Sean Connery was the third actor to play James Bond, not the first: “The rest is history”
Most people who’ve been following the James Bond franchise for years, if not decades, are probably aware that Sean Connery wasn’t the first actor to play Ian Fleming’s literary creation. However, not many of them will know that he was actually the third, not the second.
It’s been woven into Hollywood folklore that an exhaustive casting search for the ideal candidate to embody 007 eventually settled on the relatively unknown Scotsman after several stars of a much higher profile, including Richard Burton and Fleming’s first choice, Cary Grant, turned it down.
From the second Connery smouldered into the frame in Dr No, it was clear the producers had made the right choice. More than 60 years after his debut, a strong case can still be made for the original Bond being the best, provided everyone ignores the two guys who did it before him.
The first actor to bring Bond to the screen was an American, with Barry Nelson taking on the lead role in a 1954 adaptation of Casino Royale, which was hardly a faithful adaptation of the novel when the Stateside iteration of the soon-to-be iconic character went by ‘Jimmy’ and worked for the Combined Intelligence Agency, not MI6.
It’s been a useful piece of trivia for decades, and while 007 aficionados know about Nelson’s brief stint and place in history as the first man to inhabit the suave secret agent, how many of them know about Bob Holness? Best known in the United Kingdom as the original presenter of the 1980s game show Blockbusters, he began his career as a theatre actor in South Africa.
He eventually segued into performing radio plays and carved out his little niche in Bond lore when he voiced the character in an audio-only 1958 production of Moonraker. When he was cast, Holdness hadn’t even heard of the character, never mind read any of Fleming’s books, and any chances of being the first person to play 007 twice were quickly nixed when the first feature-length adaptation entered development.
“When inquiries were made about the possibility of doing another adaptation, we were told that there were plans to turn a novel into a film and they wanted to see how that went,” Holness recalled. “The rest, as they say, is history.” Connery eventually made millions from his stint as the cinema’s first Bond, but his immediate predecessor was paid the princely sum of £11 for his troubles.
As much as Eon Productions likes to put its fingers in its ears and pretend that other versions of Bond don’t exist outside of the company’s signature franchise, like the 1967 Casino Royale spoof and Connery’s own Never Say Never Again, Nelson and Holness both got there before Cubby Broccoli had a chance to turn the debonair spy into a household name and cultural staple.
Of course, they’re hardly remembered as being part of the pantheon inhabited by Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig, and whoever Amazon end up hiring, but more actors have played Bond than you might think.
