Len Deighton

Celebrated novelist, cookery writer and Observer columnist who helped turn Michael Caine into a sex symbol

- Patrick Kidd

Hollywood was not initially impressed by Michael Caine's portrayal of a spy. "Dump [his] spectacles and make the girl cook the meal," read a panicked cable from one of the backers of The Ipcress File. "He is coming across as a homosexual.

Harry Saltzman, the producer, also had doubts. This was a long way from James Bond, his other spy series. It was his wife who persuaded him to stick to the image in the book on which the 1965 film was based, arguing that if Cary Grant could look sexy in glasses, so could Caine. As for the spy's ability with an egg whisk, Saltzman soon saw how women swooned over him making an omelette for Sue Lloyd.

But Caine was unable to crack two eggs in one hand. That trick was performed as a closeup by the man who wrote the book and whose cookery column for The Observer was shown pinned to the spy’s kitchen wall. Len Deighton quite literally had a hand in making Caine a sex symbol.

Deighton spent four years drawing “cookstrips”, or recipes in cartoon form, for The Observer. The film came out the same year as Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book, the cover of which showed a gun with a sprig of parsley in the barrel. Having commissioned him for six weeks, the paper asked Deighton to create a 50-part series on French cooking, published as Où est le Garlic?