James Bond
The Contenders: Sean Connery from “Dr. No” in 1962 to “Diamonds Are Forever” in 1971; George Lazenby, who was Connery’s replacement for “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” in 1969; Roger Moore from 1973’s “Live And Let Die” to 1985’s “A View To A Kill“; Timothy Dalton in 1987’s “The Living Daylights” and 1989’s “Licence To Kill“; Pierce Brosnan from 1995’s “Goldeneye” to 2002’s “Die Another Day“; and Daniel Craig from 2006’s “Casino Royale” to the present. David Niven also played the role in the terrible, terrible 1967 parody version of “Casino Royale.”
The Argument: Ian Fleming‘s hard-drinking, womanizing spy is the focus of the longest-running singular franchise in the history of the medium, and the part serves as a testament to the kind of diversity you can get when six (or seven) middle-aged white men all get to showcase their own takes on the same character. Connery as the first, is probably still the most iconic, and is, for the most part, closer to the cruel and callous 007 of Fleming’s books. Lazenby might have the best movie with “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” but feels a little awkward in the role, though who knows if he would’ve have settled in better with more time. Moore is the most fun, always ready with a wisecrack and an eyebrow-raise, but only descending into camp in the later entries, when the scripts got worse (much, much worse) and he started feeling too old for the part. Dalton was the Bond for the P.C. era, serious and emotional, and never quite gets to the root of the character, though that’s the fault of the material rather than him. Brosnan melds some of the best characteristics of his predecessors, able to pull off some wry Moore-ish humor with a little Connery chilliness and Dalton pathos in for the mix. And Craig is the blunt instrument, leavened with a certain GQ Magazine new-man sensitivity.
The Winner And Why: Sean Connery. Moore’s films are too silly and inconsistent, for the most part, for him to be a serious contender, and Dalton and Lazenby can’t match their colleague’s impact. Craig probably has the most emotional material, best hit rate so far (two very good Bond films and one duff one), but it feels too early to elevate him into the pantheon yet. As for Pierce Brosnan, despite his fine performances, he only made one classic with “Goldeneye,” with the series falling a few notches after that film (and picking up again later). So that leaves Connery, and really, who else could be: the Scottish actor defined the role in the 1960s, and every actor who’ll ever done the tuxedo will be in the shadow of the hirsute, savage hound dog who launched the franchise.
The One You Might Not Have Seen: If you missed any of them, it’s most likely the 1967 “Casino Royale,” with David Niven. Trust us, it’s for the best: it’s a spectacularly uneven counter-cultural mess that went through as many as six directors.
Dracula
The Contenders: Sherlock Holmes might be the most popular human character on screen (according to the Guinness Book Of World Records), but even he couldn’t defeat Bram Stoker‘s vampiric creation Dracula, who has appeared on screen over 250 times. Aside from a possible 1920 Soviet silent, the first official adaptation was 1931’s Universal version, starring Bela Lugosi, who introduced many of the characteristics that still define the character to this day. Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine were among those who took up the mantle after that, while Christopher Lee starred in six successful Hammer films between 1958’s “Dracula” and 1973’s “The Satanic Rites Of Dracula.” The same year as the latter saw Jack Palance star in the Richard Matheson-scripted “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” while Udo Kier donned the fangs for the Andy Warhol-produced “Blood For Dracula” the following year. Frank Langella took the part from stage to screen in 1979’s “Dracula” from Universal, while the same year also saw George Hamilton star in comedy “Love At First Bite” and Klaus Kinski play the role in Werner Herzog‘s remake of “Nosferatu” (it should be noted that, in an ultimately ineffective way to get around copyright, F.W. Murnau‘s 1922 original, the first real adaptation of the story, renamed him Count Orlok, and so we’ve disqualified that from this list, while Herzog’s character kept Stoker’s name). More recently, there’s been Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1992 epic “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Gerard Butler in terrible reboot “Dracula 2000,” Guy Maddin‘s ballet “Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary,” Richard Roxburgh in the villain in 2004’s “Van Helsing,” Thomas Kretschmann in Dario Argento‘s “Dracula 3D,” Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in awful TV series “Dracula” and, coming soon, Luke Evans in this year’s “Dracula Untold.”
The Argument: For all of the adaptations that exist, most are pale imitations or semi-parodies of Lugosi’s heavily accented, dinner-jacket wearing Count—even the likes of Palance (who brings new texture, but is ultimately somewhat miscast) and Langella (who’s a decidedly sexier take), struggle to stand out from the crowd. There’s been a disappointing trend of late, including Butler and Dominic Purcell in “Blade:Trinity,” to reduce the character to a bland villain too. But that said, there’s still a number of iconic portrayals that do something different, with Lee, Kinski and Gary Oldman all being particularly impressive.
The Winner And Why: Christopher Lee. Yes, Lugosi’s the most iconic, and Tod Browning‘s film still holds up, but it’s a little hard to separate the performance from the parodies it spawned (and from Martin Landau‘s great portrayal of the actor in “Ed Wood“). Oldman arguably gets the most to play with, going from romantic to monster, but can’t resist getting his teeth into the (beautifully-designed) scenery sometimes. It’s almost impossible, then, to choose between the others, but given that Kinski’s performance, while soulful and monstrous, is so indebted to Max Schreck in the silent take, we’d just give the edge to Lee. The 1958 “Dracula” is Lee’s only great film in the role, but he’s more debonair, more alluring, and much more frightening than Lugosi, or those who came after.
The One You Might Not Have Seen: It’s hardly the most traditional film on the list, but Guy Maddin’s ballet film “Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary” is a stunning piece of work, with its black-and-white photography giving an especially Gothic air to proceedings and dancer Zhang Wei-Qiang is wonderful in the part, especially given his lack of dialogue.
Queen Elizabeth I
The Contenders: Are you ready for this? It’s a character that has been essayed so many times that we can actually see patterns forming within the canon. There are the Actors Who Have Played Her Twice: Flora Robson in “Fire Over England” (1937) and “The Sea Hawk” (1940), the latter of which was directed by Michael Curtiz, as was the previous year’s “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939) which was the first of two films to star Bette Davis in the role, the second being ”The Virgin Queen” (1955). Cate Blanchett was Oscar-nominated twice in the role for “Elizabeth” (1998) and the inferior sequel “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007); Glenda Jackson was in the so-definitive-it-was-shown-in-schools 1971 BBC miniseries “Elizabeth R” (1971) and the same year’s big-screen “Mary, Queen of Scots” (1971) opposite Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave herself took on the role in Roland Emmerich’s soapy and unconvincing “Anonymous” (2011), with her daughter Joely Richardson playing the younger version, which brings us to the section we’ll call Young, Hot Elizabeths. Blanchett’s first appearance certainly counts, but even back to Jean Simmons in “Young Bess” (1953) and arguably to now-unavailable silent film “The Virgin Queen” (1923), which starred actual Royal Lady Diana Manners in the role, there has been an urge to show the sexier side of Elizabeth’s formidable reputation. (Speaking of silents, even Sarah Bernhardt played the character in a 1912 short “Queen Elizabeth” which, when you think about it, is all it needed to be called as at that point, as there had only been one.)
In addition to the Jackson miniseries, Helen Mirren, who of course played Elizabeth II in “The Queen,” played the lead in the 2005 Tom Hooper-directed HBO two-parter “Elizabeth I,” while Anne-Marie Duff inhabited the role from youth to old age in the BBC’s “The Virgin Queen” (2006) miniseries. There are too many Cameo Lizzes to mention, especially as she pops us in TV shows about twice a week as a background character (there’ve been two in the modern era of “Doctor Who” alone), but of course we have to mention Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning 8 minutes in “Shakespeare in Love.” Liz As A Child has been played several times over, notably by Laoise Murray in TV show “The Tudors” and Maisie Smith in “The Other Boleyn Girl” (2008), and then there are the Lizzes Played For Laughs: Miranda Richardson takes the, er, crown for Queenie in the second season of “Blackadder,” but Pythons Graham Chapman and John Cleese have also both poked fun at her in an episode of “Flying Circus” (which parodies Jackson’s “Elizabeth R”) and a 1975 short called “Decisions Decisions,” respectively. And the latter two are of course examples of the subcategory of Men Who Have Played Elizabeth I, the finest version of which has to be Quentin Crisp in Sally Potter’s “Orlando” opposite Tilda Swinton, who has the dubious honor of being the Actor You’re Most Likely To Remember Playing Elizabeth I But Who Actually Hasn’t. Yet.
The Argument: With an Elizabeth for every mood and taste, it’s a tricky job to narrow the field, let alone pick a winner. Bearing in mind the slightly unfair advantage that an actor who has had eight hours of screen time in the role has over one who has a few minutes, and because it’s what we’re best equipped to judge, we’re biased toward a feature performance, purely because to be able to capture the contradictions and complexities of this incredible character in two hours is a major feat. What we’re really looking for is a performance that, at every moment, both chimes with the traditional idea of what and who Elizabeth was, while also humanizing her away from the stiff, unyielding, domineering figure that we learnt about in history books. For absolute accuracy to the historical facts, we’d plump for any of the miniseries over any of the films, but that’s not what we’re judging here either.
The Winner And Why: Bette Davis. Bette Davis. Sacrilege! Now, before you imprison us in the Tower for treachery or feed us to the swans, watch “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex”: Davis is extraordinary. Still young herself at 30, Davis fearlessly aged (and uglied) up to play the monarch in her later years, famously shaving her hair back and her eyebrows off altogether, and even demanding, over studio objections to the expense, that her costumes be modeled on existing Holbein portraits of the Queen. She famously had hoped for Laurence Olivier in the role of Essex, her lover and foil, and was disappointed with Errol Flynn until years later when she revised her opinion of his performance. And indeed he’s very good, but only because he seems to be rising to somewhere near her level: quite aside from the physical resemblance she achieves, her Elizabeth is brilliant and insecure, loyal and spiteful, noble and vain all in every breath, and if the frou-frou technicolor trappings of the film occasionally make it seem insubstantial, every second she’s on screen it falls into secure orbit around her. Which is kind of what the country, and the known world, did around Elizabeth herself.
The One You Might Not Have Seen: He’s not in it very much, which is probably another reason it’s so effective, but Quentin Crisp’s turn in Sally Potter’s wonderful and weird take on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” is a real treat. It’s a sly wink of a performance that is good enough to stand on its own, but also nods to everything from the Elizabethan practice of having men play women’s roles on stage, to the film’s own gender-switching themes, to the persistent rumor/conspiracy theory that Elizabeth I, due to her childlessness and also to her strategic cleverness and political savoir faire, was in fact a man in drag. I mean, it’s the only possible explanation…
