Barry Nelson, the very first actor to portray Ian Fleming's super spy James Bond on screen has passed away at the age of 89 according to a recent report in Variety. For years, if I wanted to wow someone with some trivia about a little known actor who played James Bond I'd whip a little info about George Lazenby on them. Lazenby played Bond once in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but Nelson's claim to fame was a 1954 made for TV adaptation of Fleming's novel Casino Royale, created as an episode of the anthology series Climax!. Interestingly, Nelson played Bond as an American, and pre-dated Sean Connery's first Bond film Dr. No by eight years. The Climax! version of Casino Royale is available as an extra on the DVD for the 1967 film of the same name.

Shortly after graduating from The University of California, Berkley in 1941, Nelson became a contract player for MGM. He appeared in several films including Shadow of the Thin Man and Dr. Kildare's Victory before joining the army during World War II. During the war he traveled as part of a stage production of Winged Victory which in 1944 was adapted into a film in which Nelson shared the screen with Red Buttons and TV's Superman George Reeves. In the post-war years Nelson made several more films including Undercover Maisie and Time to Kill before starring in such early television shows as The Ford Theatre Hour, The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre, and The Philco Television Playhouse. Personally, however, I will probably best remember Nelson for his role of Stuart Ullman in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

There is a long, interesting post over at TV Guide's FlickChick, recapping the history of the James Bond franchise. Who almost became Bond, who played Bond when, who turned down the role and why. I already knew that Barry Nelson was the first person to play Bond (he played "Jimmy Bond," in a 1954 episode of Climax) and that Timothy Dalton was asked to play Bond many years before he got the role in the late '80s, but I didn't know that Patrick "Number Six" McGoohan turned down the role, or that both Sam Neill and Julian Glover auditioned to play 007 before Dalton came into the picture. Richard Johnson and Sid James almost became Bond too, but I've never heard of either of them.

I was asked to play 007 too, back in the early '80s, when Moore was going to be replaced, but I had a biology paper due and had to turn them down.