The Secret Agents

Stewart Terence Herbert Young (20 June 1915 – 7 September 1994) was a British film director best known for directing three films in the James Bond series, Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), and Thunderball (1965).

Born in Shanghai, China, he was public-school educated. Like the fictional James Bond, he read oriental history at St Catharine’s College in the University of Cambridge. As a tank commander during World War II, Young participated in Operation Market Garden in Arnhem, Netherlands.

Young began his film career as a screenwriter in British films of the 1940s, working, for example, on Dangerous Moonlight (1941). In 1946, he was a co-director with Brian Desmond Hurst of Theirs is the Glory, which recaptured the fighting around Arnhem bridge. Arnhem, coincidentally, was home to the adolescent Audrey Hepburn. During the filming of Young’s film, Wait Until Dark, Hepburn and Young would joke that he was shelling his favorite star without even knowing it. Young’s first sole credit as director (and also Christopher Lee’s film debut) was Corridor of Mirrors (1948), an acclaimed film made in France.

After directing a few English films, Young began directing several films for Irving Allen and Albert R. Broccoli’s Warwick Films in the 1950s, including The Red Beret with Alan Ladd. Young was also a story editor at Warwick. This association led to his being offered the directorship of the first two James Bond films.

“Terence Young WAS James Bond” wrote Robert Cotton. There is little doubt that Young fitted the profile of Bond – the erudite, sophisticated lady killer, dressed in Savile Row suits, always witty, well-versed in wine, and comfortable at home and abroad. Cotton commented, “As Lois Maxwell related in one of Connery’s many biographies, ‘Terence took Sean under his wing. He took him to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.’ Some of the cast remarked that Connery was simply doing a Terence Young impression, but Young and Connery knew they were on the right track.”

During the filming of From Russia with Love, Young and a photographer nearly drowned when their helicopter crashed into the sea while filming a key sequence. They were rescued by other members of the film crew. Young was back behind the camera thirty minutes after being rescued.

Young never made any films as popular as his mid sixties work that included The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders with husband and wife team Richard Johnson and Kim Novak, Thunderball and Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn.

He made many films in Europe, including The Poppy Is Also a Flower (1965), Triple Cross (1967) – a story of Eddie Chapman starring Christopher Plummer, Mayerling (1968), L’Arbre de Noel (US: The Christmas Tree aka When Wolves Cry) starring William Holden (1969), and several films with Charles Bronson including Red Sun, Cold Sweat and The Valachi Papers. In addition to directing, Young also cowrote the screenplay of Atout coeur à Tokyo pour O.S.S. 117.

According to Young, he was offered and turned down the direction of For Your Eyes Only and Never Say Never Again.

Young also replaced the original directors of The Klansman and The Jigsaw Man. He undertook Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline and Inchon (1981). Young was also the editor of The Long Days, a six hour Iraqi telenovela about the life of Saddam Hussein.

Young also directed Laurence Olivier in Inchon (1981) and The Jigsaw Man (1982). Olivier and Young had been friends since 1943 when Olivier had initially offered the direction of his film Henry V (1944) to Young, who declined.

His wife was the novelist Dorothea Bennett. He died of a heart attack at the age of 79 in Cannes. —Wikipedia