The actor Ian Fleming envisioned as James Bond but who ended up as the butt of the joke
Authors aren’t always the best judges of their movie adaptations. As soon as a filmmaker gets their hands on the rights, they can change plot points and even the underlying meaning, turning it into a creation all their own. The most famous example of this is The Shining. Stephen King’s novel was more of a supernatural family thriller than a psychological one, but when Stanley Kubrick had his way with it, it became an exploration of one man’s descent into madness.
King saw the writing on the wall when the director cast Jack Nicholson in the lead role. The author had envisioned an average Joe like Martin Sheen or Michael Moriarty as Jack Torrence, believing that the audience would see instability and darkness in the character from the first scene with Nicholson in the role. It’s almost impossible to envision Sheen or Moriarty in the film simply because Kubrick and Nicholson turned the story into something completely separate from the source material. The same is true of James Bond.
Ian Fleming, who created the character and wrote 12 novels and two short story collections about him, had a very particular actor in mind when the rights to his work were purchased. He didn’t think of 007 as a smooth-talking Scotsman like Sean Connery. He wanted David Niven. Connery was in his early thirties in 1962 when he played Bond for the first time. Niven, on the other hand, was in his fifties. He was a suave, public-school-educated gentleman with cut-glass diction and a knack for making expensive suits look even more expensive.
Producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, who bought the rights to the novels, had a completely different view of the character. He wanted a guy who could throw a punch and wear a suit, someone who could drop double-entendres and look rakish rather than rapey, a man who you’d believe could do his own stunts, be they swimming with sharks or throwing himself off buildings.
Niven was none of these things. He became a Hollywood star in the 1930s, appearing in movies like Mutiny on the Bounty, Dodsworth, and Wuthering Heights. He won an Oscar in 1958 for Separate Tables and was a founding member of the famous Rat Pack. By 1962, he was not exactly part of the youth culture of the sixties, and his potential as an action hero was dubious. Something about that pencil moustache did not scream ‘license to kill.’ A martini? Definitely. Hand-to-hand combat in a nuclear reactor? Not really.
The irony is that Niven did get to play Bond, but not in the way Fleming had envisioned. The 1967 non-Eon film Casino Royale was a spoof of the genre, featuring a retired version of 007 who was more interested in playing piano and gardening than shooting up megalomaniacal villains while leaping out of planes. It was an interesting take on the character, but probably not one that even Fleming (who died in 1964) would have loved.
Even more ironically, the producers offered the role to Connery and Peter Sellers before approaching Niven. In the end, Sellers appeared in a different role in the movie. Casino Royale was a hit, probably because of the popularity of the Bond character at that point, but it received poor reviews and is largely forgotten these days. It’s also fair to say that Niven, though charming, never gave Connery a run for his money.
