Dana Broccoli

Dana Broccoli was born Dana Natol in New York in 1922. She decided at an early age to be an actress and attended Cecil Clovelly's Academy of Dramatic Arts at Carnegie Hall in New York. Here, she met her first husband, Lewis Wilson, the first actor to play Batman. In 1942 she gave birth to a son, Michael, and three years later the family moved to California where Dana Wilson and her husband joined the Pasadena Playhouse.
After separating from Wilson, she moved to Beverly Hills where she became a screenwriter. It was through her screenwriting that the met Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, an already a successful movie producer. The couple dated for six months and then married. However, this wasn't the first time the two met. Before his career as a movie producer, Cubby worked asa "tea boy" at Twentieth Century Fox. In 1947, while trying to earn some money, he had got a job selling Christmas trees on a street corner. This was the first time he met Dana. In his biography, Cubby recalled seeing abeautiful young woman who had bought one of the trees and for whom he had constructed a custom tree-stand to hold it. When he bumped into Dana twelve years later at a party in California, he realized that she was the same woman. She also remembered the Christmas tree salesman. Both believed that fate had brought them together. After a six-week courtship, they married in 1959. A year later, they had a child together, which they named Barbara.
Dana and Cubby were involved in a number of film production ventures, including the screen adaptation of Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a children's story that Fleming wrote for his son Casper. Dana also published two novels, Scenario for Murder and Florinda. Florinda was eventually adapted into a musical, La Cava, which debuted in London in 2000. During her later years, Dana was especially well known for her generosity in donating money to a variety of charities.

Influence on the Bond Franchise:

While Dana never held any official role in any of the Bond films, her husband placed a lot of value in her opinions and often sought her council for casting and production decisions. Perhaps most significantly, Dana was responsible for the casting of Sean Connery as the first James Bond. Connery had recently appeared in the Disney filmDarby O'Gill and the Little People, a film about leprechauns. Cubby asked Dana to come down to the studio to view this film, because he wasn't sure if Connery had any "sex appeal". Obviously, she found the former Mr. Universe quite sexy, and Connery was cast for the role, despite Fleming's own reservations that an uncouth, He-Man scot could play Commander Bond.

Following Cubby's death in 1996, Dana became the keeper of the Bond franchise until her own death in 2004, at which time the control was turned over to Cubby's daughter Barbara Broccoli and her son Michael G. Wilson. In his biography, Cubby said that Dana was the perfect foil for his personality. She was a strong and motivated woman who believed that their successes were based on the strength of their family.

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