Craig said 96-year-old Lansbury – who died Tuesday, after becoming a household name through playing a writer-detective in “Murder, She Wrote”— had been “ in my life all my life“.

“I mean, my favourite film was *‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’,”* said the James Bond franchise legend, referring to the 1971 Disney hit film that Lansbury had starred.

“The fact that she’s in our movie, we’re so blessed – and also what an incredible life she had,” Craig, 54, told reporters at a press conference alongside other “Glass Onion” filmmakers ahead of its European premiere.

Director Rian Johnson said Lansbury’s appearance in his follow-up to the 2019 murder mystery “Knives Out”, alongside one by the late Broadway icon Stephen Sondheim who died last November, followed brief filming visits he made to their homes.

“Besides just the honour of having them in the movie… just being able to have 10 minutes with each of them, to tell them what their work has meant to me was really, really special,” he added.

Subverting the genre

“Glass Onion”, which features a star-studded ensemble cast that also includes Edward Norton, Kate Hudson and Janelle Monae, will hit cinemas for just a week next month before streaming on Netflix in late December.

Following the success of the first film – which netted more than $300 million at the global box office, despite a budget of just $40 million – Craig will also return as Southern gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc for the third time.

Johnson – who previously directed the divisive blockbuster “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” – reiterated that his budding new franchise stems from his love for prolific British crime writer Agatha Christie.

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He said his contemporary take on the whodunit, which in this instalment includes Norton as a vainglorious tech billionaire and Hudson as a vacuous fashionista, tries to emulate her “subversive” approach a century ago.

“She was putting twists on it that if you did them today, people would say ‘that’s very subversive, you’re subverting the genre’,” said the American director, who has laced his efforts with considerable satire and humour.

“If Agatha Christie were writing right now, she’d have tech billionaires and she’d have these characters.

“She wasn’t writing period pieces, she was writing exactly to her time and all of the things that we think of as murder mystery tropes were people in society.”