I’m gona put this out there - I think Jonathan Pryce was the last great Bond villain. Sophie Marceau was a wonder in ‘The World is Not Enough’ though there was no escaping how Robert Carlyle was wasted, I would rather eat glass than than watch the race switching pompousness of Toby Stephens in ‘Die Another Day’ and ‘Casino Royale’ seemed to forget all together about creating characters with dimension, good or bad. Along with the mannerisms, strangely proportioned henchmen and inexplicably well kitted out underground layers in exotic locales, there has to be a madcapped plan. Now vision is important in any role but these villains have at times comically over the top intentions - the drugs lords just won’t cut it on this list, nor will henchmen.

6. The more you read into the scheming of the villains the more a pattern emerges. Firstly we have use some form of technology to point lasers at points on the planet to wreak havoc. (Charles Gray, Diamonds Are Forever/ Alec Trevelyan, Goldeneye/ Gustav Graves, Die Another Day)

5. Fifth on the list is the classically simple yet effective until involvement of secret agent, steal nuclear weapons and hold countries to ransom technique. First used in ‘Thunderball‘ and redeployed in that movies essential remake ‘Never Say Never Again‘, the US and UK found themselves needing to foot a bill of 100 million, such practices nicely parodied in ‘Austin Powers’. (Emilio/Maximillian Largo, Thunderball, Never Say Never Again, also Charles Gray, Diamonds are Forever)

4. Slightly more complex is some form of long lasting act of destruction that will effect markets, devalue minerals or just plain sink land masses into the sea.

Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe), obsessed with gold, plots to nuke Ft. Knox to devalue US gold and increase the worth of his own. (Gert Frobe, Goldfinger)

Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) as well as setting in train a set of events that brought about her fathers death and saw the leader of MI5 (M’s Judi Dench) being kidnapped attempts to denonate a nuclear bomb beneath Istanbul, ensuring her oil pipeline be the sole source of oil to the West. (The World is Not Enough)

Max Zorin plans to monopolize the microchip industry by destroying Silicon Valley through a tremendous earthquake. (Christopher Walken, A View to a Kill)

3. Another reoccuring theme is staging some form of act of war, and under such false pretences set unsuspecting countries up against each other, the resulting war achieving some highly ignoble goal.
Kamal Khan in Octopussy seeks to detonate a nuclear bomb, the ensuing tragedy meaning NATO will disarm allowing him undertake some conquering, Blofeld set Russia and America up to take to arms in You Only Live Twice as he cunningly uses his own space ship to subvert US and Russian satellites while Elliot Carver sets the launching pad for a war between the US and China (Tomorrow Never Dies) , and as he knows the headlines before they happen, he can ensure his newspapers get the scoop.

2. How more evil a scheme than to be a reoccuring villain in a traditionally episodic film series. As head of the global criminal organization SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld is 007’s nemesis, and the arch-villain of the Bond film franchise. He has appeared in six Bond films played by four different actors (Eric Pohlmann, Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas, and Charles Gray), and has become, with his trademark white Persian cat, grey collarless Nehru jacket, and large swivelling black armchair, one of the most imitated and parodied villains in cinema history. His schemes have included acquiring a Russian decoding device (From Russia with Love), inciting wars by subverting satellites (You Only Live Twice), seeking to purely kill Bond (For Your Eyes Only) and then at other extremes extort the planet by poisoning crops (OHMSS).

1. Bond in quick succession faced up to villains set on bettering the human race, which largely involved annihilation of the race and starting again from scratch. Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) in Moonraker seeks to use chemical weapons to wipe out the planet with specially selected humans safely hovering in space ships over the Earth waiting to breed and repopulate the planet. Of course this plot, for want of a better worse that would capture the severe mental fragility of these people, resembled that of Karl Stromberg in the preceding movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Stromberg, born with webbed hands and feet despised the human race so after setting a nuclear war in motion that would bring about the end of man, he hoped to recreate a new civilisation under the sea.

Reading: Times Online Top 10 Bond Villains