Ian Ogilvy: ‘Me as James Bond? I would have been ridiculed’

Mary ComerfordThu, October 22, 2026 at 11:00 AM UTC

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Ian Ogilvy’s latest role is in action-thriller film Knightfall - Dan Tuffs

It’s nearly half a century since Ian Ogilvy donned an animated halo as charming adventurer Simon Templar in Return of the Saint. Today, the 83-year-old actor recollects his time on the ITV show with a degree of embarrassment.

“I look at some of my old episodes and I wince when there are shots of me looking at women’s backsides appreciatively. To get rid of the leering is a good idea. You don’t get away with that kind of thing now but in those days it was considered perfectly the norm. Women probably resented it like hell but didn’t show it, they were expected to laugh it off.” Much like the light-hearted contest Ogilvy and the crew held for the best female guest star. “Rula Lenska won it, not because she was the most beautiful or sexiest – she was – but because she was the most terrific trouper, a good egg, and everyone adored her.”

Ogilvy recollects his time on The Return of the Saint with a degree of embarrassment now - PA Images/Alamy

A film reboot of Leslie Charteris’s debonair globetrotter is in the pipeline from Paramount Pictures starring smouldering Bridgerton favourite Regé-Jean Page. It’s likely that the character – a hangover from a different social era – will get an overhaul, and no bad thing says Ogilvy. Nevertheless, Ogilvy’s latest role in action-thriller movie Knightfall may give fans of the jet-setting Seventies show a welcome sense of déjà vu.

Charging around a country estate at night, felling rogue agents with a bunch of fiendish tricks while deploying a lethal line in pithy put-downs, former spy catcher Charles Knight – coaxed back into action to protect his estranged scientist daughter while foiling a terrorist plot involving a stolen biological weapon – offers a tantalising glimpse of how the suave maverick that made the Rada-trained actor a household name might look if he accepted a final mission.

As former spy catcher Charles Knight in his latest project - IMDB

“He’s closer to the roles I’ve played throughout my career,” agrees Ogilvy with a wry smile over Zoom from Los Angeles where he’s lived for more than 35 years. “Old actors tend to fade away a bit, there are just not the roles, so when one comes along, one wants to jump at the opportunity and I like the idea of the grumpy old fart, a difficult son of a b----, who’s obviously still got it.”

The same can be said of the man himself. Dressed in a blue chambray-style shirt, and with a distinguished salt-and-pepper beard complemented by an enviable mop of thick hair, his boyish features may have morphed into more rugged contours over the years, but if anything, he’s more believable as a trained assassin now than in his heyday. “I got lucky with my hair,” he concedes, ruffling his mane while maddeningly confessing that his exercise regime extends to walking the dogs around a local park. “I’m not a health fanatic at all.”

‘I got lucky with my hair’, says Ogilvy of his transition from boyish good looks to rugged masculinity - Dan Tuffs

Knightfall reunites Ogilvy with producer Jonathan Sothcott, who cast him as crime boss Richie Archer in 2014’s We Still Kill the Old Way along with its 2016 sequel, We Still Steal the Old Way, and also pairs him on screen with Roger Moore’s son, Geoffrey. It’s fitting, given that Ogilvy emerged as something of an heir apparent to the 007 star, breathing new life into The Saint in 1978-79 and gaining traction as a possible Bond successor at around the same time.

“He’s very funny and a walking pharmacy – nothing dodgy, vitamins and pick-me-ups, things like that – a very helpful character to have around,” says Ogilvy of his co-star.

Roger Moore’s son Geoffrey joins Ogilvy in Knightfall - Jordan Smith

Ogilvy describes Moore senior as “a very kind, sweet man”. Such as the time he dropped by a Return of the Saint shoot in Italy and led an all-night drinking session with cast and crew who were old pals. “We got a little bit hammered and I arose feeling quite dreadful to find Roger looking as fresh as a daisy, hopping in his car,” recalls his Templar successor. “At that moment, and for those 10 seconds, I hated Roger Moore.”

Although friendly acquaintances, they never discussed their shared role. “He didn’t presume to advise me, and I didn’t presume to ask. The Saint, just like James Bond and any of those characters, is a cipher, a blank piece of paper. The actor imposes his personality, you have to be yourself, but with a gun.”

His turn as the smooth-talking ladies’ man with a deadly calling card put him in the frame for Bond along with others including hard man Lewis Collins, who was tearing up the screen in rival ITV show The Professionals at the time. Ogilvy, however, never felt comfortable in contention, so was secretly relieved when the role went instead to Timothy Dalton.

“I never thought I was quite right for Bond,” says Ogilvy whose vowels remain resolutely cut-glass despite many years in the US. “Roger was a foot taller than me and a much more massive man. Tim Dalton was bigger in every way physically, so was Sean Connery. I was very lightweight. I was more a ‘leaning on the mantelpiece with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other doing witticisms’ type. Which is why it was a bit of a stretch, even with The Saint, some of those fights seemed insane when a 6ft 5in, 300lb man would come charging at me. I think I’d have got some ridicule if I’d been James Bond, so in a way I didn’t want the ridicule. I wasn’t gutted at all, it was a huge relief and I lost interest in James Bond after that.”

‘I was more a “leaning on the mantelpiece with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other” type’ (pictured in 1970) - Getty Images/Tony Evans/Timelapse Library

At the height of his fame, Ogilvy couldn’t go out without being mobbed, a price he would gladly have paid had his actual fee for Return of the Saint been more acceptable. “I had one of the worst contracts in the world with no residuals, no foreign sales, no repeat fees of any kind at all. The last time I got paid for The Saint was in 1979. Being famous is fine if you can afford it.”

Adding insult to injury, when the series was axed after a single 24-episode run due to high production costs, no one would cast him in other shows because he was too associated with the role.

“I wasn’t offered anything although I did a television comedy show with Lionel Jeffreys called Tom, Dick, and Harriet, which I loved, but that got cancelled as well. I went to the West End and did lots of plays which in some respects was better paid because it was regular. I loved the theatre, wonderful parts, and it was nice to see my name up in lights for once.” A framed portrait hanging on the wall behind him during our interview turns out to be a memento from that time, a run of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter. “I was quite glad when the fame started to fade away because it’s not all that amusing.”

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For Ogilvy, an acting career was probably inevitable. His father, Francis, had been an actor before switching to advertising and founding the world-famous company Ogilvy and Mather with Ian’s uncle, David, while his mother, Aileen Raymond, was a performer who had previously been married to John Mills.

Ogilvy went to Eton at a time before the school had a theatre - Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy

His colourful childhood includes a memory of being taken to London’s Embassy Club on his 15th birthday by his father, who paid a call girl to show him a good time. “It was a very continental thing to do. French fathers were always doing that with their sons and my father decided to take a leaf out of their book. It was an odd thing but I have to say it was very sweet of him and very pleasant for me. Most 15-year-old boys only think of one thing, and I got not just to think about it! My American wife (Ogilvy married actress Kathryn “Kitty” Holcomb in 1992 following the end of his first marriage to Diane Hart) looks at me sometimes and says, ‘That is child abuse.’ I say, ‘No, the child didn’t feel it was.’”

Educated at Eton, where fellow pupils included future leading men Christopher Cazenove and Jeremy Child, Ogilvy finds the ongoing conversation over public-school dominance of the arts mildly ironic given that the school didn’t even have a theatre when he attended. “They would only put on one play a year and it had to be Shakespeare. The ruling body didn’t like the idea of acting. It was thought to be immoral and not what a young gentleman should be doing, so it was actually discouraged.”

But the lack of facilities didn’t hold him back. A chance meeting with fledgling director Michael Reeves through a mutual friend when both were teenagers proved a life-changing connection. “I went off and stayed with Mike and his mother in their house out in Suffolk. We made a little 8mm movie and the following year he had a 16mm camera so we did another but after that we lost touch. A few years later, my agent called and said, ‘Someone called Michael Reeves wants you to be in his film,’ and that was it.”

The film was The She Beast, the first in a Sixties trilogy with The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General completing the set. Ogilvy appeared in all three, an impressive roster which put both actor and young director on the movie map while also courting considerable controversy.

With Hilary Heath in Witchfinder General (1968), which caused considerable controversy - Alamy

Folk horror Witchfinder General was a fictionalised account of the murderous exploits of 17th-century lawyer Matthew Hopkins during the English Civil War and came under critical fire for its scenes of sadistic violence. Nearly 60 years on, Ogilvy offers an explanation on behalf of Reeves, who died just a few months after the film’s release, aged just 25, from an accidental overdose of barbiturates. “The violence he despised was the kind in a John Wayne movie when everybody’s hitting each other and there’s no blood at all and no jaws are broken and it’s all fun. He said that glorified violence and wanted to make violence horrible, to put people off it. His heart was in the right place but of course, he got criticised a lot for that.”

It was a baptism of fire for the young actor, who also worked with legendary Boris Karloff in The Sorcerers. “He was lovely. Rather lame and quite frail in many ways but very game. Michael would have him lying on the floor and falling over and he didn’t complain at all. I once asked him, ‘Did you ever feel typecast because of the monster?’ He said, ‘No, it was the happiest day of my life. Before that, they didn’t know what to do with me. I was playing all sorts of ridiculous roles and after that, I had a career.’”

Another co-star was rising talent Victor Henry, hailed by some as the next Laurence Olivier but whose potential was cut tragically short by a freak accident which left him in a coma for more than a decade before he died, aged just 42.

“Victor was mad as a box of frogs,” Ogilvy recalls, adding that they shared a scene outside a pub which didn’t turn out well. “While they were setting up, we were obviously in the pub, keeping warm, but Victor was keeping warm and drinking. Once we got outside and the cold hit him, he turned into this paralytic drunk man. Michael was very cross about it and Victor’s agent paid to reshoot it but I love him because he was brilliant. Strange, quirky, and funny; a very dangerous character, but he was a good guy.”

With his career out of the starting blocks, Ogilvy married his first wife, Diane Hart – mother of his son, Titus, a TV producer – in 1968 and insists that the hedonistic Sixties of free love and drugs pretty much passed him by. “I didn’t see any of it. As far as drugs went, we tinkered with a bit of what was hash in those days, no weed, which you had to crumble up and stick in a cigarette. I never thought there was any point because it didn’t do anything to me. Yes, we all drank like crazy but I was a very young, married man with a family making low-budget movies, there wasn’t time to mess about.”

As time progressed, however, Ogilvy descended into what he now describes as “a classic example of someone hitting a midlife crisis” which led to the breakdown of his marriage in a painful time for all concerned. “It was horrible. Very sad for my wife, very sad for me, and we both moved on. A psychiatrist will jump on me and say I’m talking through my hat, but I think it’s a fairly common masculine thing to think there must be more to life. That was my feeling at the time which is a selfish, s----y thing to think but I acted on it.”

Although he briefly attended AA, Ogilvy quit alcohol many years ago and hasn’t drunk since. “I certainly did suffer a lot from the booze. I think my problem was just I enjoyed it too much, there is a danger with actors drinking. But I didn’t find it difficult stopping at all so I have a feeling I wasn’t really an alcoholic.”

Ogilvy and his second wife, Kathryn Holcomb, who he married in 1992 - Getty Images/Paul Harris

Eventually, Ogilvy began a new life in America. He got work in films such as Death Becomes Her, alongside Meryl Streep and Bruce Willis, as well as US TV shows Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5. He also began a parallel career as a writer – penning plays, novels, a memoir and a successful series of children’s books that have brought him a very different audience. “It was a happy coincidence that I started to write about the time when my career was beginning to tail off a bit. I was walking into auditions and there would be 15 men of my age, all of them more famous than me. I thought, ‘I’m not going to get any of these parts.’ So I concentrated on the writing.”

With film work these days largely UK-based, Ogilvy confesses that he’d move back home if it weren’t for family ties in the US. On regular visits home to see his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, Ogilvy also catches up with his oldest friend, Simon Williams, and his wife, Lucy Fleming, confessing that he’s envious of their regular work as Justin Elliott and his ex, Miranda, in The Archers.

“It’s a lovely gig to have when you’re an old person. I’d love to be in The Archers but they probably wouldn’t run to flying me over, would they?”

Knightfall, out now on digital and on Blu-ray from November 16

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”