He served as a dispatch rider during his National Service, then joined a firm of architects where he was able to utilise his passion for model-making by constructing scale models of building projects for clients.

[3] In 1993, he sold his Welders House country estate in Buckinghamshire to the singer Ozzy Osbourne and emigrated to California with his wife Brenda, whom he married in 1960, the couple had two children.

He blew up the villain's Jamaican hideout at the end of Dr. No (1962), and for Goldfinger (1964), he created Agent 007's Aston Martin DB5, featuring bullet-proof windows, revolving licence plates, forward-firing machine guns, a rear oil-slick dispenser and a passenger-side ejector seat.

[7] Other well known mechanical effects Stears orchestrated included the garbage compactor, making an X-wing fighter fly and the Jawa's sandcrawler.

Stears owned homes in Pacific Palisades and in Beaconsfield, England, where he and his wife raised cattle and show dogs.