In the early 1960s, movie producers adapting Ian Fleming’s novels about a suave British spy named James Bond plucked a relative unknown, Sean Connery, from obscurity and offered him the role of a lifetime. When Connery left the franchise after five movies (although he would briefly be back, in 1971, in Diamonds Are Forever, and again in 1983 for Never Say Never Again) the hunt for another Bond was on.
In 1967 LIFE sent photographer Loomis Dean to casting sessions for the James Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The magazine published a handful of those photos in an article on the film and on the Bond phenomenon. But some of Dean’s choicest frames Bond wannabes suiting up, brandishing guns, sipping faux martinis, and wooing women never ran in the magazine.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos from those 1967 auditions, featuring the five top candidates including George Lazenby, who would eventually win the coveted role.
Critical reception of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has hardly been uniform. There was much initial grumbling, for example, about Lazenby’s performance—especially in light of Connery effectively defining the role for a generation of moviegoers. Lazenby was a 28-year-old Australian model living in London, with virtually no acting experience outside TV commercials. But there was something about George Lazenby that placed him a notch above his competitors. Particularly impressive was his physical prowess. (In a subsequent audition to test his fighting skills, Lazenby reportedly broke a stuntman’s nose. That clinched it.)
“I’m really looking forward to being Bond, for the bread and the birds,” he told LIFE after his casting.
Meanwhile, the years have been kind to the 1969 flick. Entertainment Weekly, for example, ranked On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the sixth best of the Bond series, which now includes more than 20 feature films and is one of the highest-grossing movie franchises of all time.
A composite image of the five top candidates (including ultimate choice George Lazenby, bottom right). Published in the October 11, 1968, issue of LIFE.
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John Richardson during James Bond auditions, 1967.
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On Her Majesty’s Secret Service director Peter R. Hunt oversaw a test love scene between John Richardson and an actress, moving her leg just so.
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John Richardson during James Bond auditions.
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James Bond audition candidate John Richardson (left), in profile, 1967.
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John Richardson reacted as his screen-test costar pulled out a gun.
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Director Peter Hunt studied John Richardson during his audition, 1967.
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After he lost out on the Bond role, Richardson appeared in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and a string of Italian movies.
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James Bond audition finalist Anthony Rogers, 1967.
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Anthony Rogers and an actress during a screen test.
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Anthony Rogers smoked a cigarette during his James Bond audition, 1967.
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Anthony Rogers during his James Bond audition, 1967.
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Robert Campbell during James Bond auditions, 1967.
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Director Peter R. Hunt helped Robert Campbell get into a shoulder holster, 1967.
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Robert Campbell checked a page of lines during a James Bond audition, 1967.
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James Bond hopeful Robert Campbell adjusted his shirt and jacket, 1967.
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Robert Campbell looked in the mirror between scenes for his James Bond audition, 1967.
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Robert Campbell during a kissing test, opposite actress France Anglade, 1967.
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Hans de Vries during his James Bond audition, 1967.
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Hans De Vries and France Anglade, James Bond audition, 1967.
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Hans de Vries during his James Bond audition, 1967.
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George Lazenby during James Bond audition, 1967.
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George Lazenby fiddled with a knife while chatting with Bond director Peter R. Hunt, 1967.
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George Lazenby goofed off behind the scenes of his screen test.
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George Lazenby twirled a gun beside potential Bond Girl Marie-France Boyer, 1967.
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George Lazenby during auditions for the role of James Bond, 1967.
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George Lazenby and Bond Girl hopeful Agneta Eckemyr, 1967.
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George Lazenby leaned against a bar during a moment away from James Bond auditions, 1967.
Decades after her acting and singing careers came to an end, Brigitte Bardot is more recently known for her animal-rights activism and for her frequent scrapes with the French authorities over her passionate, public denunciations of what she considers the “Islamification” of her native France. (She has been fined multiple times for “inciting racial hatred” in books and speeches, arguing in 2003, for example, that France has “given in to a subterranean, dangerous and uncontrolled infiltration which not only resists adjusting to our laws and customs but which will, as the years pass, attempt to impose its own.”)
All these years later, however, it’s still difficult for anyone who was not alive at the time to grasp the galvanizing effect that Bardot had as an actress and as a sex symbol on moviegoers around the world in the 1950s and early 1960s. Here, LIFE.com celebrates the young Bardot with a series of pictures—most of which never ran in LIFE—made by Loomis Dean in 1958.
In a June 1958 article titled “The Charged Charms of Brigitte,” LIFE waxed lyrical (and, to contemporary ears, a touch patronizing, if not downright sexist) about the 24-year-old actress’ effect on American moviegoers and critics:
Not since the Statue of Liberty has a French girl lit such fires in America, and Brigitte Bardot does not just stand there like a statue. She moves, she wriggles, and her clothes are as often off as on. One of her films, “And God Created Woman,” has played for eight solid months in one New York theater and raked in some $2 million in the U.S. and, with her four other current films, has jammed art theaters until people complain they are clogging up culture. What Bardot has, which is more than sex, still mystifies many who stop to think about it . . . Meanwhile, the Bardot boom balloons. With four new films to open before years’ end, she’s finishing a fifth, “The Lady and the Puppet” [“La Femme et le Pantin,” but often billed simply as “The Female” for the English-speaking world], made in Spain where these pictures were taken. In gaining her present eminence, Brigitte Bardot has had certain advantages beyond those she was born with. Like the European sports car, she has arrived on the American scene at a time when the American public is ready, even hungry, for something racier and more realistic than the familiar domestic product. Americana actresses, like American four-door sedans, seem to have grown more and more standardized in styling. No Hollywood girl can play a mechanic’s wife or even an early western rancher’s daughter without being made up as precisely as the Marquise de Pompadour and garbed like a Main Line heiress. By contrast, an actress who lets her hair get in her eyes, who looks as though she could perspire at least lightly and who wriggles greedily as she kisses a man comes as a revelation. But none of this really explains why Brigitte Bardot has been so successful. Other foreign actresses have had the same opportunity to profit from public receptiveness and the lack of censorship but none of them has been able to match her accomplishments. Brigitte, also known as B.B. and the Sex Kitten, has not lifted a finger to achieve publicity. In fact, she treats all reporters like net men from the city pound. . . . The male viewer, having been frankly invited to admire the lush Bardot charms, is soon forced to an uneasy suspicion that he is a wicked old man.
And on it goes—an endless stream of metaphors that remind us of why, in part, Bardot left acting behind when she was not yet 40 years old. She had helped to create and to define the sex-goddess archetype in the movies, but found herself almost entirely unable to break out of that mold no matter how “serious” her roles became or how nuanced her performances actually were.
In the end, then, if nothing else, the pictures in this gallery help explain why most critics and most audiences were, perhaps, unable to see beyond the sheer sensuality that Brigitte Bardot exuded, both onscreen and off. After all, for a while there in the middle part of the last century, she might just have been the sexiest woman on earth.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Brigitte Bardot on set with actor Michel Roux, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot on location in Spain in 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film, “La Femme et le Pantin” Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot plays the guitar while on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot checks her hair and makeup on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot (holding a copy of LIFE magazine) looks at a photographic slide on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot photographed between takes, Spain, 1958.
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Brigitte Bardot with co-star Antonio Vilar on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin.”
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In Bardot’s films she often ended up lounging on a bed.
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Brigitte Bardot during break on location in Spain, 1958.
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