The fictional police detective, Lieutenant Columbo, is inextricably linked with the actor Peter Falk, who played him for 35 years across 69 TV episodes. But Falk was not the first actor to play the character; that honour goes to Bert Freed, who took the role for a 1960 episode of The Chevy Mystery Show.
Another example, albeit less clear-cut, might be James Bond, who I suspect might still be most closely associated with Sean Connery. But the first actor to play the British spy was Barry Nelson, in the 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale.
What other examples are there of famous, very long-running characters who are most closely associated in the public eye with an actor who wasn’t the first to play the role?
Hawkeye Pierce of MASH fits the bill. Although first portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the movie from 1970, Alan Alda’s version in the TV show from 1972 to 1983 is the iconic character.
The same is true for most of the TV regular cast: Trapper John (Elliot Gould/Wayne Rogers), Henry Blake (Roger Bowen/McLean Stevenson), Frank Burns (Robert Duvall/Larry Linville), Margaret Houlihan (Sally Kellerman/Loretta Swit). The only regular to be in both the movie and the TV series was Gary Burghoff as Radar O’Reilly.
One more but not as famous is G Wood. He played Gen Hammond in both the movie and the TV series.
Floyd the Barber on The Andy Griffith Show is most identified with Howard McNear, but the part was originated by Walter Baldwin, who played Floyd Lawson for the first time in the episode, The Stranger In Town.
Don Cheadle as James “Rhodey” Rhodes / War Machine fits. Terrence Howard had the role in the first Iron Man movie, and then was replaced after that. You can hardly think of the MCU character without thinking of Cheadle.
Wonder Woman is mostly associated with Linda Carter or now Gal Gadot, but the role was first played by Cathy Lee Crosby in a 1974 made-for-TV movie, before Carter took over the role in the 1975 series.
Casey Adams and Paul Sullivan were the first to play Ward and Wally Cleaver, respectively. This was the pilot episode of Leave it to Beaver, which aired as an episode of Studio 57 but not during the original run of the series itself.
Peter Burton played Major Boothroyd (“Q”) in the first Bond film, Dr. No, but the man who played the role the longest and was most identified with it was Desmond Llewelyn, who started doing so in the next film, From Russia with Love and kept it up through The World is Not Enough in 1999, having gone through four different actors as Bond. I like that his character was given a retirement and a great exit line.
Bozio the Clown was played by several actors in different parts of the country (Willard Scott famously played him in Washington DC around 1960), but most people probably associate the role with Larry Harmon (real name Lawrence Weiss), who bought the licensing rights in 1957. But Harmon didn’t create the role, which he played starting in the late 1940s. The first Bozo was Pinto Colvig (real name Vance deBar Colvig – people playing Bozo simply can’t be trusted to use their real names), better known as the voice of Goofy in Disney cartoons (also the Grasshopper in The Grasshopper and the Ants, Practical Pig in The Three Little Pigs and sequels, two of the seven Dwarfs, and Gabby in the Fleischer cartoon Gulliver’s Travels and a series of Gabby shorts. He also provided munchkin voices for The Wizard of Oz.) He did the three original Bozo the Clown records for Capitol Records’ children’s line, which is where Bozo originated. (I grew up listening to two of those record sets over and over as a kid, not realizing it was provided by the same guy who did the voice of Goofy)
Although we associated the role of Felix Unger in The Odd Couple with Jack Lemmon (who played him in the film and its years-later sequel) or Tony Randall (who played him on TV and in a TV movie), the role on Broadway was originated by —, Art Carney!
Not exactly the same thing, but Cathy Lee CRosby played Wonder Woman in the pilot for the TV series, portraying a very duifferent character than in the comic book. When they re-did the concept for the continuing TV show, they made her much more like the comic, and got Lynda Carter to play her (and she got to be Asteria in Wonder Woman 1984 from 2020)
But lots of people don’t make it from the pilot to the series, like Carl Reiner in what would eventually become The Dick Van Dyke Show. Cathy Lee Crosby, though, was actually called “Wonder Woman”.
Bill Bixby, if he were still alive, would take exception to that claim, having played Banner for over 12 years in at least seven different productions, the earliest of which predates Norton’s role by 30 years. (Come to think of it, Max Ferguson and Paul Soles would have something to say as well, having voiced the characters in the even earlier cartoon series.)
Lots of actors have played Count Dracula, but the one who played him on Broadway and in the 1931 Universal film (not to mention the 1948 Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, and countless times on stage after 1931) was the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi (real name Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, even though he never played Bozo the Clown). He obviously wasn’t the first to play the part – but even if we except Max Schreck who played him in Murnau’s bootlegged Nosferatu, Lugosi wasn’t the first to play the character in the stage version that originated with Hamilton Deane (later rewritten for the Broadway stage by John Balderston , who turned it into the screenplay for the 1931 film). Deane himself wanted that juicy role, but he opted to play Abraham van Helsing, giving the role of Dracula to Edmund Burke. It was soon taken over by Raymond Huntley, who played the part with a couple of white streaks in his hair that sorta resembled horns. He played the part through its run in England – Lugosi first played the part in New York – and without Lugosi’s distinctive accent. Huntley continued acting until 1984 and died in 1990.
A sort of anti-the-OP is Horace Rumpole, John Mortimer’s barrister of book and television. He envisioned Michael Hordern (the father, Senex, in the movie version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, among a GREAT many other roles, including playing Jacob Marley in two different films) in the part, and at first didn’t care for Leo McKern. He warmed to McKern when he saw him in rehearsal, and eventually wrote the series with him in mind. McKern went on to do the part for BBC radio as well, along with doing recordings of the Rumpole stories for three different audio companies. But other actors did perfrom the part on audio and radio eventually, including Hordern, who did a recording of Rumpole. To my surprise, another Rumpole on the radio was Benedict Cumberbatch!
I’m willing to wager that Johnny Weismuller is the actor most closely associated with Tarzan, though a few actors played the character in silent films prior to Weissmuller’s debut in the role.
Judy Garland is certainly the actress most closely associated with Dorothy Gale, but the character was portrayed on stage and in several silent films before the most-remembered 1939 film.
Sarah Michelle Gellar is the actress most closely associated with Buffy Summers, but the original actress in the role was Kristy Swanson in the movie that preceded the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” TV show.
I am not sure which actor would be MOST associated with playing Sherlock Holmes–Basil Rathbone and Benedict Cumberbatch being the two most obvious and neither one was the first to play him.