Bond villains … horrified by infamy

Ian Fleming's friend Noel Coward turned down the role of the main villain in the first ever James Bond film, 1962's Dr No. Up stepped stage actor Joseph Wiseman, who has died aged 91. He turned in a wonderfully steely performance as the cold and calculating bad-guy with the metal hands, but is said to have viewed the role with "great disdain". Daughter Martha Wiseman told the LA Times: "He was horrified in later life because that's what he was remembered for - stage acting was what he wanted to be remembered for" Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

If Gert Frobe's Auric Goldfinger was not the greatest Bond villain, he certainly had the greatest line. "Do you expect me to talk?" asks Sean Connery in 1964's Goldfinger. "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!" responds the smuggler with the dastardly fetish for the world's most expensive metal Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Of all the actors who played Ernst Stavro Blofeld, surely Bond's greatest nemesis and head of the evil SPECTRE organisation, Donald Pleasance's version in 1967's You Only Live Twice is surely the best. With shiny pate and dead-eyed moggy in tow, this was an iconic image that would be imitated and pilfered by generations of film-makers to come, most notably Mike Myers in the Austin Powers movies Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Live and Let Die, Roger Moore's first attempt at playing Bond, arrived in 1973 at the peak of the blaxploitation craze, and marks the only occasional upon which the main 007 villain has been a black man. Yaphet Koffo played Mr Big, aka Dr Kananga, a fairly benign bad guy when compared to some of his predecessors - he only wants to flood the market with heroin, rather than take over the world - who nevertheless has one of the series' most spectacular demises. He swallows a capsule of compressed air and is blown up like a balloon until he ultimately explodes, Mr Creosote style Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The Man With the Golden Gun, Roger Moore's second effort in the role of 007, was considered something of a box office flop when it arrived in 1974, and left the critics similarly unimpressed. Yet Christopher Lee has forged a career from an ability to make the most uninspiring of lines sound like Shakespeare, and his Francisco Scaramanga was a suitably sinister presence, even if the gun itself looked a tad rubbish Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

1985's A View to a Kill, Moore's final stint as 007, will not go down in history as one of the series' best. Yet who could resist the snakelike charms of Christopher Walken as villain Max Zorin, a microchip industrialist who plans to destroy Silicon Valley in an earthquake, thereby gaining a monopoly in the market Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

Sean Bean's Alec Trevelyan was a rare Bond villain with no unusual distinguishing marks in 1995's GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan's debut in the role of 007 and one of the best films in the series. Initially a 00 agent and friend of Bond's, Trevelyan fakes his on death while on a mission and emerges many years later as the head of a crime syndicate which 007 sets out to destroy Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Robert Carlyle played Viktor "Renard" Zokas in The World is Not Enough (1999), a funny looking little man who plans to blow up a nuclear submarine in the Bosphorus Strait, preventing oil shipping in order to gain a monopoly. His main quirk is his inability to feel pain, brought on by bullet which remains lodged in his cerebellum, edging him ever closer to death as he becomes, according to the movie's conceit, stronger and stronger with every passing day Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Casino Royale was Daniel Craig's first appearance as Bond, and saw the return of GoldenEye director Martin Campbell, who successfully revived the series by eschewing camp one liners and gadgets in favour of a darker, more realistic tone. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen put in a nicely understated performance as Le Chiffre, a high stakes gambler and banker to the world's terrorist organisations who cries tears of blood at vital moments Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive/EON

French actor Mathieu Amalric excelled as the slimy faux environmentalist Dominic Green in 2008's Quantum of Solace, though the movie itself failed to stand out as much more than a passable adjunct to the events of Casino Royale. The next Bond film is due out in 2011, with Daniel Craig returning once again. As yet there's no word on the nature of its main villain Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive/EON