Skyfall premiered at the Royal Albert Hall on this day in 2012.

Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond film in EON Productions’ long running series, premièred at London’s Royal Albert Hall on 23rd October 2012.

The film was Daniel Craig’s third outing as 007 and directed by Sam Mendes. Skyfall went on to become the first Bond movie to earn more than $1 billion worldwide.

Thomas Newman was born on this day in 1955. He composed the scores for Skyfall and SPECTRE.

thomas_newman-7656371
Photo: By Simon Fernandez, CC BY 2.0.

Composer Thomas Newman, brought into the 007 fold by Sam Mendes for Skyfall, was born on 20th October 1955 in Los Angeles, replacing house composer David Arnold.

Newman has a long history with Mendes, scoring the director’s first feature film American Beauty, followed by Road to Perdition, Jarhead and Revolutionary Road and has many more feature film credits dating back to 1984 with Reckless.

Ben Whishaw was born on 14th October 1980. He first joined the series as Q in Skyfall.

Ben Whishaw, who was introduced as gadget master Q in Daniel Craig’s third outing as 007, was born on 14th October 1980.

Prior to Skyfall, Whishaw appeared in Layer Cake, also staring Daniel Craig and played Sebastian Flyte in a film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, as well as a variety of other roles in film, TV and theatre, including the voice of Paddington Bear.

007 screenwriter Robert Wade was born on this day in 1962.

Robert Wade, who with writing partner Neal Purvis has worked on each Bond film since The World Is Not Enough (1999, with Bruce Feirstein), was born in South Wales on 16th September 1961.

Following their work on Skyfall it was announced that the screen writing duo were retiring from the Bond films. However, they were hired to work on problems with John Logan’s script for SPECTRE in 2014.  On SPECTRE Purvis and Wade received credits for the story, along with John Logan, and screenplay, alongside both Logan and Jez Butterworth.