Wait...Christopher Walken played a Bond villain?

Alternate title for this post: "This is What a Useless Rabbit-Hole Tumble Yields."

So...it started when neither Corrie nor I could remember the name of the actress who played Miracle Max's wife in "The Princess Bride." I could se her in my brain, see other movie's she's been in ("My Blue Heaven", "Scrooged") but her name escaped me.

It drove me nuts for about six seconds, as I went to find my charging phone and look it up. Carol Kane. Of course, duh. Geeze...old/dad/teacher/booze-connoisseur brain.

But among the names and pictures on that online list was an actor in a military beret, in black and white:

The actor who played the King in "The Princess Bride" had been a decorated war veteran. That made sense, as many of the dudes playing old guys in the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had been WWII vets (like Tom Poston, et al).

I clicked on Mr. Willoughby Gray's name and read up a little about him. He starred for a time in British television in many, many shows, and would have been far more familiar to someone my age to my folks' age, had they lived and grown up in the UK.

It also said he was best know to today's audiences as the King from The Princess Bride and the former-Nazi-mad-scientist doctor and "father figure to the Walken's Bond-villain Max Zorin."

That was the record-scratch halt to my brain. Christopher Walken? Bond villain? What what what?

The year was 1985, the same year Goonies, Rocky IV, and Back to the Future came out (!!!), and the Bond "classic" A View to a Kill was released. The quotes on classic in the previous sentence are doing some very heavy lifting. "A View to a Kill" was the last of the Roger Moore appearances as the super-spy, stars Christopher Walken as the bad guy in a plot that sounds like the plot to Superman from 1978 (land speculation and attempting to destroy coastal California), and while named for an Ian Fleming stry, was a wholly original idea. (Maybe "original" idea?)

It also stars Tanya Roberts (Midge from "That '70s Show"), Grace Jones, and features the youngest Bond-girl ever in Alison Doody. This was her first role, and in between it and her breakout role as the blond Austrian Nazi-sympathizer in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" she starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in "Taffin." So...she played opposite three separate James Bonds in four years...

I still haven't seen "A View to a Kill." I'm not exactly rushing out to see it, but I may be more interested now than I had been the day before this little rabbit hole dive...