2. Telly Savalas As Ernst Stravo Blofeld - On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
What do you get when you take one of the greatest villains in film and remove everything that made him the greatest villain in history? The downfall of the greatest villain in history. Telly Savalas is not to blame though. If I was contacted by EON Productions to be the next Bond villain I would jump at the chance. I would make every attempt to maintain the Blofeld legacy. But you can't fix something so totally mishandled. The writers and filmmakers didn't just change Bonds. They began in this film the dismantling of an icon. Ernst Stravo Blofeld was ingeniously teased in "From Russia With Love (1963)" and "Thunderball (1965)." Then brilliantly unveiled in "You Only Live Twice (1967)" where Donald Pleasence gave a performance that goes down in film history. The character was beautifully written and should have been a villain in many more Bond films. Instead they began to destroy him. Look I could have lived with the removal of the iconic scar. But they changed who Blofeld is. They turned him into a playboy with a harem on top of a mountain. They turned him into an evil Hugh Hefner. What the f**k were they thinking? And he knows Bond. He looked him in the face and spoke to him the previous movie. How do they expect us to believe Blofeld is in anyway fooled for a second by the ruse of Bond being the professor? And even if he didn't know Bond personally, Blofeld would have done his homework and known what the professor looked like. If he could get a harem of girls into his hideaway secretly, then he could find out what a man he was bringing to his secret lair looked like. Then they took away his threatening attitude and made him a gentleman. I know he is trying to get recognized as a lord for political purposes and to keep from being immediately arrested by the authorities. But you would think having Bond show up would cause him to go ape sh*t. I would if the guy who f**ked me over on multiple occasions just strolled into my house like he owned the place. Yes Savalas is a good actor, but this role was doomed from the get go.