Maximillian Largo is the reimagined fictional character from the 1983 film, Never Say Never Again, which was an unofficial remake of the 1961 James Bond novel and subsiquent 1965 film adaptation, Thunderball. In the 1965 film the character was named Emilio Largo. Maximillian Largo, in Never Say Never Again, was played by Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Never Say Never Again marked the high-point of a long legal battle between United Artists and Kevin McClory. For more information see: the controversy over Thunderball.
Character bio
Largo is a well known, blonde-haired, millionaire and philanthropist in his 40's, who secretly works for the evil organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E.. Largo is "No. 2" and head of its extortion operations, under the organization's leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Largo's two main headquarters are his super-yacht The Flying Saucer, which is the orginal translation of the name in the Thunderball novel, and a Moorish castle Palmyra located on the north coast of Africa.
He is killed by his mistress Domino, being shot in the back with a harpoon gun during an undersea cave fight over control a nuclear weapon, being placed in a key geologic location called The Tears of Allah, which will destroy the middle east's underground oil reserves.
Scheme
Largo's scheme in Never Say Never Again, is based on the same basic plot as Thunderball which was unique at the time. It involved the theft of two nuclear warheads from radio-intercepted test cruise missiles serendipitously armed with real warheads, launched from United States Air Force base in the U.K. during a joint NATO exercise. Ditching the missiles into the sea to be recovered and then use to hold the world hostage by threatening to detonate the one of two devices somewhere in the world possibly under the White House unless they paid the ransom of £100 million British pounds. Largo intends that threat to be a check against being stopped from his plot to destroy the world's oil reserves in the middle east. The basic nuclear ransom scheme has been used countless times since Thunderball and Never Say Never Again and is even a joke in the Austin Powers series of movies.
See also
