George Lazenby

Watch the hotel bedroom brawl early in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). Bond and a heavy put each other through the furniture, the plaster cracks, and the man doing it plainly means it; it is rougher than anything Sean Connery did. George Lazenby had never carried a film, and it shows the moment he stops hitting people and starts talking. He looks the part and moves well, and his voice goes flat, and Richard Maibaum's screenplay gives him a great deal to say. For twenty minutes in the middle, while Bond poses as the genealogist Sir Hilary Bray, the film takes his voice away and gives it to George Baker, who plays the real Bray. We know of no other Bond film that has trusted its star less.

He came to it from nowhere. A mechanic, then a car salesman, then a model, he moved to London in 1964 and was cast in 1969 off a screen test, with no film acting behind him. Peter R. Hunt, directing for the first time, went back to Fleming's novel and kept a Bond who falls in love and means it, which is a lot to ask of a first-timer. Lazenby then declined a multi-film contract before the film opened. What followed was a working actor's career rather than a star's: Universal Soldier (1971), which he had a hand in writing, the Italian thriller Who Saw Her Die? (1972), The Man from Hong Kong (1975), a supporting part in Gettysburg (1993), voice work in Batman Beyond (1999). We have not reviewed them, and none has followed him about the way the one film has. He retired in 2024.

So the case rests on one performance, and it is odder than its reputation. Diana Rigg's Tracy is better than Lazenby in every scene they share, and instead of sinking him she carries him. Gabriele Ferzetti's Draco plays the marriage negotiation as comedy with the worry underneath it real. At Draco's birthday party, with John Barry's We Have All the Time in the World coming in underneath, we stopped keeping score against Connery and started watching the man, because his lack of assurance had begun to look like Bond's rather than his own. The last half hour, which we will not describe, needs a Bond who does not quite know how to behave, and Lazenby, who did not, gives it one.

That is the honest account: a limited actor in the one part where the limits helped. We would not send anyone to his other films for him. We would send them to this one, with patience for the flat middle, because the ending got at us as no other Bond film has, and it could not have done so with a smoother man in the suit. Lazenby said later, "I’m glad I didn’t do another one. I didn’t want to be known as James Bond." He is known as nothing else, and once turned out to be enough.