The artist behind many of Bond’s best posters from the 1960s and 1970s created posters that were as memorable as the films they promoted.
Robert McGinnis, who has died at the age of 99, was the illustrator behind some of the most recognisable James Bond posters of the 1960s and 70s. His hand-painted images helped define the look of Bond at a time when a poster wasn’t just part of a marketing campaign — it was often the first impression, and sometimes the most enduring one.
He was born in Cincinnati on 3rd February 1926, and after a brief apprenticeship at Walt Disney Studios, studied fine art at Ohio State University. In the 1950s he began illustrating paperback covers, eventually producing more than 1,200 of them. His style was elegant, detailed and confident — perfectly suited to the hardboiled detectives and pulp heroines of mid-century American fiction.
His move into film posters began with Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), which remains one of the most iconic pieces of Hollywood poster art. That success led to more commissions, and in 1965 he was brought in to work on Thunderball, painting alongside Frank McCarthy. The result was a sprawling montage of Bond underwater with harpoons and jetpacks, surrounded by women and explosions — a visual shorthand for the scale and sex appeal of the film. McGinnis was responsible for the glamorous, precisely rendered women, while McCarthy handled the action — the fights, machinery, and underwater battles — creating a dynamic blend of seduction and spectacle that became the template for several Bond campaigns that followed.
McGinnis and McCarthy worked together again on You Only Live Twice (1967), which placed Bond in the middle of a Japanese volcano lair under siege. For On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), McGinnis again collaborated on a poster that gave George Lazenby his one official painted pose, flanked by skiing assassins and alpine danger.
By the early 1970s, McGinnis was the solo artist for Bond. His work on Diamonds Are Forever (1971) — Sean Connery’s return to the role — featured Bond with two women in bikinis, a laser satellite, and a backdrop of Las Vegas chaos. The composition was tight, theatrical, and unmistakably McGinnis.
His Live and Let Die (1973) poster introduced Roger Moore as Bond, standing in front of a tarot-like arrangement of voodoo imagery, crocodiles, flames, and coffins. It’s one of the most visually dense Bond posters, and still one of the most collectable. He followed it with The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), with Bond front and centre while a scene of swirling action unfolds around him — car jumps, kung fu fighters, and Scaramanga’s golden gun looming large as he loads it with a golden bullet engraved with Bond’s number.
McGinnis’s final official contributions to Bond were alternate designs for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). The main posters for those films were handled by Bob Peak, but McGinnis produced backup and foreign-market artwork — now rare and prized by collectors.
Outside of Bond, he painted posters for Barbarella (1968), The Odd Couple (1968), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), and dozens more, including the 1967 non-Eon Casino Royale spoof. He also continued working in publishing, producing later covers for Neil Gaiman novels and the Hard Case Crime series. His magazine work appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, and Good Housekeeping. In 1993 he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.
Today’s film posters, with their floating heads and Photoshopped symmetry, do the job of announcing a release. McGinnis’s work did more than that — it made the film desirable. His Bond posters in particular had character, precision and flair. They were full of life, hand-built and thought-through, not constructed on a screen in a rush to meet a marketing deadline.
Robert McGinnis died on 10th March 2025 in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
