James Bond

Bond first shows up at a chemin de fer table in London, introducing himself with his name twice. M sends him to Jamaica, where he takes on Dr. No and first hears of SPECTRE, a criminal organization loyal to no flag. From then on, SPECTRE is after him: in From Russia with Love it sets a trap using a cipher machine and Soviet clerk Tatiana Romanova, and Bond survives a fight with assassin Red Grant on the Orient Express.

In Goldfinger he gets Q's Aston Martin DB5 and stops millionaire Auric Goldfinger from contaminating the gold at Fort Knox. In Thunderball, SPECTRE steals two atomic bombs, and Bond recovers them in the Bahamas after an underwater battle. Sean Connery's Bond is cool, wry and supremely sure of himself.

In You Only Live Twice, Bond fakes his own death and goes to Japan, where he finally sees the face of SPECTRE's chief, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, inside a volcano. Blofeld escapes.

In the next film, played by George Lazenby, Bond truly falls in love. He saves Countess Tracy di Vicenzo on a Portuguese beach, accepts help from her father, crime boss Marc-Ange Draco, and finds Blofeld at a clinic high in the Swiss Alps. After wrecking the base, Bond marries Tracy. As they drive away from the wedding, Blofeld and Irma Bunt machine-gun the car and Tracy dies. Bond holds her, repeating that they have all the time in the world.

Sean Connery returns in Diamonds Are Forever, with Bond hunting Blofeld for revenge before stumbling into a diamond-smuggling ring that leads back to him.

With Roger Moore, Bond gets lighter and funnier. He takes on drug lord Kananga, assassin Francisco Scaramanga, who has a golden bullet with Bond's name on it, and shipping magnate Karl Stromberg, alongside Soviet agent Anya Amasova. In Moonraker he ends up in space. Along the way he twice crosses paths with the steel-toothed giant Jaws.

In For Your Eyes Only, Bond leaves flowers at Tracy's grave, proof he hasn't forgotten his wife, and disposes of a bald villain in a wheelchair who looks a lot like Blofeld. Then he tackles a Kremlin jewel-smuggling plot in Octopussy and industrialist Max Zorin, who wants to flood Silicon Valley, in A View to a Kill.

Timothy Dalton brings a harder Bond. In The Living Daylights, he figures out that a Soviet general's defection is a setup. In Licence to Kill, drug lord Franz Sanchez's men murder his friend Felix Leiter's bride and feed Felix to a shark. M refuses to let him go after them, so Bond hands in his licence and goes rogue.

With Pierce Brosnan, Bond enters the post-Cold War world. The new M, played by Judi Dench, calls him a dinosaur, and fellow agent 006, Alec Trevelyan, comes back as an enemy in GoldenEye. Then come a media mogul who manufactures wars and heiress Elektra King. In Die Another Day, Bond spends 14 months imprisoned and tortured in North Korea and loses his 00 status until he proves he was betrayed.

With Daniel Craig, the series starts over and tells one continuous story. Bond has just earned his 00 in Casino Royale. Still reckless, he faces banker Le Chiffre at a poker game in Montenegro and falls for Vesper Lynd of the British Treasury. He thinks about giving it all up for her. In Venice he learns Vesper handed the money to a mysterious organization to save his life, and she drowns. In Quantum of Solace, Bond follows that organization, Quantum, from Italy to Bolivia until he settles the score over Vesper's betrayal.

In Skyfall, Bond is shot, presumed dead, and comes back to protect M from former agent Raoul Silva. They hole up at Skyfall, his childhood home in Scotland, where his parents are buried. M dies in his arms.

In Spectre, a message left by the late M leads Bond to SPECTRE and to Franz Oberhauser, son of the man who took Bond in when he was orphaned. Oberhauser now goes by Ernst Stavro Blofeld and claims he was behind everything Bond has suffered. Bond meets Madeleine Swann, Mr. White's daughter, has Blofeld arrested and leaves with her.

In No Time to Die, he loses his trust in Madeleine and spends five years retired in Jamaica. Felix Leiter pulls him back in, and Bond faces Lyutsifer Safin, who holds a nanobot weapon that kills by DNA. He learns he has a daughter with Madeleine, Mathilde. On Safin's island, Bond is infected with nanobots coded to kill them both. Unable to touch them, he stays behind to open the base to the missile strike and says goodbye to Madeleine over the radio. Bond dies in the blast.

Ian Fleming, who worked in British naval intelligence during World War II, introduced Bond in the 1953 novel Casino Royale and wrote 12 novels and two short story collections about him. He took the name from an American ornithologist, James Bond, author of a guide to Caribbean birds that Fleming kept at his home in Jamaica. Fleming wanted a plain, dull name. In the books Bond is darker and smokes heavily. The actors in the official Eon series were Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig; David Niven and Connery also played Bond in two films outside it.