An Agent of Change: How each James Bond actor personified his era

The character of James Bond arrived fully formed in Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, 1953's Casino Royale. The author had conjured the license-to-kill hero from the shadowy secret agents and soldier-of-fortune commandos he'd crossed paths with while working for British Naval Intelligence during World War II. On the page, Fleming's Bond was described as being 6 feet tall, weighing 168 pounds, and in his mid- to late 30s. He had a "cruel" mouth, a 3-inch-long vertical scar on his right cheek and short black hair — a comma of which fell across his forehead. He also drove a Bentley and smoked up to 70 custom-made cigarettes a day — a mix of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos produced by Morland of Grosvenor Street. Fleming's Bond had a passion for cars, a refined palate and a sweet tooth for the ladies. In later years Fleming would say that his most famous literary creation was "a creature of his era."

Over nearly seven decades, that era would constantly change. Bond's times and the real-world events that informed them would become a moving target — from the paranoia-soaked heights of the Cold War to the ensuing era of détente to the global threat of drug cartels and rogue states to our still-fresh post-9/11 anxieties. So too would the actors who'd play Fleming's hero on the big screen, each of whom would reflect his particular moment in history in his own unique way, put- ting his personal stamp on the character while also engaging in a larger-dialogue world beyond the one inside the movie theater.

When Sean Connery was tapped to play Bond for the series' kickoff installment, 1962's Dr. No, Fleming couldn't have been less pleased with the selection. At 32, Connery was the right age and had the right physicality to play the character. But Connery was a relatively unknown actor at the time — and one who (gasp!) had come up as an amateur bodybuilder. Fleming had always imagined someone suave, elegant, debonair in the role. Someone like David Niven, not a working-class Scot. Clearly he'd underestimated Connery. Years later he would even admit as much, saying that he couldn't imagine anyone else in the part. Fleming would even rewrite 007's backstory to include a Scottish father.

From the beginning, Connery was a sexier, more swaggering and more ruggedly intense Bond than the one Fleming had envisioned while sitting behind his typewriter. And in the early '60s, the era of JFK and Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack, this made a perfect kind of sense. Yes, Connery's 007 gave off a musky whiff of unpredictability and danger (killing was Bond's business . . . and during the Cold War, business was good), but he was also an unrepentant lothario, routinely bedding and often roughing up women without so much as a second thought. Connery was the pre-women's lib Bond.

During Connery's six official films as 007, the plots and villains would change like whack-a-mole targets, but each of his movies mined the same East-West fear as subtext. Dr. No arrived in theaters five years after the launch of Sputnik and in the midst of the space race with the Soviet Union. And while that film's titular megalomaniac was technically Chinese-German and not Russian, there's a timeliness to his nefarious scheme to foil an Ameri- can space launch with a terrifying high-tech radio-beam weapon.

With the first Bond sequel, 1963's From Russia with Love, it was time to face off more overtly with the era's hammer-and-sickle heavies. Just two years after the rise of the Berlin Wall and one after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film is a barely disguised metaphor for the mutually assured destruction mind-set of the early '60s. SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is a stand- in for the Communist menace, duping Bond and a Russian-trained Mata Hari (Daniela Bianchi) into stealing a top-secret decoding device. Lotte Lenya's butch Svengali, Rosa Klebb, with her dagger-soled shoe, shows just how far our Cold War enemies will go for world domination. SPECTRE might have been a fiction, but moviegoers at the time didn't have to squint very hard to see that it represented the evil that lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Connery would continue to square off with SPECTRE in 1965's Thunderball and 1967's You Only Live Twice, after it steals nuclear warheads and hijacks a space capsule, before passing the double-O baton to George Lazenby. But by the time he left the series (before briefly returning again for 1971's Diamonds Are Forever) he'd become the Cold War era's savior and superman. Every time he squeezed the trigger of his Walther PPK for Queen and country, he was tilting the fight of us-versus-them more and more toward us.

For all but the most ardent Bond aficionados, Connery's successor, George Lazenby, remains something between a footnote and a punch line — a one-and-done 007 who's little more than a trivia-night answer. But true Bond obsessives know that his sole turn in the tux in 1969's unfairly derided On Her Majesty's Secret Service is actually one of the franchise's top-tier entries. A rough-and-tumble Australian commercial model, Lazenby was far from a polished professional actor. He was coarse around the edges, more street-smart than book-smart. During his audition to play Bond, he even punched a stunt coordinator in the face. Bond producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli was impressed.

Lazenby couldn't sell a dry one-liner with the same ease or confidence as Connery, but his bare-knuckle charisma was a reflection of something else that was simmering in the culture. By the late '60s, in the wake of the Summer of Love, when a younger generation of men became more open about their feelings, here was a brute who was able to show his vulnerable side. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, not only are the mod fashions of the era on parade (dig the frilly, ruffled shirt Bond wears above his kilt while visiting Blofeld's alpine aerie), the secret agent's feelings are too.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service gives us Bond for the Age of Aquarius. He's no hippie, but he is a man who might own a Cat Stevens album or spend a week getting in touch with himself at California's Esalen Institute à la Don Draper. While Connery's 007 tended to treat women with disposable casualness, Lazenby's Bond was more emotionally complex. In the film, yes, he battles SPECTRE. But he also falls in love with Diana Rigg's Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo, whom he marries before she's ultimately taken away from him. It's a deeply moving moment in a series not exactly designed for moving moments. This never happened to the other fellow, indeed.

Following Connery's quickie return engagement in Diamonds Are Forever, the Bond brain trust went after an actor who'd always been on their 007 short list. Roger Moore would turn out to be the antithesis to Connery: silky smooth where his predecessor was sandpaper rough; silly where he was serious; light where he was dark. Moore was tailor-made for the Smiley-Face-Decal Me Decade. As the Cold War began to thaw, the franchise struggled to find topical new adversaries, turning to self- parody and camp. It also began to comment on the world more culturally than politically.

During his seven Bond films between 1973 and 1985, Moore would still tangle with the Russians from time to time — both rogue and state-sponsored. But his run reflected the series' struggle to find a foe with the same real-world resonance. Instead, Moore's sequels try to tap into the zeitgeist in a different way, wrestling with new anxieties (the environment, nuclear disarmament, the microchip industry) while opportunistically piggybacking on other successful movie trends.

Moore's debut, 1973's Live and Let Die, for example, isn't so much a straight 007 chapter as it is an awkward cocktail of an old-fashioned globe-trotting espionage and a funky blaxploitation flick. By the time the film opened, there'd been a string of hugely successful, down-and-dirty B-movies that had spoken to America's underserved urban audience (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Shaft, and Super Fly among them). The idea of plopping an effete martini-drinking spy in that milieu may not have seemed obvious, but it made sense commercially. In the film, Moore's Bond squares off against Yaphet Kotto's Kananga — a ruthless drug kingpin out to corner the world's heroin trade, something that was destroying America's inner cities at the time.

Exploiting cultural trends was a key element in the Bond playbook throughout Moore's comparatively lighthearted tenure. And the actor met each new '70s fad with an amused cocked eyebrow and some fanciful new techno gadget from the Q branch. The Man with the Golden Gun, released in 1974, borrowed from the post-Bruce Lee kung fu craze, and 1979's Moonraker was a craven attempt to cash in on Star Wars by sending Bond into space. Even when the Russians did figure into the plot (as in 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me), they were no longer our enemies but rather our allies, albeit uneasy ones.

If each subsequent Bond film is a dialogue with what's going on in the world offscreen, then so too is each passing of the 007 torch. Just as Moore was a reaction to Connery, Moore's successor would be a reaction to him. Moore was 57 by the time A View to a Kill hit theaters — a long-in-the-tooth, sexist dinosaur Bond who clearly was no longer doing his own onscreen stunt scenes (if he ever had to begin with). At 41, Timothy Dalton seemed to be a relatively youthful shot in the arm. But despite all of his vitality, his 007 seemed to be shaken and stirred into sobriety by the '80s AIDS crisis. In his launchpad chapter, 1987's thinly veiled Iran-Contra allegory The Living Daylights, Dalton's Bond is no longer a profligate playboy; he's more chaste — almost to the point of sexlessness. With what was going on in the headlines, it was no longer quite so cool to hop in the sack with anyone you just met at the baccarat table.

In The Living Daylights, Bond does return to his topical, Communist-fighting roots, battling a diabolical Russian general and even riding with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (at the time a western ally against the Russians). But by the time its follow-up, 1989's Licence to Kill, arrived, the franchise was back to borrowing from other successful films (namely the banana-republic drug mechanics of Scarface) and flirting with the National Enquirer-pitched kitsch of a crooked televangelist played by Wayne Newton. Dalton was a darker and more cynical Bond to be sure, but his 007 would ultimately be too much of a pivot for the character to bear. His run would end after two films.

After a long five-year nap, a new-and-improved Bond was named: Pierce Brosnan. Broccoli had wanted the Irish actor to be Moore's smooth replacement, but Brosnan couldn't get out of his Remington Steele contract at the time. Brosnan's hit television show had already proved that he could look dashing in a tuxedo, but how would he fare against the more amorphous and paranoia-fueled late-capitalism threats of the '90s? In 1995's GoldenEye, the enemy would be closer to home, coming not from SPECTRE or the East but instead from within, in the form of a tech-savvy former MI6 colleague gone rogue. In 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, the big baddie is a Rupert Murdoch-like media tycoon out to start World War III for no other reason than to goose ratings. And in 1999's The World Is Not Enough, Brosnan's 007 gets ensnarled in oil politics. Only in Brosnan's last outing, 2002's Die Another Day, did an old-fashioned enemy surface: the North Koreans. But by then Brosnan was also driving invisible cars and throwing down with villains who lived in ice castles.

Fleming had always described his literary creation as a "blunt instrument." But that idea seemed to vanish along with Connery. Daniel Craig would mark a return to that cold-and-brutal concept. Craig didn't possess Brosnan's purring diction; he was a Bond who spoke with his fists — and they would become pretty bruised. In the aftermath of 9/11, the gloves were now off. And Craig's Bond became colder, more brutal. There's a moral ambiguity to the Bond of the 21st century. He operates in the gray zone at an arm's distance from MI6 — not unlike that other free agent, Jason Bourne, whose close-quarters fight sequences and showstopping action set pieces Craig's films have unquestionably taken a page from.

More than in any previous period in the double-0 saga, Craig's installments seem to be an amalgam of those of all of his forerunners, cherry-picking the elements that made each one unique and of his moment. He has Connery's hard toughness, Lazenby's haunted romanticism, Moore's blasé nonchalance, Dalton's focus and Brosnan's sex appeal. Even his adversaries are like a greatest-hits collection — the SPECTRE-like organization Quantum, the surprising return of Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) in 2015's Spectre. The more the world changes, it seems, the more it stays the same.

With No Time to Die, Bond is now on the brink of a new era. This will be Craig's last film as 007, and no one knows yet what will come next. This is true not just of what will transpire onscreen but off it as well. The world outside of the movies seems to be changing faster and cycling more unpredictably than at any moment since Fleming first created his cinema's most enduring protagonist. We have no clue where the world, or the franchise, is headed. But if Bond's one-of-a-kind history provides any indication, the one thing that is certain is that whoever plays 007 next will be a hero of his — or her — moment.

Read more from EW's 25 Days of Bond, a celebration of all things 007 ahead of the release of No Time to Die. For even more James Bond, pick up Entertainment Weekly: The Ultimate Guide to James Bond here or wherever magazines are sold.

Related content:

• Daniel Craig bows out with a bang in final No Time to Die trailer
• James Bond casting director takes us inside her process
• The man who turned Sean Connery into James Bond