25 best James Bond villains ever

We've pored over the James Bond films to bring you this list of the finest cinematic Bond villains ever. In no particular order, they are…

Rosa Klebb (From Russia With Love, 1963)

Hatchet-faced harridan Rosa Klebb is the mastermind behind a plot to assassinate – and humiliate – James Bond with the help of a decoding machine and duped Russian cipher clerk Tatiana Romanova. She's chiefly memorable for her lethal choice of footwear, packing a concealed knife in her sensible shoes. It makes for one of the more hilariously awkward fight scenes in the Bond films, as she hops at Sean Connery while he tries to fend her off with a chair.

Xenia Onatopp (GoldenEye, 1995)

Not so much Onatopp as over-the-top, Famke Janssen rose to fame as this beautiful and hilariously-named Georgian killer – who murders her victims by suffocating them between her thighs, reaching orgasm as they die. And they say Bond films are daft…

Dr Kaufman (Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997)

He's only in the film for five minutes, but Vincent Schiavelli's Teutonic hitman steals the show. Whether he's boasting of his talents ("I could shoot you from Stuttgart und still create ze proper effect.") or expressing his dissatisfaction with his underlings ("I feel like an idiot, I don't know what to say."), he's a model of Germanic efficiency.

Max Zorin (A View To A Kill, 1985)

David Bowie and Sting turned down the role of microchip tycoon Max Zorin, but Christopher Walken stepped in to play the platinum-blond psycho – a product of Nazi eugenics experiments. A yuppie villain for the Thatcher years, Zorin's scheme involved triggering an earthquake to flood Silicon Valley, giving him a stranglehold on the world microchip market.

Hugo Drax (Moonraker, 1979)

Drax may be your bog-standard villainous megalomaniac, but he wins a place on this list simply for plotting the most grandiose scheme of any Bond villain. Not for him the piffling crimes of irradiating Fort Knox or drug smuggling, no - he wants to destroy all life on earth and repopulate it with his army of gym bunnies. From his secret base. In spaaaaaace. Well, no-one can accuse him of not thinking big.