 other actors tested for the part, Michael felt that Sylvia strongly favoured him for the role. His character was an immediate success, particularly with the female audience and he found himself in his first regular TV role. Also appearing in the series were regular cast members George Sewell, Gabrielle Drake & Wanda Ventham. 26 episodes were made of the series before it was replaced by Space: 1999.  

     Michael enjoyed working on the series, particularly with Ed Bishop, whom he had nothing but the highest admiration and respect for. In 1996 there was an unsuccessful attempt to revive the series but despite the project receiving Gerry Anderson’s blessing and that Ed Bishop stated he was interested in reprising the Straker role, it came to nothing. When asked if UFO still stands up as a programme 30 years on, Michael felt that the series was a milestone in science fiction and without it, films like Star Wars and the like would have never been made. He thought that his Colonel Foster role was the forerunner to the Han Solo part in Star Wars and is happy to be remembered as UFO’s “Action Man”.

     Michael will forever be remembered not only for the roles he played, but also for the role he didn’t play – James Bond.

     Although he wasn’t a big fan of the Bond franchise, he would screen test for the role of 007 more than any other actor, without success. His first involvement in the Bond role was when Bud Ornstein, then head of Production at United Artists in Europe, saw Michael in a late night theatre doing stand up and asked him to meet him at the U.A. offices. Michael did a photo shoot and the photographs were shown to Harry Saltzman but although Michael’s agent had an “insider” it came to nothing and the role was given to George Lazenby. While Michael was working on UFO, Harry Saltzman, then co-producer of the Bond films, contacted Gerry & Sylvia Anderson and looked at footage from UFO to see if he was suitable to replace Connery who had just made “Diamonds Are Forever”, in “Moonraker", which was to be the next Bond film (as it turned out “Live and Let Die” was made next, “Moonraker” didn’t reach the screens until 1979), but again nothing came of it.

     A couple of Bond movies went by until Producer Cubby Broccoli rang and offered him a part in “The Spy Who Loved Me” as Sergei, Barbara Bach’s lover and is ironically killed by James Bond before the opening credits. Michael knew that taking the role might hinder his chances of playing Bond at a later date but eventually decided “Why Not? Getting paid for couple of weeks to ski in San Moritz, What did I have to lose?” Willie Bogner, a successful skier in the 1950’s, did most of the work on the opening scene, skiing backwards with a camera between his legs pointing behind him. Nevertheless, the opening scene was shot in record time and “Spy” was a great success.