HILL, BILL

Contributed by: The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia by Steven Jay Rubin

(1921–     ; birth name: Edward William Hill): British producer, production manager, and assistant director who served as production manager on From Russia with Love and also took a small but critical acting part, portraying Captain Nash, the Yugoslavia-based British Secret Service agent who is murdered by Donald Grant (Robert Shaw) in the Zagreb train station restroom. Hill always joked about his brief nonspeaking part. “If you thought about it, it was totally preposterous,” he remembered. “Here I am, arriving in Zagreb station on this terribly important mission to assist a fellow agent, and after we trade the recognition signal, we’re on our way to the bathroom. What were we supposed to be saying anyway? ‘Let’s have a pee and then we’ll board a train’?”[1]

A native of London, Hill made his big-screen debut as an assistant director on director Julian Amyes’s war drama Hell in Korea (1956). Two years later, he rose to production manager on John Guillermin’s biographical feature I Was Monty’s Double, a.k.a. Hell, Heaven or Hoboken, which featured future Bond players Bill Nagy (Mr. Midnight in Goldfinger), Walter Gotell, Marne Maitland, and Steven Berkoff. Hill made his producing debut as an associate producer on The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964).

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[1] Bill Hill, interview by Steven Jay Rubin, London, June 20, 1977.

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