Bond director is arrested for selling sex - in a dress

Bond director is arrested for selling sex - in a dress
From Chris Ayres in Los Angeles
IN A scandal to match Hugh Grant’s encounter with Divine Brown or George Michael’s lewd behaviour in a public lavatory, the director of the most recent James Bond film is facing charges of attempting to “perform an act of sex” on an undercover police officer — while dressed as a woman.

Lee Tamahori, who has a British mother and Maori father, directed Die Another Day, starring Pierce Brosnan, and xXx: State of the Union, in which Ice Cube appeared with Samuel L. Jackson.

Mr Tamahori, 56, could face up to six months in jail and a $1,000 (£567) fine.

The arrest of the Bond director in a seedy part of Hollywood brings back memories of Hugh Grant’s infamous encounter with a prostitute less than a mile from Mann’s Chinese Theatre — the best-known cinema complex in Los Angeles.

The 1995 incident ultimately failed to harm Grant’s career — and, in fact, may have helped him to lose the image of a bumbling Englishman. In Mr Tamahori’s case, however, the City of Los Angeles said that the New Zealander was the prostitute, not the client.

Police say that he was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress and black wig when he allegedly approached an undercover police officer and offered to perform sex for money.

The director, a gaunt figure with silver hair and thick black eyebrows — who often appears in public dressed entirely in black apart from a blood red tie — was arrested for soliciting an act of prostitution and loitering with the intent to commit prostitution, both misdemeanours. He has been ordered to appear in court on February 24.

Mr Tamahori, who began his career in the late 1970s as a commercial artist, was released on $2,000 bail. He has already hired Mark Geragos, the celebrity defence lawyer who unsuccessfully represented Winona Ryder on shoplifting charges and Scott Peterson, who was found guilty of killing his wife and unborn son.

Mr Geragos is a regular guest on CNN’s Larry King Live.

A spokesman for the City of Los Angeles said that police were running a “sting” operating when Mr Tamahori approached an officer, who was sitting in his car.

Mr Tamahori got his first break after directing Once Were Warriors in 1994, a depiction of urban Maori life that was hugely successful in New Zealand.

He later directed an episode of the hit television series The Sopranos in 2000 before making Die Another Day, in which Brosnan starred alongside the Oscar-winning Bond girl Halle Berry.

On the Internet Movie Database there is only one quote attributed to the Bond director. “Sex should not be in the movies and should be in the home,” he is credited as saying, “and violence should be in the movies and not in the home.”

PRIVATE PLEASURE - PUBLIC PAIN

April 2003 Ron Davies MP was found in a layby frequented by gay men. He said that he was looking for badgers

April 1998 George Michael was arrested while engaging in a lewd act in a public lavatory in Beverly Hills

June 1995 Hugh Grant was discovered by police receiving oral sex from Divine Brown in a car on Sunset Boulevard

October 1991 Sir Allan Green, Director of Public Prosecutions, was caught kerb crawling near King’s Cross station in London

January 1990 Marion Barry, the Mayor of Washington, was recorded by surveillance cameras smoking crack with his girlfriend