Who was your favorite James Bond?

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A BOND THAT KEEPS GROWING Mine is Sean Connery, and Roger Moore Bond, James Bond… Does the man with the golden gun really need an introduction? No fictional character is better recognised the world over than James Bond, Secret Agent 007. Licensed to kill, primed to thrill, Ian Fleming’s spy has a fan following that cuts across all boundaries of age, gender and nationality. The longest-running and highest-grossing franchise ever in the history of cinema, the James Bond films have ruled the global box office for all of four decades since the release of Dr. No in 1962. The actors who have played Bond on screen have passed into folklore, although all the five haven’t had the same level of success. Sean Connery has played innumerable wonderful characters before and after James Bond, but his name continues to be associated with the invincible superhero, a figure he stopped essaying after 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. What really is the secret of Bond’s phenomenal success and longevity? The answer is pretty obvious: the spy who came in from the cold of Ian Fleming’s imagination around the middle of the last century is remarkably flexible. He has changed with the times and has yet remained the same. It is this fascinating dichotomy that has enabled James Bond to keep pace with changing fads even as he has remained true to the essence of the man he was always meant to be as a larger-than-life screen character: predatory, promiscuous and blessed with an instinct for survival that few characters can match. The Bond of Fleming’s books a very different kettle of fish: he’s a gritty, fallible and humourless workaholic wedded to his mission. On the screen, he assumes the persona of an icon: colourful, libidinous and quick on the draw. But more than the contours of the character that lies at the centre of the Bond universe, it’s the nature of the films that woven around him that have ensured continuing box office success. Undemanding but hugely thrilling, packed with glamour and gadgetry and riding on storylines that are inventive while adding up little more than a mere pretext to hang all the stunning visual exhibitionism on. It’s a formula that continues to work as the franchise enters its fifth decade. From Dr No to Die Another Day, the 20th Bond film, the franchise has rarely failed to deliver the goods commercially. The only blimps that it encountered go back to the late 1960s, when On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which a little-known Aussie actor essayed the eponymous part, failed to make any headway at the box office.