ARCH-ENEMY OF THE STATE
RELATIVELY FEW WORLD events occurred on 10 April 1963. A US nuclear submarine sank. A Communist official suffered a stroke. Lee Harvey Oswald, pre-Kennedy assassination, tried and failed to kill a former US Army General. Most importantly though, on that day, Ernst Stavro Blofeld was reborn for the first time.
As cameras rolled on the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love , 007’s best-known bad guy slunk from the pages of Ian Fleming’s novels onto the big screen. Richard Maibaum’s script directions set the shady über-villain’s mysterious tone immediately, keeping Blofeld’s face hidden from the audience and unwittingly introducing the source of countless future parodies: a white Persian cat, which somehow added to the air of malevolence despite being a thoroughly adorable floof.
Blofeld would go on to have almost as many lives as his fluffy feline friend. His introduction in From Russia With Love marked the diabolical mastermind’s second incarnation, but his first — the original, literary Blofeld — was still going strong in Fleming’s books.
Four years earlier, Fleming had got together with filmmaker Kevin McClory to create Blofeld — and his villainous organisation SPECTRE — for an unrealised film script, which Fleming would turn into his eighth Bond novel, , published in 1961. Blofeld in the books ishe’s an absolute unit at 20 stone: a former weightlifter-turned-gangster with a black crew cut, who doesn’t drink or smoke and is totally asexual. In other words, the anti-Bond.
