Ernst Stavro Blofeld

In From Russia with Love, SPECTRE's chief appears only as Number 1: a faceless man shot from behind, stroking a white cat. When chess master Kronsteen's plan fails, he has him executed on the spot with the poisoned blade in a henchman's shoe and gives Rosa Klebb one last chance.

In Thunderball he chairs a SPECTRE meeting in Paris, hidden behind a refugee aid organization, and electrocutes a member in his chair for skimming money. The atomic bomb plot goes to Emilio Largo, Number 2. His face stays hidden.

In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld finally shows his face, with a scar running down over his right eye. Played by Donald Pleasence, he runs a base inside a volcano in Japan and, working for a foreign power, captures American and Soviet spacecraft to start a war between the two. He treats his own people cruelly: he drops Helga Brandt into a piranha pool and shoots Osato for failing. When Bond storms the base with Tiger Tanaka's ninjas, Blofeld sets off the self-destruct and escapes.

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, played by Telly Savalas, Blofeld wants a title: to be recognized as the Count de Bleuchamp. High in the Swiss Alps, he runs an allergy clinic where he hypnotizes young patients to spread a virus that can wipe out crops and livestock worldwide. His price is an amnesty and the title. Bond destroys the base, and Blofeld flees on a bobsled until a branch knocks him off. He survives and strikes back on the worst possible day: on Bond's wedding day, he and Irma Bunt machine-gun the newlyweds' car, and Tracy dies.

In Diamonds Are Forever, played by Charles Gray, Blofeld hides behind surgically altered doubles and behind the identity of billionaire Willard Whyte, whose voice he fakes with a device. He uses smuggled diamonds to build a laser satellite and blackmail the superpowers. Bond attacks the oil rig where he's hiding and rams the villain's mini-sub into the control room. Blofeld's fate is left open.

In For Your Eyes Only, a bald man in a wheelchair with a white cat hijacks Bond's helicopter by remote control. Bond turns the tables, hooks the wheelchair with the helicopter and drops the man down a chimney while he offers to buy Bond a delicatessen in stainless steel. The name Blofeld is never spoken because of the legal fight over the character's rights.

In the Daniel Craig era, Blofeld returns, played by Christoph Waltz, with a new origin. He's Franz Oberhauser, son of Hannes Oberhauser, who raised Bond after he was orphaned. Jealous, Franz killed his father in an avalanche, faked his own death and took his mother's family name, Blofeld. He founded SPECTRE and tells Bond he was behind Le Chiffre, Dominic Greene and Raoul Silva, and the deaths of Vesper and M.

At his desert base in Morocco he tortures Bond with a drill to the head, but Bond escapes and the blast from his watch leaves Blofeld with a scarred eye. In London, Bond downs his helicopter on Westminster Bridge and, instead of killing him, lets M arrest him.

In No Time to Die, Blofeld is in a maximum-security prison in London but still runs SPECTRE through a bionic eye. He sends his agents to Cuba to kill Bond with Heracles, a nanobot weapon that kills by DNA, but the weapon has been tampered with and wipes out SPECTRE's own members instead. Behind it is Lyutsifer Safin, who wanted revenge on the organization.

Bond visits Blofeld in prison. Blofeld taunts him, revealing he set up the Matera ambush so Bond would believe Madeleine had betrayed him. Bond grabs him by the throat, not knowing he's carrying nanobots coded to the villain's DNA. Blofeld dies on the spot.

Blofeld debuted in Ian Fleming's 1961 novel Thunderball and came back in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. Thunderball grew out of a screenplay Fleming worked on with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, and the lawsuit that followed gave McClory rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld. So after 1971, Eon spent decades unable to use the name; McClory brought him to Never Say Never Again, with Max von Sydow. A 2013 settlement returned the rights to Eon. The white cat and the bald head inspired the Austin Powers parody Dr. Evil.