In Memoriam of British actor Robert Shaw (1927-1978)

By: Steven Jay Rubin

Published:
2020-08-28

The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia presents This Day in James Bond Movie History. On this day in 1978, we lost one of the great actors of all time - Robert Shaw, who was only 51. In From Russia with Love (1963), based on the best of all of Ian Fleming's novels, Shaw portrayed the seemingly unstoppable SPECTRE assassin Donald Grant (I don't think his friends called him Don).

Assigned to murder 007 (Sean Connery) in a train compartment on the Orient Express, Grant succeeds in disarming Bond and keeps a silenced automatic trained on him, while in typical Bond villain mode, he explains how they've outwitted the great 007. He keeps calling him "Old Man," and when Bond asks him, "What lunatic asylum did they get you out of?," Grant leans over and slaps him hard across the face. It truly looks like the end of Bond. The only thing separating him from certain death is Grant's greed and a trick brief case supplied by Q Branch.

The clip with Robert Shaw as Grant and Sean Connery as 007 in From Russia with Love

Everyone remembers Grant as Quint the shark fisherman in Jaws (1975), but Shaw's filmography was much deeper than that. One of my personal favorites is his Mr. Blue in director Joseph Sargent's terrific 70s crime drama The Taking of Pelham 123. Great memories of a wonderful actor and an ace in the deck of the James Bond series.
Copyright © 2020 Steven Jay Rubin. All rights reserved.

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In Memoriam of British actor Robert Shaw (1927-1978)

The clip with Robert Shaw as Grant and Sean Connery as 007 in From Russia with Love

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