What makes a memorable Bond henchman? Screen presence? A sense of threat? Distinctive physical characteristics? Popularity with audiences? In many ways, the late actor Richard Kiel, who died aged 74 on September 10, 2014, in California, embodied all those features and more. He was certainly hugely popular with cinemagoers, something EON producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli was quick to realize and make use of.
Richard, of course, played the very tall steel-toothed henchman ‘Jaws’ in two James Bond movies, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979), and also reprised the role in some 007 videogames. In Spy Richard had some classic scenes, where ‘Jaws’ seemed genuinely menacing and almost superhuman in his ability to survive threats to his life. In Moonraker, on the other hand, his reprisal of ‘Jaws’ was treated in a more lighthearted fashion, but he could still scare the living daylights out of viewers. In fact, the latter movie saw ‘Jaws’ desert his employer, Sir Hugo Drax, and switch sides, much to Bond’s relief and to the delight of Richard’s fans.
The JBIFC takes the opportunity to look back briefly on the career and impact of ‘Jaws’, in (00)7 bite-sized points.
007 and Counting…
001: Richard Kiel was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939, and made his screen debut in 1960 in an episode of the TV series Laramie. In between acting jobs in the early 1960s, he took jobs as a bouncer, a cemetery plot salesman, and even as a maths tutor at night classes. Given his unusual height, but dedication to his job, many of his students never forgot their tutor.
002: Life was pretty tough, but Richard persevered with his acting career, and continued to appear in various TV programmes in the 1960s, including an episode of The Man From UNCLE. His casting as ‘Jaws’ for Roger Moore’s third James Bond movie, however, brought the 7ft 2inch actor to worldwide fame (he was actually 7ft one-and-a-half inches, but he told people he was 7ft 2inches ‘because it was easier to remember’).
003: Production on The Spy Who Loved Me started in 1976, and was Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli’s first film as solo producer. Indeed, the producer was under considerable pressure to prove to the world that the Bond movies were alive and kicking, and Cubby was very keen to cast very memorable support roles for the main actors. One key role was ‘Jaws’, the enforcer and key assassin for Karl Stromberg, the main villain. The other henchman was Sandor, who would work alongside ‘Jaws’. As many keen Bond fans will know, Sandor was played by Milton Reid, a tough-looking former wrestler who had previously had a small role as a guard in Dr. No. The story behind Kiel’s casting is that an assistant had seen Richard Kiel in an episode of the American TV series The Barbary Coast and suggested him for the role of ‘Jaws’.
004: Marketing a new 007 adventure in an exciting and imaginative way, including well ahead of the movie’s release, is crucial today, and was equally important back in the 1970s. A good insight into this came via a TV series made with the UK’s ‘Open University’, which gave Bond enthusiasts some fascinating background on the creation, production and marketing of Spy. Early advanced publicity for Spy, skilfully put together while the movie was still in production, saw the release to newspapers of an intriguing (and now iconic) black-and-white still of the main villain, Karl Stromberg (played by Curd Jurgens) sitting in the foreground, with Sandor and Jaws standing either side of him, just behind. This teased Bond aficonados in exactly the right way, creating a real sense of anticipation about what was in store after what had seemed like a longer gap than usual since the last 007 adventure. This particular still ws soon shared by media outlets right around the globe, much to the delight of the studio.
005: Realising how popular the role of ‘Jaws’ was with test audiences for the movie, and sensing that the film was becoming very special indeed (it remained the late Sir Roger’s Moore’s favourite 007 movie), Bond producer ‘Cubby’ Broccoli decided that, instead of dying in an inferno or being killed by a shark, ‘Jaws’ should be seen swimming away in the final scenes of the movie. Broccoli said later that he liked the character played by Richard so much that ‘I wanted him to survive the shark so that we could use him in another Bond’. Although director Lewis Gilbert was not keen on the idea of a man biting a shark and surviving, Broccoli told him: ‘Man bites dog, Jaws bites shark. It’s perfect!’
006: Richard Kiel returned as ‘Jaws’ in Moonraker (1979). He was there from the beginning, playing a key role in the stunning pre-credits sequence where Roger’s 007 gets pushed out of a charter jet plane with no parachute, leading to a spectacular skydive which culminates in a dramatic mid-air tussle between Bond and ‘Jaws’ for a single parachute. However, this breathtaking stunt sequence was undermined in the eyes of the critics by having ‘Jaws’ fall into a circus tent roof. This was an early indication of how the character of ‘Jaws’ tended to be treated in the rest of the movie – as a figure of slapstick fun. The genuine sense of menace that had defined ‘Jaws’ in Spy had been radically watered down, which was a real pity.
007: The late Sir Roger Moore, looking back on The Spy Who Loved Me in his 2008 memoirs My Word Is My Bond, recalled of Richard Kiel and his role as ‘Jaws’: ‘I can’t think of two more different characters – Richard is so kind, so gentle and indeed an accomplished writer as well as an actor, whereas Jaws is, well, a hired killer without much soul. Jaws did have a dry sense of humour, thanks to the little nuances Richard gave him’. Director Lewis Gilbert made a similar observation in his own memoirs, All My Flashbacks (2010), where he commented that, although Richard played a merciless killer in Spy, he ‘had the sweetest of natures in real life’.
Did You Know?
Richard published his memoirs in 2002, entitled Making It Big in the Movies, and he loved chatting to fans at film conventions and fairs around the world. One story that he would love to share concerned his steel teeth – they were extremely uncomfortable to wear, and he had to remove them after every take.
Richard Kiel and his menacing steel teeth.