How A Russian Thief Bought the Rights to ‘Casino Royale’ and Turned James Bond into a Woman
In 1955, flamboyant Russian actor and director Gregory Ratoff was in Cairo, Egypt, acting and directing a film entitled The Royal Bed, which was about King Farouk.
The Italian producers of the film were unable to get into Egypt, and everyone was stealing money from them. Ratoff stole 10,000 pounds in cash, and hoped to escape at Cairo Airport. He got on his knees and prayed to God:
“As God is my witness, if I get through with this cash, I’m going to buy a TIME magazine when we land in Athens and use the money to purchase the film rights to the first book I read a review of.”
That book turned out to be Casino Royale, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel.
The above story was recounted by screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr.
Ratoff hired Semple Jr. to write the screenplay for Casino Royale. Both Ratoff and Semple Jr., however, made the unbelievable decision to make James Bond a woman.
“Frankly, we thought he was kind of unbelievable and as I recall, even kind of stupid,” Semple Jr. told Variety. “So Gregory thought the solution was to make Bond a woman, ‘Jane Bond’ if you will, and he even had a plan to cast Susan Hayward in the role.”
Ratoff had borrowed money from then-head of 20th Century Fox Darryl Zanuck and long-time friend and producer Charles Feldman to pay Fleming $6,000 for the film rights. (Fleming had already made $1,000 for a TV adaptation of James Bond for the TV show Climax in 1954.)
Semple Jr traveled the world with Ratoff gambling in casinos, basically living the life of James Bond. He did all the work, while Ratoff enjoyed the lifestyle.
“He was too old-fashioned to work, so I would sit at the typewriter for four or five hours a day in whatever hotel we were staying in, and just turn out pages and pages of scenes. I probably wrote several scripts during a year of traveling throughout Europe.”
Hayward, of course, never played the part. She went on to win an Oscar for playing death row inmate Barbara Graham in 1958’s I Want to Live! and garner another four Oscar nominations.
Despite Ratto’s efforts, he was never able to secure the funding necessary to produce the film before he passed away from leukemia on December 14, 1960.
After his death, Ratoff’s friend and agent Feldman purchased the film rights from Ratoff’s widow. During this time, Fleming sold the rights to the rest of his James Bond novels—excluding Thunderball—to producer Harry Saltzman.
Saltzman joined forces with Albert R. Broccoli to make the Bond films, while Feldman turned Casino Royale into a Bond parody in 1967.
Semple Jr., who thought James Bond was stupid, went on to write Sean Connery’s return as 007 in 1983’s Never Say Never Again.
