Top five MINI big-screen starring roles

The Mini should have its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, as only a handful of actors can lay claim to such a long career on the silver screen. Here’s just a small selection of its leading roles over the last 60 years.

Even though it starred big-name actors such as Michael Caine, Noel Coward and Benny Hill, the Mini Cooper S is ultimately the biggest star in the iconic 1969 heist film, The Italian Job, in which a gang of thieves steal a loot of gold from Turin -- the home of Fiat -- and escape into Switzerland.

MINI part-financed a remake starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Donald Sutherland and Jason Statham in 2003.

This one follows in the wheel tracks of an iconic Jaguar E-Type in the original Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and then a (clearly paid-for product placement) time-travelling Volkswagen New Beetle in the follow-up Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

MINI jumped on the Bond-spoofing bandwagon for the final instalment of the trilogy, Austin Powers in Goldmember with Mike Myer’s Austin Powers character driving a Cooper S draped in the Union Jack as his own personal car.

Peter Sellars loved his own modified Mini -- a lavishly appointed Cooper S complete with wicker cane body panels and a leather interior – so much that he had a replica made for the second instalment in the Pink Panther spy-spoof comedy series, A Shot in the Dark.

It was the Mini’s big-screen debut in 1964 but certainly not its last.

Continuing Mini’s adventurous silver-screen fascination with spy films, amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne thrashes a late-model MkV Mini Mayfair through the streets of Paris to escape from the French police in The Bourne Identity.

Is there a better way to save the world and rid an alien invasion of 1980s video game characters than by transforming a quartet of MINIs into Pac Man-munching ghosts?

Ummm… Sure! Well -- spoiler alert -- that’s what happened in the 2015 Adam Sandler kid-flick Pixels.