During his three years there, he gained several awards, including the Margaret Rawlings Cup, shared with Angela Morant, and the Elsie Fogerty Prize for the Best Individual Performance by a Man.
[1] His debut performance was in a play titled Not in the Book and was followed by Doctor in the House, where Bond appeared as Dr Simon Sparrow.
Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote a song for Bond titled "Disillusion Me", which he recorded as a single.
In 1976, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company;,[9] where he played Hevern in Maxim Gorky's The Zykovs and Willy Oban in The Iceman Cometh.
When David Essex planned to leave Rice and Lloyd Webber's musical Evita, they looked for someone to play the part of Che.
After being introduced by Lloyd Webber, producer Hal Prince and Bond "hit it off famously and very soon Gary was cast as David Essex's takeover in Evita."
However, in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 2018 memoirs, he recalls that, when performing eight shows a week, playing Evita became a strain for Elaine Paige: "Help came from Gary Bond.
[11] Over the years, Bond became close friends with both Lloyd Webber and his then wife Sarah Brightman and often provided a "lifeline to the goings on backstage."
He played Otto in Noel Coward's Design for Living in 1982, performed in State of Affairs in 1983, appeared opposite Keith Michell in The Baccarat Scandal 1988, and in 1992 was the Count in a revival of Jean Anouilh's The Rehearsal.
Having made his screen debut when he appeared in Zulu (1964) as Private Cole, he starred as Mark Smeaton in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and the Australian film Wake in Fright (1971).
He also appeared in Variation on a Theme, as Boswell in The Highland Jaunt, starred in the series Frontier, The Linden Tree, Affairs of the Heart, Wings of Song and a recorded version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
A film version of Wake in Fright, based on the 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook, was linked with the actor Dirk Bogarde and the director Joseph Losey as early as 1963.
Monica Dawkins, the film's make-up artist, remembered that "out of hours he was very nice but during shooting he kept himself apart, he wasn't comfortable around people".
[18] The film opened commercially in France on 22 July 1971, Great Britain on 29 October 1971, Australia during the same month, and the United States on 20 February 1972.
[21][22][23][failed verification] In Garry O'Connor's 2019 biography of Ian McKellen, he mentions that the two were in a relationship early in both of their careers, but it came to an end in 1972 when Bond was about to open in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
[25] Agent David Graham mentions in his book Casting About: A Memoir that Had it been within my power to choose, Gary Bond would have become my life's companion.