01 James Bond
On the page: Casino Royale (1953) and From Russia with Love (1957).
The essential outline is a lean, dark-haired man with a persistent comma of hair over his right eyebrow, blue or blue-grey eyes and a vertical scar on his right cheek. The SMERSH dossier gives his height as 183 centimetres and weight as 76 kilograms. This is an athletic physique without the bulk of a modern action-film body. [1, 2]
On screen: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig in the EON series. Barry Nelson’s television Bond and David Niven’s comic interpretation belong to separate adaptations. [3, 30]
Connery gives the character physical assurance; Dalton makes his severity especially visible; Brosnan brings a polished silhouette; Craig turns bodily strain and injury into a major part of the performance. Those are different emphases, not a reliable league table of fidelity. Craig’s light hair is an obvious departure, but hair colour alone says little about how persuasively he conveys danger.
The most suggestive literary comparison is with musician Hoagy Carmichael. Vesper makes it, and Bond subsequently considers it in the mirror. It offers a clue to facial character, not instructions to reproduce Carmichael’s face. [1]
For a literary portrait, the scar and unruly lock matter because they disturb the immaculate surface. Bond should look capable of wearing evening dress without looking as if evening dress is his entire occupation. Restoring those small irregularities is more revealing than assembling the most conventionally handsome features of six actors.
