The fantastic stage and screen actor Joseph Wiseman would no doubt have been tickled by the headlines on his obituaries yesterday — he died in Manhattan Monday at the age of 91 — all of which referenced his role as the first James Bond movie villain, Dr. No.
Wiseman made his stage debut in 1939 in the original production of “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and continued working in the theatre into his 80s — I saw him in the 2001 Broadway revival of “Judgment at Nuremberg” and in a memorable performance a decade earlier in the Lincoln Center revival of Paddy Chayefsky’s “The Tenth Man.”
As Ronald Bergan pointed out in his fine tribute in The Guardian yesterday, Wiseman was only on screen for about 20 minutes in the 1962 film “Dr. No” but he had made every one of those minutes count.
What the New York actor could not have known at the time, of course, was that he was in on the ground floor of the greatest franchise in movie history and that his icy villainy would serve as the template for many of the Bond baddies to come (when the time came for Mike Myers to play “Doctor Evil” in the “Austin Powers” comedies, he borrowed Dr. No’s Nehru jacket).
Wiseman was amused by the ever-growing hype that surrounded the Bond movies: “I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I had no idea it would achieve the success it did. I know nothing about mysteries. I don’t take to them. As far as I was concerned, I thought it might be just another grade-B Charlie Chan mystery.”
“Dr. No” was one of the dozens of bread-and-butter TV and film acting jobs that financed Wiseman’s New York stage career. By the time he did the Bond film, Wiseman was already a familiar face to TV viewers from his guest shots on everything from “The Untouchables” to “Adventures in Paradise.”
The actor owed much of his popularity as a peerlessly scary villain to his huge success in the 1949 Broadway hit “Detective Story.”
When the time came to make the movie version two years later, the Hollywood producers made the smart decision to use Wiseman in the role of the hood Charley Gennini (below, center).
Wiseman quickly became known as a scene stealer when he worked in movies, momentarily shifting the focus away from big stars like Paul Newman and Rex Harrison. He was most often a tad frightening in films, but the actor could also be slyly amusing, as he is in the underrated 1968 comedy “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” as the appalled owner of the theater that — accidentally — becomes the scene of America’s first striptease act.
