Dunhill Unique Silver Lighter

In the 1989 movie Licence To Kill (1989) James Bond (Timothy Dalton) receives a Dunhill lighter from his good friend Felix Leiter and his wife Della on their wedding day. The lighter is a silver Dunhill Unique with plain finish.

The Unique lighter is still available but not with a plain finish as seen in the film: the Unique lighter now comes in Barley or Vertical Lines texture (see images on the left).

The lighter seen in the film has an inscription that reads:

James,
Love Always
Della and Felix

Bond takes the lighter with him on his rogue mission: we see the lighter laying next to him in the Casino de Isthmus City. Bond uses the lighter at the end of the movie to ignite Sanchez who is soaked in gasoline, so we can assume that in the story, the lighter is lost. The actual lighter seen in the film got a longer life: 007 Magazine reported in 1989 that Timothy Dalton had suggested to Cubby Broccoli that he donate the the cigarette lighter to the 'Children In Need' campaign, which Cubby did. The final price of the lighter is not known, but two days after the start of the auction the bidding had risen to £3,000.

Dunhill provided accessories for other Bond movies as well. The association first began in 1962 when the production team acquired a cigarette lighter for Sean Connery's introduction in Dr. No (read more on ajb007.co.uk). Bond uses a gold Dunhill lighter and wears a Dunhill belt and gold/silver Dunhill cufflinks in Tomorrow Never Dies, two or three other Dunhill cufflinks in The World Is Not Enough and a silver L-shaped pair of cufflinks in Die Another Day.

The Dunhill Unique lighter without the vertical lines or barley texture is difficult to find, of course eBay is always a good place to look.

Dunhill in James Bond novels

Dunhill as a brand is also mentioned in some of the Ian Fleming novels. In From Russia With Love a "well-used Dunhill Gold Lighter" is mentioned on the first page as one of the possessions of a dead body. In the 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, Tiger Tanaka uses a "Dunhill filter holder" and in The Living Daylights, Captain Sender also uses a "Dunhill filtered cigarette holder".