PATRICK DEMARCHELIE/©2002 DANJAQ LLC. I SPY: In his fourth turn as 007, Brosnan finally looks like a man who has survived too many fights and too many cocktails

The Man With The Golden Run
	Film's biggest franchise — and a peculiarly British institution — celebrates 40 years with Die Another Day. On location with Pierce Brosnan's Bond — and his sexy foil, Halle Berry
	By JEFF CHU

Posted Sunday, Nov 3, 2002; 2.02 p.m. GMT
It's a dull Saturday afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio, and young Halle Berry is flipping through the TV stations. She's bored in the deep, almost desolate way that eight- and nine-year-olds get bored — but something on the screen grabs her attention. A blonde in a white bikini is rising from the sea. There's a knife in her white-leather belt. Suddenly the afternoon isn't dull anymore. One of those channels that broadcasts old movies by day and infomercials by night is showing a 1962 James Bond film called Dr. No. "I remember that bikini coming out of the water and thinking how beautiful Ursula Andress was," Berry says. "I thought, 'Wow! Wouldn't it be great to be like her?'"

Berry's memory of her first Bond moment might seem suspicious — even a P.R. hack's invention — if the same image weren't frozen in the minds of millions of other 007 fans. But when you're an Oscar winner and one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood, fantasies have a way of coming true. Berry gets to live hers out on an April afternoon in Cádiz, Spain. Wearing a fluorescent orange bikini, she slips off her flipflops, adjusts the white-leather knife belt slung low around her hips, wades about 10 meters out into the shallows of the Atlantic and turns back toward the beach. "And action!" director Lee Tamahori calls through a megaphone. Berry dips under the surface, pops back up, runs her hands through her hair, then sashays toward shore, her wet skin glistening in the afternoon sun. Tamahori asks her to do it again. And again. Then he has her swim toward the camera. "And action!" Cut, action, cut, action, one final "Cut!" — and the set bursts into applause.

When Berry comes out of the water, her teeth are chattering. The locals say April was never this frigid, this windy — "Nunca," they insist, never — until the week she had to pretend the icy Atlantic was the bath-warm Gulf of Mexico and shoot Scene 102, her big entrance as Jinx, the mysterious assassin in the new Bond film Die Another Day.

In return for making the cold look so hot, Berry wins the undivided attention of everyone on set — including the off-duty Bond. Lolling under the thatched roof of a beachside cabana throughout the scene, Pierce Brosnan hasn't taken his wolfish eyes off Berry. "Look what you've created," he whispers to writers Robert Wade and Neal Purvis, a sly grin creeping across his face. "Look what you've done."

That the Bond girl rising from the sea is the reigning Oscar queen says plenty about the staying power of the understated British spy Ian Fleming created 50 years ago. Though Fleming's 14th and last Bond book was published 36 years ago — two years after his death — his character launched the most successful franchise in film history. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary with the release this month of the 20th official Bond film, the series has come roaring back from its protracted midlife crisis of the 1980s. The last three outings, all starring Brosnan, have together grossed more than $1 billion at the box office — and if the story lines were not always coherent, at least the action was reliably high-octane, the stunts spectacular, the women lovely (and increasingly lethal) and the hero an island of imperturbable British cool amid the mayhem. In Brosnan, the franchise has found its best Bond since Sean Connery (some say the best of all time), a man whose nimble brow and arch half-smiles see to it that — despite decades of critics asking when he'll mothball the tux, pack away the Walther PPK and retire — "Bond is still so sexy and so cool," as Berry puts it.

Much of the credit for the aging spy's resuscitation goes to producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson. The daughter and stepson of franchise co-founder Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, the two run EON — short for "Everything or Nothing" — the London-based company that has produced all 20 "official" Bond films (Never Say Never Again, the Connery comeback vehicle made by Jack Schwartzman and Kevin McClory in 1983, is considered a renegade). When Cubby's health began to fail in the 1990s, they stepped up to take his place. (Wilson had been co-producing with his stepfather since 1985's A View to a Kill, and Barbara had been an assistant director and associate producer in the '80s.) Their first effort: GoldenEye, the high-tech, high-speed 1995 hit that proved 007 could compete with the big-bang action pictures while keeping some of his cheeky, retro spirit. Since then, the competition has only got tougher, brasher and more explosive, with plenty of pretenders to the throne — most recently, Vin Diesel's xXx — echoing villain Auric Goldfinger's famous threat: "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

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