A Guide to the Blofelds

There’s a lot of talk going around lately about the casting of the new James Bond. Who will play him… Callum Turner, Jack Lowden, CrimeReads favorite/dark horse Josh Bowman? This question is all well and good… but I want to know if this new leg of the franchise is going to have a Blofeld. Because, notoriously, the 007 films can’t keep it together around this guy.

Who is Blofeld? Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Bond’s archnemesis. He’s a megalomaniac who keeps trying to take over the world in one way or another. Oftentimes, his face is hidden. Sometimes, he’s in a wheelchair. Usually, he is petting a cat. One time, he’s Bond’s adopted brother, kind of.

The whole Blofeld situation is a bit nuts, with a total of nine different actors playing him in one way or another, across the different chapters of the franchise.

A preamble: EON became embroiled in a legal dispute surrounding Thunderball that had serious implications for the different Blofelds. Ian Fleming had based his novel Thunderball on a 1959 script for a film that he had written with his associates Jack Whittingham, Kevin McClory and Ernest Cuneo. Apparently, the story changed considerably and the writers went through multiple versions. In March of 1961, McClory, read an advance copy of the novel and contacted Whittingham, with whom he petitioned the courts to slap the novel with an injunction to stop it from being published. The judge who heard the case that month, permitted the novel to continue being published, though he didn’t ban any further legal action from taking place. Fleming suffered a heart attack during this time, but survived.

The suit (McClory and Whittingham v Fleming, Jonathan Cape Ltd and Bryce) went to court in November of 1963, and the case lasted three weeks. Fleming had two more heat attacks during this process. The men settled the case out of court, agreeing that Fleming was to retain the rights to the novel (as long as further editions credited the story as having been created by Wittingham and McClory as well as Fleming), while McClory and Whittingham won film rights. Fleming died of a fourth heart attack the following year.

What does any of this have to do with Blofeld? Walk with me.

First, multiple actors played the role as a continuous character in the Connery era: Anthony Dawson as Blofeld’s body and Eric Pohlmann as his voice in both From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965), then Donald Pleasance in You Only Live Twice (1967). This change-up of actors poses no real issue to the films, because we don’t see his face at all in those first two films; the first time we get to see his face, it’s Pleasance. Continuous enough, fine.

Here’s where it gets wacky. Well, wackier. After You Only Live Twice, EON (the company that produces the Bond films) cast a new 007, George Lazenby, to begin a new era of the franchise. Telly Savalas plays Blofeld in that film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969).But then Lazenby quit, setting the Bond franchise adrift. They brought back Connery to play Bond in 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, and so cast a new Blofeld: Charles Gray.

This was Connery’s last EON Bond film, with the producers bringing on Roger Moore to start a new era with 1973’s Live and Let Die. But the battle between Kevin McClory and the Fleming estate continued; the original 1963-64 settlement gave way to more lawsuits over who owned what. During this time, EON was not allowed to use any of the elements from Thunderball, which seemed to include including the character Blofeld and the organization SPECTRE.

EON had a thing or two to say about how little the Bond franchise needed Blofeld. In a bizarre pre-credits sequence in the Moore film For Your Eyes Only, Bond casually kills Blofeld by using a helicopter to lift him up and drop him (robotic wheelchair, cat, and all) into a smoke stack. That Blofeld also didn’t show his face; his body was played by John Hollis with voicework by Robert Rietty.

Later legal verdicts in the battle for the rights to Thunderball, especially a landmark one in 1983, confirmed that McClory in fact owned numerous elements of the Thunderball story, and therefore the Bond franchise, as well as that he could make his own movie adaptation of Bond elements as long as they were based on the Thunderball film. So he made his own film, Never Say Never Again, that year, casting Max von Sydow as Blofeld, and Sean Connery as Bond.

Blofeld remains absent for the final Moore film A View to a Kill (1985), both Timothy Dalton films, all four Pierce Brosnan films, and the first three Daniel Craig films.

McClory, who continued to sue for rights and royalties to the Bond properties for the rest of his life, died in 2006. His family resolved the issues with the Fleming estate and EON productions, selling the rights to EON’s parent company in 2007, paving the way for Blofeld’s eventual return in Spectre (2015). In that film, and in the final Craig film No Time to Die (2021), he is played by Christoph Waltz, marking the first time that a single actor has played Blofeld (in both body and voice) across two films.

So there you have it!