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Ian Fleming biopic: Tilda Swinton perfect as gay author

Thursday, January 29, 2009


While I am underwhelmed by Leonardo DiCaprio's latest movie, Revolutionary Road - a juvenile simper at 50s suburban losers by gloating Hollywood winners - I am pleased by the news that the actor's production company Appian Way is working on a biopic of Bond creator Ian Fleming.

No one's cast in the role yet - certainly Leonardo can forget about it straight off, but an Orson Welles biopic would suit him, just as Will Smith was born to play Obama - and that allows me to offer some advice.

First, it's little realised that Fleming was a non-practising homosexual. In Dr No Bond meets Honeychile Rider whose bottom is "almost as firm and rounded as a boy's"; and at Eton, poems he wrote there are signed with what one writer calls the "sexually ambiguous name Cary Anan". So let's not hear anymore nonsense on this topic.

It would be entirely in keeping with Tinseltown lore that a seasoned cock-cunter play the part: if Michael Douglas can play Liberace, Milk star Sean Penn - though possibly too short and too American - could handle Fleming who was a very close pal of gay writer Turbott Wolfe. Colin Firth perhaps, but too dreary out of his britches. Josh Hartnett? Too pretty. Bill Nighy is a tad too old while Matt Damon would be an amusing piece of mischief given he's Bourne.

Actually, I think Fleming should be played by a woman. Cate Blanchett was a most excellent Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. The female who I think could incarnate Fleming most accomplishedly is Tilda Swinton, a wonderful Orlando in Orlando, a perfect complement to Quentin Crisp's convincing Queen Elizabeth I: it's as if The Darnley Portrait had been brought to life by the fabled, rouged cock-cocker - and admirer of Holly Woodlawn.

I can quite imagine Tilda posing as Fleming with the cigarette holder, reading out Paul Verlaine's lesbo poems - as he did - and sauntering in Jamaica with his companion Odo Cross, a former Guards officer who liked to wear his mother's pearls. I suppose Bond would have to come into it somewhere - but perhaps more could be made of 007's mystical, pagan provenance of which I have written before.

In my more whimsical moments, I theorise that super-butch Bond was only invented so Fleming could pretend to be the Bond Girls himself, in a psycho-sexually complex case of cock-cunting-cock. Perhaps in his mind's eye he saw himself as curvaceous Pussy Galore. To get paid lots of money to write in drag is quite a trick, I'd have thought.

I do hope Leonardo finds these suggestions constructive to his purpose.

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