Jackie Chan affectionately sent up the spy genre with The Tuxedo, in which he plays an ordinary taxi driver who’s transformed by a feat of technological magic into a suave secret agent in the James Bond mold. Below you’ll find plenty of famous names from the world of espionage, but we’ve also picked out a few other great secret agents from cinema history who, we think, deserve their own brief moment in the spotlight. Some have trained for the life of a spy, but many of them have the world of espionage and imminent death thrust upon them.

Then again, the following list also proves, secret agents can come in many different forms. In fact, Britain’s national security agency doesn’t even call them agents – they’re covert human intelligence sources, or simply “officers.” Whatever we choose to call them, secret agents lead necessarily furtive and obscure lives – so obscure, in fact, that most of what we know about them is defined by what we’ve seen and read in books and movies.ĭuring the Cold War, the image of the secret agent as a well-groomed sophisticate in a suit proliferated all over the world, and even in the high-tech landscape of the 21st century, that image still stands–just look at such movies as Kingsman: The Secret Serviceand The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Famous spy agent names