For the record, 10 actors have played the role of James Bond before Daniel Craig. If we subtract Barry Nelson in the one-hour 1954 TV version of Casino Royale and the four actors in the 1967 Casino Royale spoof, that leaves five.
A library of books has been written comparing these five interpretations and chronicling what the role has done to the various actors' lives and careers, and it would be presumptuous of me to try to explore such a vast slab of cultural history in a sidebar to a movie review.
However, as a long-time Bond-watcher and one of the few journalists to have interviewed all five pre-Craig Bonds, I do have some thoughts on the subject and this new Bond start seems a proper occasion to put them down. So here goes:
SEAN CONNERY
When this 32-year-old Scottish actor first appeared as Bond in 1962's Dr. No, it electrified the world. It was simply one of the cinema's great meetings of an iconic star with a signature role, like Clark Gable as Rhett Butler or Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine.
His Bond exuded a charisma the movies had never seen before. He was sexy, suave, smugly debonair, supremely arrogant, sadistically cruel, relentlessly aggressive and capable of wryly tossing off tongue-in-cheek one-liners like no actor in history.
Eight years after Connery walked away from Bond, I went to LA to interview him on the set of a bad movie called Meteor, and, as I spent the day observing him, it was easy to see that all the aspects of the Bond persona are very much reflections, or slight exaggerations, of his own character.
Connery was in a foul mood that day — he was going through a difficult lawsuit — and after he'd kept me at arm's length for many hours, his frustrated publicist finally took me to Connery's trailer so I would be unavoidable. At the end of the day, finding us there, his privacy violated, Connery literally exploded.
He screamed, he grabbed the poor publicist by the shirt collar, he filled the confined space with his rage, he literally threw us out. It was the only time in my life I've ever feared that a celebrity might physically harm me. And yet, it also was thrilling. I thought: I'm being attacked by James Bond!
Years after that, I tried again and this time he was a pussycat and even apologized for that incident, blaming a bad turn in his lawsuit. But I was not fooled. Underneath the charm, there's a panther inside this man and this panther is James Bond.
GEORGE LAZENBY
After establishing himself as the Fifth Beatle (Connery's favorite expression for his relationship with Bond) in five films, Connery temporarily decided in 1967 that he'd had enough, and the producers briefly replaced him with this unknown Australian model.
Lazenby only made one Bond picture, 1969s On Her Majesty's Secret Service. If you look at it today, he's not half as horrible as everyone remembers and the movie itself works off the performance of Diana Rigg, in the largest and best of the early Bond-girl roles.
Despite his scathing reviews, the producers were willing to stay with him and Lazenby might have grown into the role. But it was the year of Woodstock, and he saw Bond as an irrelevant anachronism to everything that was now cool. He grew a beard for the publicity tour, bad-mouthed the movie and demanded to be let go from his contract.
When I interviewed him long after his Bond experience on the set of a low-budget kung fu movie, I found a big, likable Aussie who fully realized he had muffed his chance at the big time and blamed only himself, but was somewhat resentful that his name had become a show-biz synonym for "spectacular bad casting."
ROGER MOORE
After Lazenby, Connery returned to the role for 1971s Diamonds Are Forever (and would return one more time, for the "unofficial" Bond, 1983s Never Say Never Again) before the franchise was turned over to Roger Moore in 1973s Live and Let Die.
Producer Cubby Broccoli had wanted Moore for the role even before Connery (his obligations as TV's The Saint made him unavailable), and Moore's upper-class manner and more traditional good looks were thought to be a better fit for the snobbish Bond of the Ian Fleming novels.
Moore was Bond for 12 years and seven movies, and he played him as a light comedian — a silly Bond — who was increasingly dwarfed by the growing scale of the movies' sets and special effects, and a style that was becoming cartoonish and absurd. His Bonds did well at the box office, but the critics routinely murdered him.
When I interviewed him after the New York premiere of For Your Eyes Only in 1981, it was a totally pleasant experience. Moore is the kind of guy you'd like to sit next to at a dinner party — he's funny, glib, a great storyteller, and self-deprecating in a way that's truly endearing.
In the course of the interview, he also said something that, in retrospect, has always seemed very telling to me, even profound. He said he had never gotten over feeling "a little embarrassed at being Sean's stand-in." I think this embarrassment comes across in the films. It's almost the keynote of his James Bond.
TIMOTHY DALTON
When Moore abdicated and Dalton inherited the role in 1987, I flew to London for the royal premiere of The Living Daylights. I actually sat in the same row as Dalton and two rows behind Prince Charles and Princess Diana. (She was enthralled by the movie, he dozed off in the first act, and I knew that marriage wouldn't last.)
The next day's round of press interviews were like a victory celebration. Every critic in the room seemed to think the Bond movies had finally found a successor to Connery and that Dalton — a Shakespeare-trained stage veteran — would be at it for the next 20 years.
But Dalton's follow-up, 1989s License To Kill, showed a substantial drop at the box office, and it became clear in this harder-edged Bond outing that Dalton's crueler moments were not totally convincing, and the sadistic one-liners — and other witticisms — tended to drop from his lips to the floor.
Dalton is an extremely nice guy, and the thing I recall most from my interview with him was a distinct gentleness. Sadly, you can't fool the camera, and this quality also came out in his two Bonds, conflicted with the ruthlessness of the character and made too many of his scenes ring false.
PIERCE BROSNAN
During a four-year lag in the series because of legal problems, Dalton's contract expired, he choose not to continue and the role went to this Irish actor — TV's Remington Steele — who had regularly topped audience polls of who should be the next Bond.
Like Dalton's spy, Brosnan's leaner, meaner, back-to-basics Bond was greeted with considerable enthusiasm by the press, and he had a good run in four pictures between 1995 and 2002 that consecutively out-grossed each other and re-established the brand for a new generation.
But while Brosnan definitely had the arrogance, he always seemed to me very stiff, uptight and self-consciously serious in the role, and he never exuded the kind of charisma that made me want to "be" that character in my fantasies — there's no panther behind his eyes. Physically, he's also very slight.
When I interviewed him in 1995 for his first Bond, GoldenEye, he misinterpreted one of my questions as an insult and came close to losing his temper. It was an awkward moment, but in the heat of it I distinctly remember thinking: If push comes to shove, I can take this guy. I certainly never felt that way about Connery.
THE FINAL ACCOUNTING
In the end, it always gets back to Connery. Bill Gates once famously said that he was a member of a generation "to whom James Bond will always be Sean Connery," and this generational prejudice certainly colors my opinion of things.
But I stand witness to the fact that Connery is the only one of these five actors who is truly impressive and intimidating in person, and he's the only one who's had an A-list movie-star career outside of Bond. (Indeed, he's had it for 44 years and, at age 76, he's still a major box-office star.)
He created the Bond mold out of his personality, and none of his successors was able to successfully pour himself into it or create anything half as interesting as an alternative. This is why none of the Connery-less Bond films has ever completely worked — even though, granted, they each have their moments and the style is always fun to revisit.
How will Craig fare in this saga of frustration? Time will tell. He definitely has some of the panther in him, and he's made a good start. But his lack of natural elegance and leading-man stature is likely to grind on our nerves once the novelty of his "blunt-instrument" Bond wears off.
My guess is he'll make a few Bonds and slip away. Like his four predecessors — all of whom resigned the part — he's likely to find that the challenge of duplicating one of the movies' great star turns is an impossible, and ultimately thankless, task.
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