Before 2012 Bond film Skyfall fell into place, Oscar-nominated Frost/Nixon screenwriter Peter Morgan was hired to work on a script with franchise regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

Little is know about Morgan's storyline, only that the writer plotted out "a shocking story" and "the central idea... the hook" was retained for Skyfall.

Morgan's lost 007 movie plot has finally been revealed thanks to new book Some King of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury.

His treatment, titled Once Upon a Spy, began during the Cold War with Judi Dench's M an MI6 agent stationed in Berlin.

Her affair with a KGB agent comes back to haunt her 30 years later after the Russian spy's death. His son, a corrupt oligarch, blackmails M leaving her career in jeopardy.

She dispatches Bond to make a payoff, but a dramatic turn of events forces 007 to kill M at the film's climax.

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Wade revealed that Morgan's idea was eventually rejected by director Sam Mendes and franchise producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson.

"Neal and I are pretty well steeped in [Ian] Fleming. I think Peter was more interested in [John] Le Carré. It just didn't work," he said.

After Morgan's departure, Purvis and Wade penned a first draft script for Skyfall, then titled Nothing is Forever.

In it, the death of M is retained but Javier Bardem's villain is known as Raoul Sousa and it's his bombing of a Barcelona subway that eventually steers M into a safe house where she's killed.

A bureaucrat named Mallender (eventually Ralph Fiennes's Mallory in Skyfall) then takes over as her successor.

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Though the similarities with Skyfall are clear, it's fascinating to learn about the early development process for the most commercially-successful Bond movie of all time.

Particularly the Morgan version, which Wade admitted to having huge reservations about.

"We always found that really, really difficult to make credible or satisfying. It was very dark and frankly I don't think it really worked," he explained.

"The only thing that remained was M's past comes back to haunt her and she dies at the end."

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