Mr. Wint in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ Was 92

Bruce Glover, the unorthodox actor who portrayed Mr. Wint, the assassin with the distinctive aftershave who partnered with Putter Smith’s Mr. Kidd in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, has died. He was 92.

His son, Back to the Future actor Crispin Glover, shared on Instagram that he died on March 12. His cause of death wasn’t immediately available.

Glover played Deputy Grady Coker alongside Joe Don Baker as Sheriff Buford Pusser in the unexpected box-office hit Walking Tall (1973), then returned for the 1975 and ’77 sequels that had Bo Svenson as the lead.

The Chicago native also portrayed a redneck thug in Stanley Kramer’s Bless the Beasts and Children (1971); Duffy, an associate of Jack Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes, in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974); and a brutish debt collector leaning on a hustler (James Coburn) in Walter Hill’s Hard Times (1975).

Glover performed in hundreds of plays, appearing on Broadway opposite Bette Davis in Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana in 1961 and alongside Anne Bancroft in Mother Courage and Her Children in 1963.

In Guy Hamilton’s Diamonds Are Forever (1971) — the sixth and final Eon film to star Sean Connery — Glover and jazz musician Smith entertained moviegoers as Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, gay assassins who do the bidding for diamond smuggler Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Charles Gray).

As they complete each other’s sentences, the pair kill a dentist with a scorpion, blow up a helicopter with a time bomb and try three times to off Connery’s James Bond before meeting their demise on a cruise ship. (Both characters were featured in the 1956 Ian Fleming novel on which the movie is based.)

The burly Glover was a natural who never went to acting school or took an acting class — yet taught acting throughout his career, by most accounts quite effectively.

“If I am anything as an actor, it is that I will never the usual,” he said in a 2019 interview for The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology website. “I will be the unusual, and I intend to continue that whatever I am doing, whether it be acting, or I’m writing, or I am going to be painting or whatever I am going to be doing. It is uniquely my own.”

Bruce Herbert Glover was born in Chicago on May 2, 1932. His father, Herbert, was a religious man who didn’t want his son going to the movies, but his mother, Eva, took him anyway.

“I was always an actor and didn’t know I was acting,” he told the James Bond Radio Podcast in 2015. “I loved going to movies, and I would direct people in scenes that I’d seen in movies and act different roles. I had an instinct for it.”

He thought about making a living as an artist (he painted) or athlete (he played football at Carl Schurz High School, which lost in the 1949 city championship game at Soldier Field) before he attended Wright Junior College.

While posing for students in an art class, Glover was asked by a fellow model if he would put on a gorilla suit for an act she was in. It turns out she was a stripper and “needed a guy strong enough to wear a 100-pound ape suit and toss her around for 15 minutes,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Well, that sounds like a very dignified thing to do,’ and I did it.

“I went down to the [Lincoln Park] zoo and studied Bushman, the famous gorilla, which the guy who owned the act told me to do. Bushman gave me my first acting lesson. He said, ‘Think my thoughts and do my moves.’”

He went to Tampa, Florida, with the variety show act, which lasted six weeks, then got drafted into the U.S. Army; he served from 1953-55 and was stationed in Korea.

Afterward, Glover got the part of Kilroy in a local production of Williams’ Camino Real — he said he had never seen a play before — did summer stock in Wisconsin and in 1957 earned a degree in speech from Northwestern, where he advised Warren Beatty to leave college to go to New York to get on with acting.

Glover moved to New York as well, and after his first two stints on Broadway, he understudied for Robert Preston in 1966’s The Lion in Winter.

Meanwhile, he was showing up on such TV shows as Car 54, Where Are You?, Route 66, Perry Mason, My Favorite Martian, The Rat Patrol, Mod Squad and Gunsmoke and in such films as Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).

Casting director Billy Gordon, who had gotten him his gig in Bless the Beasts and Children when his career was in trouble, pushed for him to portray Mr. Wint in Diamonds Are Forever. (Paul Williams had originally screen-tested for the role opposite Smith.)

Glover told Hamilton that since Wint was gay, he should demonstrate “a kind of sexual pleasure” when 007 pulls the assassin’s coattails between his legs and attaches a bomb to them from behind. That’s where the “Wooooo” came from.

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In 2007, he was directed by Crispin in the film It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, and they acted together in Influence (2015).

His résumé also included the movies C.C. & Company (1970), Black Gunn (1972) and Ghost World (2001) and guest spots on Barney Miller, Hart to Hart, The Facts of Life, T.J. Hooker and Murder, She Wrote, among many other shows.

His wife of 56 years, Betty, a ballet dancer who performed in Oklahoma! on Broadway, died in 2016.

In his Van Gogh’s Ear interview, Glover noted that he had been close to death “many times, and even the death process is kind of a learning process.”

“I remember I had a motorcycle accident … I ran into a cow that had ran out on the side of the road. A big steer with horns coming right at my face. And I knew I was going to die, but I noticed that his mouth was slopping his tongue out. And I laughed. So even at that moment when I knew I was probably going to die, I found it funny.

“I had another moment where I was going to be struck in the face by a rattlesnake while I was climbing a cliff in Utah. And as it was striking at me, I still noticed how beautiful it was.

“So live it til the end and laugh when you can.”