Now, I'll tell you something that might interest you. Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming ever wrote. And he couldn't get anybody to touch it, to publish it - he couldn't do anything about it at all. Nobody wanted to know.

The film was a remake of an earlier picture called Ask a Policeman released in 1939 which Guest himself had co-written. He married the actress Yolande Donlan in 1954. He went on to direct produce and script a huge number of films over the following forty years with perhaps his best known work being on the first two Hammer Films Quatermass science-fiction adaptations in the 1950s: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957).