One of the most beloved hallmarks of the James Bond franchise is the rogues gallery of villains. In each movie, 007 faces off against a new eccentric megalomaniac with a quirky personality trait like an obsession with gold and a ludicrous, sadistic plan like kickstarting World War III for the exclusive media coverage.
In over two dozen films, the venerable British spy has encountered hundreds of antagonists who have met their ends in a variety of ways. While some deaths may not be notable, a huge part of creating a memorable Bond villain is giving them a memorable death scene in the climactic action, like getting sucked out the window of a private jet or laughing maniacally while falling off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Karl Stromberg
Arguably the strongest Bond movie of the Roger Moore years, The Spy Who Loved Me has a quintessential megalomaniacal villain in Karl Stromberg, who builds a giant supertanker in his own honor.
Stromberg gets a hysterically anticlimactic death scene as Bond casually exercises his license to kill by shooting the bad guy twice in the crotch, then in the chest, then in the head, killing him. The gratuitous crotch shots lean into the slapstick absurdity of the Moore era, which favored comedy over the dramatic realism of the later Dalton and Craig Bonds.
Dominic Greene
Strawberry Fields in one of the most heartbreaking deaths in the franchise.
In the movie’s finale, Bond coldly leaves Greene stranded in the desert with nothing but a can of engine oil to quench his thirst. This wonderfully dark climax is made even darker when M tells Bond that Greene was found dead in the desert with two gunshot wounds in his neck and engine oil in his stomach.
Dario
Dario is one of the most ruthless and memorable henchmen from the Bond franchise. He was a side villain in License to Kill – one of drug kingpin Franz Sanchez’s sadistic enforcers – and his climactic fight with Bond takes place in a big cocaine factory.
Benicio del Toro brought a convincing sense of menace and edge to Dario, and his suitably shocking death highlights that edge as Bond feeds him legs-first into a giant industrial cocaine grinder. It's a brutal death scene, but one fitting in the era of R-rated action blockbusters like Lethal Weapon 2 and Die Hard.
Hugo Drax
At the end of Moonraker, Bond shoots Hugo Drax with a dart from his watch, then sends him out into space to die alone on his shuttle. Roger Moore’s 007 watches on with hilarious indifference as a startled Drax disappears into the empty vacuum of space. Moonraker was controversial among Bond fans because going to space seemed too far-fetched (and it was an obvious cash-in on the Star Wars craze), but the movie still has some spectacular moments like this one.
Red Grant
Red Grant, played by Jaws’ Robert Shaw, is just a side villain in From Russia with Love. But his surprisingly brutal fight with Bond on the Orient Express isn’t just one of the greatest fight scenes in the Bond franchise; it’s one of the greatest fight scenes of all time.
007 is hopelessly outmatched by Grant’s physicality and only manages to survive thanks to a gadget-laden suitcase and a chokehold that finally subdues the SPECTRE assassin. In contrast to Bond's other memorable fights, this one is notable for the simplicity and brutality of the struggle. It's just two men in a cramped train car trying desperately to kill each other.
Max Zorin
On the whole, A View to a Kill is one of the worst Bond movies. It was Moore’s last film in the role, long after he’d visibly aged out of it, and it’s short on memorable action sequences. But Christopher Walken has a lot of fun hamming it up as the movie’s twisted villain, Max Zorin, and he gets an unforgettable death scene.
Following his climactic standoff with Bond, Zorin slips off the Golden Gate Bridge and falls to his death. The fact that he starts to laugh right before he falls gives the scene an unnerving quality.
Dr. Julius No
Terence Young perfected Bond villain deaths right out of the gate. The death of the titular villain in the first-ever 007 movie, is still one of the most memorable in the franchise’s history.
During the action-packed finale in the villain’s lair, Bond throws Dr. No into a boiling pool of his own toxic waste, and he’s unable to climb out because of his signature metal hands. It's an ironic demise as the villain's greatest strength, his metal hands, prove to be his undoing.
Auric Goldfinger
Bond thinks he’s being flown to a lavish ceremony being thrown in his honor and that his quest to bring down Goldfinger is over, but the villain has one more trick up his sleeve. Scorned that his plan was foiled, Goldfinger confronts Bond on the private jet. In the ensuing fight, a gun goes off and shoots a window, then Goldfinger gets sucked out of the window.
This showdown on the plane gives Goldfinger a final action-packed stinger after the climactic thrills of the Fort Knox sequence. The troubled look on the usually stoic Gert Fröbe’s face sells the horror of Goldfinger’s predicament in his final moments. This death has the kind of goofy slapstick quality that would go on to define the Moore movies.
Franz Sanchez
License to Kill is essentially 007 vs. the Al Pacino version of Scarface. Bond goes after drug lord Franz Sanchez, but not on an official MI6 mission; he wants to avenge Felix Leiter and his wife. So, it’s fitting that, when Sanchez is closing in on Bond for the kill near a crashed gas tanker, Bond uses the lighter Felix gave him as a gift to kill the villain in a fiery explosion.
This brutal killing is an appropriate climax for License to Kill, widely regarded to be one of the darkest, grittiest Bond movies. It’s hardly surprising that it’s the only Bond movie to earn a 15 rating from the BBFC in the UK and an R rating from the MPAA.
Alec Trevelyan
Sean Bean characters always have memorable deaths. In GoldenEye, he plays Alec Trevelyan, a former 00 agent who is presumed dead and later revealed to be the villain. Bond mourns his “death” throughout the movie, so he’s pretty miffed when he turns out to be alive (and a bad guy).
At the movie’s climax, Bond drops Trevelyan from the top of his own satellite dish. The most ironic Bond villain deaths involve the grandiosity of their evil plans coming back to bite them. Trevelyan is a prime example of this, being crushed by the satellite dish he used to control a secret second GoldenEye satellite.
