#pierce-brosnan

#pierce-brosnan

"[Bias] is that thing that stops you being regarded as a person and makes you something smaller. With my accent, I've had that experience where I'm suddenly no longer a person with infinite possibilities and potential - I am 'that Scottish person'. I'm reduced to a noise that comes out of my mouth."

It's a great story where Conan was 40 years king...and he gets complacent, and he gets forced out of the kingdom, slowly. Then there's conflict, of course, and then he somehow comes back, and then there's all kinds of madness and violence and magic and creatures.

The Creek, as you called it when you explained why you were busy on Wednesday nights, blew up out of the box, helping The WB find its teen serial lane along with shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Felicity, and later Charmed and Smallville. Like the characters on the rest of those shows, the kids on The Creek had superpowers, and theirs was the coolest of all: they talked like wise, insightful grownups who'd read a lot of books.

At the time of its 1962 release, however, it shook up the spy genre and unleashed a tidal wave of imitators looking to replicate its box-office fortunes. Most, whether serious stories like The Quiller Memorandum, copyright-dodging rip-offs like 008: Operation Exterminate and Agent 077: Mission Bloody Mary, and parodies like the Vincent Price-starring Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, are long-forgotten. One, meanwhile, is only remembered thanks to its sheer lousiness.

Alan was my best friend, my brother and my everything. I don't stop thinking about him. For me, there's no replacement; I just have a void. If I could speak to him I'd say: Come back, because I can't really bear being without you. We saw each other or spoke every day since 1980. I was a third party in the marriage, but Rima was never jealous.

The Welsh-born actor had spent much of the decade living in the United States, where he split his time between the stage and the screen, building an utterly respectable career. He had played a compassionate doctor in David Lynch's The Elephant Man, a murderous ventriloquist in the cult thriller Magic, and the real-life convicted child murderer Bruno Hauptmann in the TV movie The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, for which he had won his first Emmy.

40 fotos Actor George Clooney poses for a portrait session in Los Angeles, California, May 1985.Michael Ochs Archives (Getty Images) George Clooney and Kelly Preston, circa 1985. Frank Edwards (Getty Images) George Clooney in the TV show 'The Facts of Life.'NBC (NBCUniversal via Getty Images) George Clooney at the Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.Jim Smeal (Ron Galella Collection via Getty) George Clooney in Los Angeles in 1990 promoting his film 'Red Surf.'Vinnie Zuffante (Getty Images) George Clooney rolling in money

The esteemed film-maker was licking his wounds: his most recent picture, Far from the Madding Crowd, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an anachronistic King's Road style and panache, had flopped stateside. Childers approached the date with mixed feelings. He adored Schlesinger's previous movie, the jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model on the make, and had seen it three times.