 It turns out that Joanna Lumley has a peculiar habit of dropping in on long-running spy-adventure franchises at strange moments in their histories. She stood in for Diana Rigg/Honor Blackman/Linda Thorson in the mid-1970s TV series The New Avengers, a retread of the classic 1960s show that also featured an extra, young male cast member (Gareth Hunt) so that he could handle any chores that might tax Patrick McNee's delicate heart rate. And in 1969, when she was 22, she appeared in the first James Bond film not starring Sean Connery, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. For those of you who may have trouble keeping one movie's world-domination plot straight from another's, that's the one where Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas with his earlobes pinned back, takes over a clinic in the Swiss alps and "cures" a bunch of girls of their allergies by hypnosis. In the process, he also turns them into unwitting time-release bombs in a biological-terrorism scheme as part of his plot to force the world's powers to grant him amnesty for all his past crimes and the right to be addressed as "Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp" by anyone who can get the words out with a straight face. Lumley played one of these girls. "I was sent to meet Harry Saltzman, the American who co-produced the Bond films with Cubby Broccoli, in South Audley Street," she recalls. "It was a very hot day. The lift had broken. He arrived in his Rolls-Royce, after lunch, and since his office was on the top floor, I had to follow him up the stairs. At the top, he was so out of breath he was almost speechless. He just managed to say, 'Ya have da part'. I said thank you, and went away again. I often wondered why he hadn’t told me in the lobby downstairs."
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