Sean Connery: 1961–1967, 1970–1971 and 1982–1983 Sean Connery was the first actor to portray Bond in film in
Dr. No (1962). A Scottish amateur bodybuilder, he had come to the attention of the Bond film producers after several appearances in British films from the late 1950s. Connery's interpretation of the character differed considerably from Fleming's, being more promiscuous and cold-blooded than the literary version. Connery described Bond as "a complete sensualist—senses highly tuned, awake to everything, quite amoral. I particularly like him because he thrives on conflict". Christopher Bray says of him that "in his single-minded, laconic, mocking, self-sufficient vanity, Connery's Bond was the epitome of sixties consumer culture". in July 1971, filming
Diamonds Are Forever Interviewed by
Oriana Fallaci in 1965, Connery identified where he had altered the character for the films, saying "I said to the producers that the character had one defect, there was no humor about him; to get him accepted, they'd have to let me play him tongue-in-cheek, so people could laugh. They agreed, and there you are: today Bond is accepted to such an extent that even philosophers take the trouble to analyze him, even intellectuals enjoy defending him or attacking him. And even while they're laughing at him, people take him terribly seriously". Connery went on to add that "Bond is important: this invincible superman that every man would like to copy, that every woman would like to conquer, this dream we all have of survival. And then one can't help liking him". After the pressures of five films in six years, Connery left the role after the 1967 film
You Only Live Twice saying, "It became a terrible pressure, like living in a goldfish bowl ... that was part of the reason I wanted to be finished with Bond. Also I had become completely identified with it, and it became very wearing and very boring". After a hiatus of one film—''
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in which George Lazenby played Bond—Connery returned to the role for Diamonds Are Forever'' after
David V. Picker, the head of
United Artists, made it clear that Connery was to be enticed back to the role and that money was no object. When approached about resuming the role of Bond, Connery demanded—and received—a fee of £1.25 million (£ million in pounds), 12.5% of the gross profits and, as a further enticement, United Artists offered to back two films of his choice. His performance received mixed reviews, with Raymond Benson considering that Connery "looks weary and bored ... he is overweight, slow-moving, and doesn't seem to be trying to create a credible character". Despite that, Benson considers that Connery "still radiates more screen presence than Roger Moore or George Lazenby". On the other hand,
Pauline Kael said "Connery's James Bond is less lecherous than before and less foppish—and he's better this way". Producer
Jack Schwartzman moved ahead with a non-Eon Bond film in the early 1980s, following the controversy over the 1961 novel
Thunderball and the subsequent
long legal battle;
David Niven: 1967 starred in the 1967 film
Casino Royale When Sean Connery had been cast in November 1961,
David Niven had been Fleming's choice for the role; the actor reflected the author's image of the character. In 1965 producer
Charles Feldman signed Niven to play Sir James Bond for
Casino Royale, a film not made by
Eon Productions. Connery and
Peter Sellers had both turned down the role. Niven was 56 when he played Bond and his characterisation was that of an elderly man who had won the
Victoria Cross at the
siege of Mafeking, had a daughter by his lover, the spy
Mata Hari, played
Claude Debussy on the piano, ate
royal jelly and cultivated black roses. The concept of Bond is that once Niven's Bond retired, his name and 007 designation was passed to another agent to keep the legend alive; James Chapman notes that the implication was that the "other Bond" was that played by Connery. Chapman considered the concept of an elderly Bond interesting, with Bond referring to Connery's Bond as a "sexual acrobat who leaves a trail of beautiful dead women behind like blown roses". In line with the literary Bond, Niven's character drives a
vintage Bentley, rather than the
Aston Martin favoured by Connery. Bond scholar Steven Jay Rubin thought Niven perfectly cast as the retired Bond, and saw him as "a throw-back to the hell-for-leather adventure heroes" of the character, which paralleled Niven's own life and career. Barnes and Hearn describe this as a "perfectly fair interpretation", given the way Niven approached the role, while Raymond Benson thinks casting Niven was "intelligent". Jeremy Black questioned the use of Niven in the role, observing that he did not seem to be a killer, and did not have the "disconcerting edge" that Connery had.
George Lazenby: 1968–1969 in ''On Her Majesty's Secret Service'' With the departure of Connery after
You Only Live Twice (1967), Broccoli and director
Peter R. Hunt chose little-known
Australian actor
George Lazenby (born 1939), to be the third major actor (following
Sean Connery and
David Niven) to play the role of Bond. He first came to their attention in a
Fry's Chocolate Cream advertisement. Screenwriter
Tom Mankiewicz agreed with this view, praising Dalton's "androgynous... and evil" screen persona. Director John Glen also felt that Dalton was the best actor who portrayed Bond, and that he was ahead of his time, noting the comparisons between Daniel Craig's incarnation to that of Dalton's. Dalton was voted the second-best Bond, behind Connery, in a publicly conducted poll by
Radio Times in anticipation to the 25th Bond film,
No Time to Die. Dalton's films did not perform as well at the box office as most of the previous films. Commentators such as
Screen International considered the Bond series had run its course in the age of series such as
Indiana Jones and
Lethal Weapon. Edward P. Comentale observed that "Dalton, for all his occasional flat northern vowels, was probably too much the stage actor to be convincing as an action hero in the age of
Willis,
Schwarzenegger and
Stallone". After just two films—
The Living Daylights and
Licence to Kill—litigation ensued over the licensing of the Bond catalogue, delaying what would have been Dalton's third film by several years. His six-year contract expired in 1993 and he left the series in 1994.
Pierce Brosnan: 1994–2004 at the
2002 Cannes Film Festival|alt=Smiling man with short, tousled hair, wearing white shirt open at collar, and black jacket. After Timothy Dalton retired from the Bond role in 1994, Eon turned to the actor they had considered after
A View to a Kill:
Pierce Brosnan. He was offered a three-film contract, with an option on a fourth; his salary for his first film,
GoldenEye, was $4 million, which rose to $16.5 million for his fourth and final outing,
Die Another Day. Brosnan had first met Broccoli on the set of
For Your Eyes Only, when Brosnan's wife,
Cassandra Harris, was appearing in the film as Countess Lisl von Schlaf, and the couple lunched with Broccoli during filming. Brosnan went on to play a criminal-turned-private investigator in
Remington Steele in the 1980s, where he captured some of the traits of previous Bonds in playing the role: like Moore, he exemplified a high degree of suavity, elegance, charm and wit, but displayed a masculinity and grittiness on occasion reminiscent of Connery's Bond, both successfully "combine the character's Englishness with a classless internationalism that is highly knowing". Andrew Spicer says that "Brosnan's frame carries the 'Armani look' with its refined understated Englishness, to perfection. His lithe, sinuous athleticism is well suited to the fast-paced action and state-of-the-art gadgetry that retains the series' core appeal". James Chapman also considered Brosnan's appearance striking, saying the actor had "old-fashioned, darkly handsome matinee idol looks". With Brosnan, the Bond writers knew that because of the changes in public attitudes, he could not be as overtly sexual and dominant over women as Connery's Bond, and was denounced by M in
GoldenEye as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the
Cold War". Brosnan was seen by many as the quintessential James Bond in appearance and manner; displaying an air of coolness, elegance and a grace which made him believable as an international playboy, if not purely as an assassin. John G. Stackhouse, for instance, argues that it is preposterous that any man as strikingly handsome as Brosnan, or Connery, could be a secret agent, saying, "When Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan enters a room, everyone notices. Thus it is ridiculous to suppose that James Bond, looking like that, could be a secret agent for longer than about two seconds". Brosnan's Bond was introduced in
GoldenEye; James Chapman argues that the film works his portrayal of Bond into the history of the others in the series through the post-credits sequence use of the , previously seen in
Goldfinger and
Thunderball, "thus immediately evoking the memory of [Sean] Connery". Brosnan's characterisation of Bond was seen by Jeremy Black as being "closer to the Fleming novels than Moore ... yet he is also lighter and less intense than Dalton". Black also commented that the shift in character in the first three films reflected changing social opinions, with Bond not smoking. Brosnan was clear he wanted to change Bond's smoking habit, saying "I don't give a damn about everyone's perception of the character: I think smoking causes
cancer therefore he doesn't smoke", although he did smoke a Cuban cigar in
Die Another Day. Brosnan continued with the use of humour prevalent with other portrayals, and provided a "mix of action and danger threaded through with the right amount of wit and humour"; Smith and Lavington saw the humour largely as puns that were "flippant, but not crass". After four films in the role, Brosnan stated he wished to do one final Bond film. Although plans were made for a film to be released in 2004, negotiations stalled and Brosnan announced his intention to leave the franchise in July 2004.
Daniel Craig: 2005–2021 at the Berlin premiere of
Spectre in October 2015 On 14 October 2005, Eon Productions,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and
Sony Pictures Entertainment introduced at a press conference in London
Daniel Craig as the sixth actor to portray Bond in the Eon series. A tuxedo- and lifejacket-clad Craig arrived via a
Royal Navy speedboat. Craig accepted the role based on the strength of the script for
Casino Royale; he later recalled that "once I sat down and read the story, I just thought that I wanted to tell [it] ... I'm a big Bond fan, and I love what he represents". Significant controversy followed the decision, with some critics and fans expressing doubt the producers had made the right choice. Throughout the entire production period, Internet campaigns such as danielcraigisnotbond.com expressed their dissatisfaction and threatened to boycott the film in protest. Craig, unlike previous actors, was not considered by the protesters to fit the tall, dark, handsome and charismatic image of Bond to which viewers had been accustomed. Many disparagingly called him "James Blonde", believing the blond-haired, blue-eyed Craig far from the traditional tall, dark and suave actors who had earlier portrayed him. The
Daily Mirror ran a front-page news story critical of Craig, with the headline, ''The Name's Bland – James Bland''. Craig first played Bond in the 2006 film
Casino Royale, an adaptation of Fleming's
novel of the same name and a
reboot of the Eon series, which saw Bond earn his 00 status. Despite the negative press on his appointment, Craig was widely praised by critics and former Bonds after the release of the film, many of whom believed he was the first actor to truly nail the character as portrayed by Fleming.
Todd McCarthy, reviewing the film for
Variety, considered that "Craig comes closer to the author's original conception of this exceptionally long-lived male fantasy figure than anyone since early Sean Connery", and he went on to say that "Craig once and for all claims the character as his own".
Steven Spielberg, who had directed Craig in the 2005 film
Munich, called him "the perfect 21st-century Bond". Paul Arendt, writing for the
BBC, agreed, observing that "Daniel Craig is not a good Bond. He's a
great Bond. Specifically, he is 007 as conceived by Ian Fleming—a professional killing machine, a charming, cold-hearted patriot with a taste for luxury. Craig is the first actor to really nail 007's defining characteristic: he's an absolute swine". James Chapman commented on the realism and violence in the film, noting that Bond is seen to seriously bleed for the first time in the series; Chapman also identified a number of violent scenes which make
Casino Royale notable in the series. In 2012
Skyfall was released; it was Craig's third outing as 007. Reviewing the film,
Philip French, writing in
The Observer, considered that Craig managed to "get out of the shadow of Connery", while the
New Statesman thought that he had "relaxed into Bond without losing any steeliness". == References ==