Trivia

Was the original choice to play James Bond 007 in Dr. No (1962).

Died of a heart attack while playing golf, shortly after completing a guest-starring role on Hawaii Five-O (1968).

In 1976, in what would be his final interview, Boyd expressed regret at concentrating so heavily on movies and said he wished he had acted more on stage and on television.

He blamed the massive commercial failure of The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) for ruining his movie career.

Was initially cast as Marc Antony in Cleopatra (1963). When numerous delays in production eventually brought about his departure, Richard Burton took over the role.

While working as a doorman at a Leicester Square cinema in London in 1955, Boyd was discovered by Sir Michael Redgrave, who got him his first film role.

Nearly died during the great flu epidemic in London in 1952.

In 1995, Charlton Heston denied a claim by screenwriter Gore Vidal that there was a gay subtext to the film Ben-Hur (1959). Vidal claims he wrote the script with such an implication and mentioned the subtext to director William Wyler. Boyd, who played Ben-Hur's friend (and later nemesis) Messala, supposedly was in on this subtext and played his scenes as if he had been spurned by his gay lover. Heston was not informed of this as they thought he would not like it. Heston went on to state that after writing one scene, Vidal was dismissed from the project. Vidal responded by producing extracts from Heston's 1978 journal "The Actor's Life", in which he admitted Vidal had written most of the finished screenplay.

For his work in Ben-Hur (1959), he's one of only 7 actors to win the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a motion picture without receiving an Oscar nomination for the same performance. The other 6 are, in chronological order: Millard Mitchell in My Six Convicts (1952), Earl Holliman in The Rainmaker (1956), Oskar Werner in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Richard Attenborough, The Sand Pebbles (1966) and Doctor Dolittle (1967), Richard Benjamin in The Sunshine Boys (1975) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Nocturnal Animals (2016).

For his role of Messala in 'Ben- Hur' he had to grow a beard then when it was quite long researchers discovered that young Roman tribunes didn't have beards so it had to come off. It was the decided he should have brown eyes which meant him having to wear contact lenses to hide his blue eyes and have lifts in his shoes to make him equal height to that of Charlton Heston's 6ft 2 inch.

There seems to be some confusion as to Boyd's date of birth. Reference works usually give 1928 as his birth-date, and his obituaries referred to him as being 49 at the time of his sudden death.

Shortly before his death he was seriously considered for the role of the Regimental Sergeant Major in The Wild Geese (1978), which was subsequently played by Jack Watson.

He left the cast of "Cleopatra" at an early stage of production, as did Peter Finch (they had been signed to play Antony and Caesar respectively), and, in the same period, caused some further annoyance to his bosses at Twentieth Century Fox by turning down the role of Boaz in "The Story Of Ruth". Stuart Whitman played this part instead; the film was a flop. As a result, Boyd was, following his stardom-making performance in "Ben-Hur,", absent from the screen for over eighteen months.

Was associated with the lead role in a film version of Mary Renault's novel of ancient Crete, "The King Must Die." The film was never made.