Richard Maibaum; Wrote Many of the James Bond Movie Scripts

Richard Maibaum, a former stage actor who began writing scripts for Hollywood in the 1930s, earning credits for pictures ranging from the steely thriller “They Gave Him a Gun” to the covert capers of James Bond, is dead.

The scenarist, producer and playwright was 81 when he died Friday at St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica. The cause of his death has not yet been determined, his family said Sunday.

Born in New York City and an honors graduate of the University of Iowa, Maibaum began in the entertainment industry as an actor with the Shakespearean Repertory Theatre in New York in 1933.

His writing stage credits included “The Tree,” “Sweet Mystery of Life” and “See My Lawyer.”

He caught the train to Hollywood with his bride in the mid-1930s where he began crafting scripts for “Ten Gentlemen From West Point,” “Gold Diggers of 1937,” “The Bad Man of Brimstone,” “The Amazing Mr. Williams,” “I Wanted Wings” and several more.

After Army service in World War II with the Combat Film Division, he went to Paramount as a producer-writer and worked on several Alan Ladd features including “The Great Gatsby.” He moved to England in the late 1950s with producer Albert (Cubby) Broccoli’s Warwick Films. There Broccoli gave him a couple of the phenomenally successful Ian Fleming spy novels to read.

Their collaboration began with “Dr. No” in 1962 and ran through “License to Kill” in 1989. Between were “From Russia With Love,” “Goldfinger,” “Thunderball,” “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” “For Your Eyes Only” and many more.

He best liked injecting humor into Fleming’s straightforward thrillers, he told The Times’ Charles Champlin in 1965.

But Maibaum was often hard-pressed, he said, to constantly create the additional exotic adventures that Bond audiences had come to expect of their hero. Villains were invented that had no hands, Indian rope tricks were adapted to become killing devices and hunts for wild animals instead became hunts for Sean Connery or Roger Moore, the original British secret service agents.

Changing times also dictated Bond’s behavior, Maibaum recalled in another interview a few years ago.

Where once the intrepid adventurer had to bed at least three women per picture, “you can’t have him alley-catting around anymore in the era of AIDS.”

Maibaum’s survivors include his wife, Sylvia, two sons, a granddaughter and a sister.

A funeral service is scheduled today at 1 p.m. at Hollywood Memorial Park.