Reginald Bernard John Gadney (20 January 1941 – 1 May 2018)[1] was a painter, thriller-writer and an occasional screenwriter or screenplay adaptor.
[3] Gadney was encouraged to paint by his mother, but his early years were entrusted to a German nanny until wartime regulations saw her interned as an "undesirable alien."
Gadney attended Dragon School in Oxford and then Stowe in Buckinghamshire before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards in 1960,[4] where he formed a lasting friendship with Simon Parker-Bowles.
[10] After leaving the army, Gadney attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge and then won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[12] Gadney won a BAFTA in 1983 for his seven-part television serial about John F. Kennedy starring Martin Sheen.
[1] It was Dance's suggestion that Gadney play the real-life character of James Bond, who, in the screenplay, Fleming found birdwatching on his Jamaican estate.