Off a FR thread:
“[I am] fed up to here with the whole Bond bit,” Sean Connery once told The Guardian, also adding, “I have always hated that James Bond. I’d like to kill him.” Fellow actor Michael Caine even cautioned others about bringing up the character in Connery’s presence. “If you were his friend in these early days, you didn’t raise the subject of Bond. He was, and is, a much better actor than just playing James Bond, but he became synonymous with Bond. He’d be walking down the street, and people would say, ‘Look, there’s James Bond’. That was particularly upsetting to him.”
I read Ian Fleming’s Bond books and he was the exact picture that I imagined from reading...He may not have liked it, but he was damned great at it...
He was also a great Russian submarine commander...