Eileen Bond fuming about ‘appalling’ Bondy telemovie

At least one person won’t be hooked on Channel 9’s new telemovie House of Bond – Eileen Bond herself.

The first wife of the disgraced late tycoon Alan Bond told The Daily Telegraph that the depiction of her marriage was false. 

Eileen Bond, pictured below with her daughter in 2003, called the snippets she had seen of House of Bond “appalling.”

The scenes she was particularly offended by involved Bond, who’s been long known to Australians as ‘Red’, threatening to take millions of dollars from her ex-husband, and another scene in which Alan Bond threatens to have her killed.

“Alan, in our 37 years of marriage, never spoke to me like that, never said a word,” Bond told the newspaper.

Bond, who also denied threatening Alan Bond over money, said she was considering legal action over the two-part series, which she said she wanted correction for the sake of her grandchildren. 

Actor Ben Mingay plays the disgraced Australian businessman, who died in June 2015 at the age of 77, while Adrienne Pickering plays Eileen Bond in House of Bond, which is due to premiere next month. Rachael Taylor will play Diana Bliss, Alan Bond’s second wife, who committed suicide in 2012.

Alan Bond was one of Australia’s most high-profile businessmen in the 1980s and 90s, bankrolling the yacht Australia II in the 1983 America’s Cup, which saw the first time a country other than the US win the prestigious yacht race, and buying Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Irises’ painting for $54 million in 1987.

But the English-born tycoon was declared bankrupt in 1992 after failing to repay a multi-million dollar loan and in 1997 was jailed on fraud charges over the transfer of $1.2 billion from one of his businesses to another.

In a statement to the Daily Mail, Channel 9 said only that “House of Bond is the rags-to-riches tale that will expose Alan ‘Bondy’ Bond’s incredible rise and spectacular fall in the 1970s and 80s … Was Bond a hero? A villain? Or a little bit of both?”.

Will you watch House of Bond? Do you remember when Australia won the America’s Cup? What did you think of Alan Bond?