George Smiley - Models

Models

In 1995, le Carré said that the character of George Smiley was inspired by his one-time Lincoln College, Oxford tutor, the former Rev. Vivian Green — a renowned historian and author with an encyclopaedic knowledge. However, other than the thick spectacles and Green's habit of disappearing into a crowd, there were too many dissimilarities between the loquacious Green and the reticent Smiley to make this a clear match, and so other sources for Smiley continued to be named. It has been suggested that le Carré subconsciously took the name of his hero from special forces and intelligence officer Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley. More commonly, it was rumoured that le Carré modelled the character on Sir Maurice Oldfield, a former head of British Intelligence, who physically resembled Smiley. Le Carré denied the rumours, citing the fact that Oldfield and he were not contemporaries, although he and Alec Guinness lunched with Oldfield when Guinness was researching the role of Smiley, and several of Oldfield's mannerisms of dress and behaviour were adopted by the actor for his performance.

Oldfield himself believed that, although Green probably inspired le Carré, the character of Smiley was primarily based on John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, who had been le Carré's boss when he originally joined MI5, prior to his career in MI6. In 1999, le Carré confirmed that Bingham was also an inspiration for Smiley, and in 2000 went further, writing in an introduction to a reissue of one of Bingham's novels that "He had been one of two men who had gone into the making of George Smiley. Nobody who knew John and the work he was doing could have missed the description of Smiley in my first novel".

Various le Carré works involve other characters resembling Bingham; the most notable is Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy.