BBC' FLEMING: Sordid Life of Ian Fleming

BBC miniseries ‘Fleming’ takes look at the sordid life of the creator of James Bond

By Rob Lowman, Los Angeles Daily News

Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond

What: Four-part miniseries about Ian Fleming, the man who invented James Bond, starring Dominic Cooper and Lara Pulver.

When: 10 p.m. the next four Wednesdays.

Where: BBC America.

Lara Pulver has the look of a Bond girl. The mystery, intelligence and cool glamour are all there, but she is hardly a girl. In the new BBC America miniseries “Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond,” the British actress plays the woman who in some ways was the archetype for all of 007’s females, Ann Fleming.

In 1939, when the story begins, Ian Fleming was an unsuccessful banker and stockbroker but still connected. He was from an upper-class family, with his most notable trait being a womanizer.

She was Ann O’Neill, married to Shane O’Neill, a childhood friend and a baron. They had two children, but it wasn’t much of a marriage. She was a restless spirit, hosted parties for the likes of Winston Churchill and was having an affair with Esmond Harmsworth, a viscount and owner of a powerful newspaper.

Despite all this, Ann and Ian began their own — torrid would be too tame a word — affair, though it would be some 13 years before they would marry.

Pulver says when she first read the script for the four-part miniseries, she remembers scrawling in pen: “Why?”

“ ‘Why is a woman like her getting involved with this man who treats women so disrespectfully?’ ” asked the actress.

Pulver says that after “Fleming’s” director, Mat Whitecross, sent her some of Ann’s diaries she began to piece together the character. Ann lost her mother at an early age and had been shown little affection growing up. Fleming had his own rocky relationships with his mother after his father died when he was young. Their relationship began to catch fire when World War II began.

Early on, Fleming (Dominic Cooper) is recruited into Naval Intelligence, where his imagination is put to good use, dreaming up spy missions, including creating a group of elite commandos to gather intelligence and overseeing various operations, including one called Golden Eye that sabotaged Nazi operations in Spain.

What Whitecross found fascinating about the project was that it didn’t attempt to be a straight biopic of the famed author.

“This was much more Fleming’s life through his character,” says the director, noting that Bond is “a very dark, kind of depressive, quite twisted character in ‘Casino Royale,’ ” the first novel in the series about the superspy.

“As to the factual elements of the miniseries, that depends on who’s writing what you’re reading about Ian Fleming,” Pulver says, “because you can read 40 different books about Fleming and they’ll come up with different stories. It’s a testament to him as a storyteller. He loved to embellish.”

The opening moments of “Fleming” find Ann and Ian swimming in the ocean near Goldeneye, the house the author had built in Jamaica and named after the WWII operation. (The 1995 film “GoldenEye” was not from a Fleming book, by the way.) Everything about the scene smacks of a Bond film: Pulver in a red eye-catching two-piece suit, Cooper a speargun in hand trailing her through the water and music that echoes the movie scores.

The couple did go spearfishing for their dinner when at Goldeneye, and it was there on their honeymoon that Fleming wrote “Casino Royale.”

“He’s a sadistic brute,” says Ann about Bond, after reading a bit of it.

“I thought that was your type,” Ian responds.

Indeed, their relationship, according to writings including Ann’s diaries, seem to thrive because of the literal bruisings they gave each other.

Pulver, who will be seen this summer in Doug Liman’s “Edge of Tomorrow,” a big-budget sci-fi film starring Tom Cruise, says the first time she met Cooper was at a table read, which she found unusual since “chemistry” tests between leads is fairly common these days.

“There was an instant respect and unspoken trust of each having each other’s backs, which is so vital when you’re depicting two very volatile people,” says Pulver about their meeting. “We felt free to become as vulnerable and as volatile as we had to.”

In one scene, Pulver got so much into character that she hurled a glass at Cooper even though it wasn’t in the script.

“Luckily, Dom was agile and ducked. Afterwards, I burst into tears and kept saying I was sorry,” she says, adding that everybody was kind about it.

“They had a kind of S-and-M relationship,” says Whitecross about the Flemings, “which was fascinating, because it’s — even now — quite shocking.”

In one scene Ian beats Ann with a belt as a prelude to sex.

On a lighter note, Pulver learned to swim underwater for the snorkeling scene, which was filmed in Majorca, Spain. Although she had been able to practice on the surface, the scene called for her to be 6 or 7 feet down, and she’s always had a fear of going underwater.

A stunt double would have been used if necessary, but the actress was determined to do it herself. So the night before, she called her partner, actor Raza Jaffrey (“Smash”), for advice. He had her fill the sink with water and practice putting her face in. The next morning when she got to the location, Pulver says the water looked “so amazing” that she had to try. So she swam on the surface and the stunt person pulled her down about 6 feet and gave her a push.

“I swam as far as I could. I couldn’t believe I could actually do it,” she says with a smile.

Perhaps, a little surprisingly, Pulver has lived in Los Angeles for five years now. She came out for the Mark Taper Forum production of the musical “Parade” after its London run at Donmar Warehouse. While here, she was cast in HBO’s “True Blood.”

“It’s one of the few true Los Angeles shows; so I got 18 months of living in L.A.,” she says.

She stayed ever since, although she has been racking up the miles traveling back to the United Kingdom for TV shows and movies such as “MI-5,” “Sherlock,” “Fleming” and Starz’s “Da Vinci’s Demons,” shot in Wales. Even “Edge of Tomorrow” was filmed in England.

Tonight she will be seen briefly in the second episode of “Sherlock” on PBS. On the show she plays Irene Adler, a dominatrix and the object of the famed private eye’s desire. (Since she is a character of high interest, she could be back in future seasons.) In “Da Vinci’s Demons,” which returns for a second season on March 22, Pulver plays Clarice Orsini, the powerful wife of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

If the Starz series puts the actress into the 15th century, “Fleming” put her into the World War II years. Pulver says Caroline Harris, the costume designer for the miniseries, became engrossed with the 1940s period.

“I had 30 hours of costume fittings, which is kind of unheard of,” says the actress. “I remember when Caroline was trying all these different clothes on me thinking, ‘Oh that color isn’t right for me,’ or ‘That isn’t a particularly good look for me.’ ”

But Pulver says those fittings helped her become Ann.

“Caroline really wanted the costumes to be memorable, like that canary yellow dress at the end of the first episode,” she says. “She wanted them to capture the spirit of the character. It was really influential, actually.”

If the character of Bond has always been something of an enigma, it’s because his creator was, and without Ann many think 007 would have never existed.

The couple kept up their affair — often quite openly — through Ann’s first marriage (her husband was killed in the war in 1944) and her second marriage to Harmsworth, who finally couldn’t take it anymore and divorced her.

Ian and Ann finally married in 1952, though life at Goldeneye proved hardly idyllic.

“I think when they finally become husband and wife the fireworks were over,” Pulver notes, “and what we don’t see in this miniseries is when the affairs in their marriage started.”

Bond's Creator Stripped Bare

Fleming begins his career with a job in Naval Intelligence, then goes on to full-scale espionage. He's found his way—gone from life as a wastrel, jealous of his successful brother, wary of his domineering mother—to work that sparks his passions. There's a war on. Intermittently, that is, at least as far as this series is concerned. In the judgment of the show's writers, apparently, the greater drama is to be found in a succession of torrid sex scenes—and they're not short—between Fleming and his various conquests. One escapade in a restaurant has him pursuing the married Ann O'Neil virtually to the door of the ladies' room. Life is already complicated for Ann, who is out with her lover, newspaper magnate Esmond Rothermere, while her husband is off serving in the military. And now Fleming, with whom she's besotted, is chasing her around the upstairs halls. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe is dropping bombs and hitting the place. Don't ask.

TV Review: ‘Fleming: The Man Who Would be Bond’

Shaken but not particularly stirring, “Fleming: The Man Who Would be Bond” is a better title than a miniseries — a fact-based story (albeit fudged, as the disclaimer notes) that never quite takes flight despite nifty touches, first-rate leads and its World War II backdrop. Granted, getting to know more about Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond, inevitably wasn’t going to rival 007’s fantastic exploits, but the author’s wartime work in Naval intelligence almost takes a back seat to his prolonged romancing of his eventual bride, complete with plenty of rough (if that’s the word for it) sex.

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