Two acclaimed actors inspired James Bond for very different reasons
Bond, James Bond; There’s arguably no character in cinematic history as well known as him.
Even if you’d never seen a film in the long-running franchise, you know the figure. You know his energy, his attitude, his charm, as the name alone is now so renowned and so present in culture that you don’t even need to have watched a minute of action. You don’t even need to have read a word of Ian Fleming’s original books, as because he wrote the man so well, his reputation precedes him.
Beginning in 1953, Fleming’s novels and short stories were the basis for one of cinema’s most well-respected franchises. After twelve novels and countless other adventures, and now with 27 cinematic portrays and more to come now Amazon have got involved, the character is a cultural mainstay.
It’s also a character that has inspired so many others. It would be tough to find a spy or action film that wasn’t at least a little inspired by Bond, either by the thrill of the movies or simply by the character’s suave, becoming a new archetype for charming leading men in the action world. But that personality didn’t come from nowhere.
When Fleming sat down to first start crafting Bond, a lot came to mind. There was a lot on the moodboard to be boiled down into the man, and as he evolved through the novels and through the movies, this only developed further as Fleming’s initial influences keep coming back around with each new actor that steps up to the plate and goes back to the drawing board to do their research.
Some of what went into it was real life. Fleming was reportedly greatly inspired by war stories and first-person accounts from soldiers and spies during the world wars. He pored over accounts from British intelligence officers when first crafting Bond, as well as his own experience working in the Naval Intelligence Division and as a part of Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive.
But there were also some well-known faces in the mix, as two key actors majorly inspired who James Bond would be. The first bridged the gap between Fleming’s real-world influences and the cinematic edge, as Christopher Lee had also been a Special Operations Executive and had a prior career in actual espionage before becoming an actor. He also happened to be Fleming’s first step-cousin, so he had the chance to study the man up close and steal bits of his personality and actions to put into the character.
Initially, Fleming wanted Lee to play the lead, but eventually he got him in as the villain, Francisco Scaramanga, in The Man with the Golden Gun.
There was another star in the mix, too, though. While Lee was close by and helped contextualise the real-world war stories into cinematic action, Cary Grant was another name that brought the more Hollywood edge to the character.
Fleming reportedly watched countless Grant movies while working on Bond, especially paying attention to his roles in thrillers like Notorious, where the mix of tense action and charm was on full display.
Similar to Lee, Fleming wanted his inspiration to be in the project, and so the role of Bond was first offered to Grant. The actor thought he was too old to play a womaniser, and so, in the great lesson of ‘rejection is redirection’, they had to look elsewhere, with eyes landing swiftly on Sean Connery, the man who would bring the character to life.
