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By Root 452 0

the experts for some emergency coaching, to make me look as if I knew what I was doing . . . Now, of course, it’s as much part of my life as it is of everyone’s – and I couldn’t do without it! A lot of the shooting was done out on the ice floes and, although the temperature never reached more than about three degrees, the ice was cracking under our feet and beginning to melt. Standing in three inches of water was a really miserable experience – and I got a sense of the potential danger we were in when our generator truck began sinking and had to be driven off the ice. It was followed by the catering lorry, which was a very serious business. So with hand-held battery-powered lights, and no lunch, we were thoroughly fed up.

There were other problems with the extreme cold, too. I found close-ups very hard because my face had literally frozen. So Harry Palmer’s expression was not so much wooden as completely glacial! And in temperatures like this, the camera slowed right down – and then fogged up the minute we had to do an inside shot. Some of the scenes were filmed in the Helsinki botanical gardens, which were of course much warmer to preserve the plants, and there was a lot of hanging about waiting for the camera lenses to de-mist.

My head was warm, at least, and without my beautiful sable fur hat I wouldn’t have survived. The first time I put it on, a Finnish journalist was standing nearby and said – with a completely straight face – ‘You know, you bear a remarkable resemblance to Anita Ekberg.’ Anita Ekberg – me? I stole a glance at myself every time I passed a mirror, but I couldn’t quite see what she was getting at. Anita Ekberg or not, the hat looked pretty good on screen and I became very fond of it and took it home afterwards to join all the hats from my other films, that I had amassed in my bedroom. The only one missing from the collection then – the rest of it all disappeared long ago – was my pith helmet from Zulu. I’m sorry not to have kept that, but it was big and would have been a bit heavy to carry home from filming in South Africa. God knows who did end up with that helmet. When Berman’s, the London theatrical and film costumiers, put the uniform on display in their window the whole lot was smash-and-grabbed.

I really enjoyed playing Harry Palmer in the three movies. In some ways I felt a certain affinity with the way his character develops during the course of them. In The Ipcress File he was a complete innocent, just as I had been in the film business. By Funeral in Berlin we had both learned a lot more. And by the time we got to Billion Dollar Brain I felt that both Harry and I had become pretty hardened by our experiences. In many ways, playing Harry Palmer required a certain frame of mind, rather than straight-out dramatic acting. He’s cool all right, but he has to be. Being a spy is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job and he can never afford to relax.

Well, after Billion Dollar Brain I felt I probably could afford to relax and after we had left Finland for the distinctly milder climate of England to finish the movie, I shot off to Paris for a bit of fun. I had a bit part in Shirley Maclaine’s new film, Woman Times Seven, and I was only too happy to do it in return for everything Shirley had done for me in Hollywood. Anita Ekberg was appearing with Shirley, so I also got a chance to look at her a bit more closely, which was nothing but a pleasure, although I still couldn’t spot much resemblance.

Thoroughly defrosted by Paris, I then went off to Spain to do the first of a two-picture deal for Twentieth Century Fox. Deadfall was directed by my old friend Bryan Forbes and although the movie didn’t turn out as well as we’d hoped, it was a happy time. As soon as we’d finished filming in London I went straight back to Spain, this time for a Harry Salzman production, Play Dirty. I had signed to do this one not just because of Harry, but also because it was to be directed by the great French film director, René Clément. Unfortunately as soon as I’d put my name on the dotted line, Clément walked out after a huge row