12 Facts About Wolf Mankowitz

Cyril Wolf Mankowitz was an English writer, playwright and screenwriter.

Wolf Mankowitz specialised in porcelain, and in 1953 published a book on the Portland Vase.

Wolf Mankowitz himself appears in the film's opening credit sequence, wearing a sandwich board that bears his writer credit.

In 1962, Wolf Mankowitz offered to introduce his friend Cubby Broccoli to Harry Saltzman, holder of the film rights to James Bond, when Broccoli mentioned he desired to make the Bond series his next film project.

Broccoli and Saltzman then formed Eon Productions and began co-producing the first Bond film, Dr No, for which Wolf Mankowitz was hired as one of the screenwriters.

Wolf Mankowitz later collaborated on the screenplay for the non-Eon 1967 Bond movie Casino Royale.

Wolf Mankowitz wrote the script for Yorkshire Television's serial Dickens of London and the book of the same name based on his research when writing the series.

Wolf Mankowitz was an original investor in the Partisan Coffee House, a meeting place for the New Left just off Soho Square, which functioned from 1958 to 1962.

Wolf Mankowitz's plays include The Samson Riddle, The Bespoke Overcoat, The Hebrew Lesson, It Should Happen to a Dog and The Mighty Hunter.

In 1944, Wolf Mankowitz married Ann Seligmann, a psychoanalyst; the couple met at Cambridge University.

Wolf Mankowitz died of cancer in 1998 in County Cork, Ireland, aged 73; his ashes are at the Golders Green Crematorium.

Files placed in the public domain during August 2010 revealed that for a decade after the Second World War, Wolf Mankowitz was suspected by security service MI5 of being a communist agent.