JAMES BOND
NEWS

Undoubtedly actor Barry Nelson’s major claim to world fame was that he was the first actor to bring Ian Fleming’s James Bond character to life on screen in the 1954 American TV production of Casino Royale. While his portrayal as ‘card-sense Jimmy Bond’ (Yes, honest!) was likeable and efficient, this original TV production hardly set the world on fire, but luckily did no harm to Nelson’s long and continuing workmanlike career in theatre, TV and cinema.

Born in San Francisco on April 16th 1917 as Robert Neilson, he would eventually settle in New York, where much of his theatrical work took place. Originally signed by MGM in 1941, Barry Nelson featured in secondary roles in Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), Dr. Kildare’s Victory (1942) and Johnny Eager (1942), before graduating into lead roles in A Yank on the Burma Road (1942).

At the time Barry Nelson starred in the 1954 CBS-TV adaptation of Casino Royale, he was also appearing the in the popular weekly sitcom My Favorite Husband opposite Joan Caulfield. The show had originated on radio in 1948 starring Lucille Ball, and later evolved into the groundbreaking television sitcom I Love Lucy (1951-57). CBS brought My Favorite Husband to television in 1953, starring Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson as Liz and George Cooper. The CBS television version ran for two-and-a-half seasons from September 1953 until December 1955. Re-runs of the series were broadcast during the summer of 1957.

Nelson had made his Broadway debut in 1943 in the Moss Hart play, Winged Victory. Theatre would call him back again and again after World War II, and in August 1956 he appeared with great success on the London Stage heading an all-English cast as ‘simple backwoods boy’ Will Stockdale in Ira Levin’s play, No Time For Sergeants. One reviewer wrote: “Barry Nelson was unknown in London until one night last August when he walked out on to the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre as that loveable simpleton of a new recruit who dominates the plot of ‘No Time For Sergeants’. With his quiet charm and complete mastery of the soft answer, Mr Nelson captivated the town overnight and it will be a long time before he is allowed to go back to Broadway.”

Unfortunately Barry Nelson lost out to Andy Griffiths (who uncannily closely resembled Nelson) in the Broadway production and Mervyn LeRoy’s 1958 film version from Mac Hyman’s novel, as he would also do with Walter Matthau in the film version of Cactus Flower. Other Fifties’ theatrical success on Broadway for Nelson included The Rat Race and The Moon Is Blue, and he would return for further theatrical successes in the Sixties and the Seventies in Seascape, Mary Mary, and Cactus Flower.

In 1978 his role in The Act, together with Liza Minnelli, earned him a Tony nomination. Barry Nelson's final film role was as hotel manager Stuart Ullman, in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).

Having retired from acting in the early Nineties, in recent years Barry Nelson and his second wife Nansilee Hoy spent their time travelling and collecting antiques for their homes in New York and France. Nelson is survived by his wife Nansi. He had no children.

The 1954 live television production of Casino Royale was broadcast on October 21, 1954 as the third episode in the first season of CLIMAX! - an American anthology series that aired on CBS from 1954 to 1958. Long thought to be lost, Casino Royale surfaced from obscurity in 1981 when film & TV historian Jim Schoenberger discovered an old kinescope recording of the production in Chicago. A handful of publicity photographs were taken during the rehearsals for Casino Royale, and used to promote the show on its original broadcast.

The production was generally well-reviewed after the live broadcast - with George Tashman of the Richmond Independent in California commenting in his “Clickin’ the channels” column:

“Boy oh boy oh boy! I hope the kiddies were safely tucked in their beds by 8:30pm. Thursday night. It they weren't, chances are that they had a tough time getting to sleep if they watched ‘Casino Royale’ on the CBS-TV show Climax! I have never seen on television such gruesome bits of torture, shooting and dying as exhibited by Barry Nelson, Linda Christian and Peter Lorre. I have also never seen, for as sustained a period of time on television, a gown as low cut as that Miss Christian was wearing, if that was the word the covers it. ('Smattafact, the word would keep her from getting a cold much better than that dress did. Huh? Complaining? Who's complaining?)”

The review went on to highlight to torture scene:

“...But the business of Mr. Lorre pulling out Mr. Nelson's toenails, on-by-one, was a little rough for TV audiences, I thought.

Technically, after the first act, Climax! did all right. But there was trouble keeping the microphone on the actors in a couple of scenes, and the lighting, in one rather important scene, kept the mike's shadow on the wall. Once that was cleared up, the show moved smoothly.

You may remember that in the opening program of this series a corpse got up and walked off, in full view of the cameras. In the second show, a ghostly voice, off-stage, was heard to exhort the actors to speed things up by saying, loudly, ‘Faster, faster’...”

Casino Royale (1954) FACT FILE