Bond Girls

Kim Basinger

The Unofficial Bond Girl

Basinger’s breakout role was as Bond girl Domino Petachi in the unofficial non-Eon movie Never Say Never Again (1983), starring opposite Sean Connery. She posed nude for Playboy to promote the film. Basinger said Playboy led to opportunities such as Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1984), co-starring Robert Redford, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She starred opposite Mickey Rourke in the sexually provocative 9½ Weeks (1986) and Vicki Vale, the female lead in Batman (1989). Basinger received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture nomination for her work in The Natural (1984). She won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in L.A. Confidential (1997).

After her first divorce, Basinger dated casting director Jon Peters and singer Prince. Her second marriage was to the actor Alec Baldwin.

Some family members recommended Basinger buy the small town of Braselton, Georgia in 1989 for US$20 million, to establish as a tourist attraction with movie studios and film festival, but she met financial difficulties and sold it in 1993.

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Denise Richards & Sophie Marceau

“The World Is Not Enough”

 

Denise Richards is an American actress and former fashion model. She achieved success during the late 1990s in several films, including Starship Troopers,Wild Things, and The World Is Not Enough . She a

lso appeared on the reality TV show, Denise Richards: It’s Complicated. Richards was cast as the nuclear-

physicist Christmas Jones in the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough (1999). Though she considered her role “brainy”, “athletic”, and having depth of character, she was criticized as not credible in the role. Her outfit, which often comprised

a low-cut tank  top and tight shorts, elicited comments.  She was ranked as one of the worst Bond girls of all time by Entertainment Weekly in 2008 and was chosen as “Worst Supporting Actress” at the 1999

Razzie Awards for the role.

Sophie Marceau achieved international recognition in 1995 as Princess Isabelle in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. That year, she was part

of an ensemble of international actors in the French film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders, Beyond the Clouds where she had her first nude scene. As Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough she was one of the film’s two main villains; an oil heiress who wants to make her mark on the world by sealing an oil trade route with a nuclear explosion.

The World Is Not Enough plot revolves around the assassination of billionaire Sir Robert King by the terrorist Renard and Bond’s subsequent assignment to protect King’s daughter, Elektra, who had previously been held for ransom by Renard. During his assignment, Bond unravels a scheme to increase petroleum prices by triggering a nuclear meltdown in the waters of Istanbul.

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Daniela Bianchi “From Russia With Love”

Daniela Bianchi

Italian actress, whose best kno

wn part was Tatiana Romanova in the 1963 James Bond movie From Russia with Love.

Born in Rome, she was the 1st runner-up in the 1960 Miss Universe contest, where she was also voted Miss Photogenic by the press. Her film career began in 1958. In From Russia with Love her voice was dubbed by Barbara Jefford.

She made a number of French and Italian movies after From Russia with Love, the last being Scacco Internazionale in 1968. One of her later films was Operation Kid Brother (also known as OK Connery and Operation Double 007), which was a James Bond spoof filmed in English (though Bianchi was again dubbed) and starring Sean Connery’s brother, Neil Connery. In 1970, she retired from acting to marry a Genoan shipping magnate, and they have a son.

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Barbara Bach “The Spy Who Love Me”

Barbara Bach

In 1971, Bach co-starred with two other Bond girls, Claudine Auger and Barbara Bouchet in the mystery La Tarantola Dal Ventre Nero and had small roles in other Italian films.

In 1977, her role as the Russian spy Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me gained her recognition as an international sex symbol. Although her character Anya is seen as the first Bond girl who is an equal to Bond, since she is also an experienced spy, Bach still walked away from the film saying that Bond is “a chauvinist pig who uses girls to shield him against bullets. The following year she appeared in the movie Force 10 from Navarone. She lost a role to actress Shelley Hack when she auditioned for the television series Charlie’s Angels. Bach has 28 films to her credit. She appeared in Playboy several times, from 1977 to 1981, in 1985, and in 2008.

Bach met Ringo Starr on the set of the film Caveman in February 1980, and they were married on April 27, 1981, a few weeks after the film’s release. In recent years Bach has accompanied Starr on his tours and has appeared on some of Ringo’s music videos, playing on some of his songs.

Bach holds a master’s degree (UCLA, 1993) in psychology and was formerly hitched to both Eric Clapton and George Harrison.

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Honor Blackman – Goldfinger

Honor Blackman

Blackman was born in Plaistow, Newham, London. While training to be an actress she worked for the Home Office, the British government agency that overseas MI5. Years later, Albert R. Broccoli admitted that Blackman had been cast on the back of her success in the popular British TV spy show The Avengers, despite the fact that the American audience had never even seen the program. Broccoli said, “The Brits would love her because they knew her as Mrs. Gale, the Yanks would like her because she was so good, it was a perfect combination”. Blackman was the first and one of two “Bond girls” older than the actor playing James Bond, and at 39 she was the oldest actress ever to play a Bondgirl.

In a 1965 episode of The Avengers, titled “Too Many Christmas Trees”, John Steed received his Christmas cards, one of which was from Cathy. “A card from Mrs Gale!”, Steed exclaims in delight. Then, reading the inscription, he says in a puzzled voice, “Whatever can she be doing at Fort Knox…?”. It was an inside joke, as Blackman was filming Goldfinger at the time.

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Diana Rigg – On Her Majesty Secret Service

Diana Rigg

Rigg spent many years of her childhood in Bikaner, India, where her father was employed as a railroad executive. To date she still speaks fluent Hindi. She got her start when she went straight from high school to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she made her professional debut at the age of 19. Diana Rigg has made a career out of playing troublesome characters. She is particularly known for her role in the British 1960s television series “The Avengers”, where she played the secret agent Mrs. Emma Peel for 51 episodes between 1965–68.

In one understandably beloved episode, “A Touch of Brimstone”, Rigg was disguised as “The Queen of Sin”, to infiltrate the Hellfire Club, a clandestine group determined to topple governments through practical jokes. She wore an extremely tight Edwardian-style corset, high heeled leather boots, and a three-inch spiked collar. According to legend, that memorable outfit was not provided by the program’s wardrobe department, but instead came from Ms Rigg’s own closet. Rigg tried out for the role of Emma Peel on a whim, without ever having seen the program.
On the big screen she became a Bond girl in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), playing Tracy Bond, James Bond’s only wife.
Because of her work in multiple charities, Rigg was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1988 and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1994.

Carole Bouquet – For Your Eyes Only

Carole Bouquet

Carole is a French actress and fashion model, who has appeared in more than 40 films since 1977. Bouquet was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She is best known internationally for her role as Bond girl Melina Havelock in the 1981 movie For Your Eyes Only, but she also acted in a number of mainstream European films throughout the 1980s and continues to do so in France.
Bouquet was a model for Chanel in the 1990s. She is the widow of producer Jean-Pierre Rassam with whom she had a son, Dimitri Rassam. From 1997 to 2005, she dated actor Gérard Depardieu, with whom she had worked several times. Bouquet was engaged to him from 2003 to 2005.

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Caroline Munro – The Spy Who Loved Me

Caroline Monro

In 1977, Munro turned down the opportunity to play villainess Ursa in Superman in favor of what would become her most celebrated film appearance, the ill-fated helicopter pilot Naomi in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. In one of the franchise’s most memorable car chase sequences, she seductively winks at Bond while trying to gun him down from her helicopter. In her role as Naomi, she holds the distinction of being the first woman ever undeniably killed by James Bond. Cubby Broccoli urged Caroline to make her way to America in search of more lucrative offers. She declined preferring to stay close to her family.
Throughout the 1980s, Munro was often cited by the press as being a candidate for the co-starring role in a proposed (but never produced) feature film based upon Doctor Who. The feature was being co-produced by her second husband George Dugdale. At various times, press reports linked her with numerous actors touted to play the role of The Doctor, including David Bowie.

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Olga Kurylenko – Quantum Of Solace

Olga Kurylenko

Olga plays the Bond Girl, Camille Montes, in the 22nd James Bond film, Quantum of Solace and portrays Nika Boronina in the movie adaptation of the video game Hitman. Kurylenko was discovered by a female model scout while on vacation in Moscow at the age of 13. When she was 17, she signed a contract with the Paris-based Madison modeling agency. By the age of 18, she had already appeared on the covers of Vogue and Elle.

While working as a model in Paris, Kurylenko supported her mother back home in Ukraine.

She grew up poor; she shared an apartment with her aunt and uncle, grandparents, and cousin. She never had any fancy clothes, often wearing hand-me-downs and re-sewing torn sweaters instead of buying new ones.

The fact that she is the first Bond girl from a post-Soviet state received mixed reactions in post-Soviet countries. The Saint Petersburg based Communist group KPLO has accused her of “moral and intellectual betrayal” in starring in a film about the “enemy of the Soviet people” (meaning James Bond),but the mayor of Berdyansk has suggested naming a street after herand Kurylenko and her mother met Ukraine’s First Lady Kateryna Yushchenko in President Yushchenko’s family country house.

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Ursula Andress – Dr. No

Ursula Andress

Andress was born in Ostermundigen, Bern, Switzerland, the daughter of Anna, who was Swiss, and Rolf Andress, a German diplomat who was expelled from Switzerland for political reasons. Andress has four sisters and one brother. She is fluent in English, French, Italian, and German. The young Andress started her career as an art model in Rome, which led to her first roles in the Italian movie industry.

Andress became famous as Honey Rider, a shell diver and James Bond’s object of desire in Dr. No (1962), the first Bond movie. In a well-known scene, she rises out of the Caribbean Sea in a white bikini. The scene made Andress the “quintessential” Bond girl, and is now considered iconic. “My entrance in the film wearing the bikini on that beautiful beach made me world famous as ‘the Bond girl‘“, she said, and the bikini from this “classic moment in cinema and Bond history” sold for £35,000 at auction in 2001. In 2003, in a UK Survey by Channel 4, her entrance in Dr. No was voted #1 in “the 100 Greatest Sexy Moments”. In 2007, Australian series 20 to 1 ranked her entrance in Dr. No as the #2 Sexiest Movie Moment.

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Caterina Murino – Casino Royale 2006

Caterina Murino

She was born in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Initially wanting to be a doctor, she switched career paths to entering beauty pageants after failing twice the entrance exams to get into medical school. She reached fifth place in the 1996 Miss Italy contest. In 1999 and 2000, she studied drama at the Cinema of Theatre of Francesca de Sapio, and appeared in stage productions of Richard III and Italian language plays. She began her career in television in 2002. She gained international fame after playing Solange in the 2006 adaptation of the James Bond novel Casino Royale.
Besides her native Italian, she also speaks Spanish, English and French. She has been living in Paris since 2004. Her birth year is sometimes reported as 1974, though her official website gives the year as 1977.

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Maryam d’Abo – Living Daylights

Born in London to a Georgian mother and Dutch father, d’Abo was raised in Paris and Geneva. She decided to be an actress at the age of 11. She studied at Drama Centre London, while working as a model in commercials. Her most famous role was in 1987 as Kara Milovy, the sweet and vulnerable Czechoslovakian cellist and sniper, who falls for James Bond in The Living Daylights. It remains her personal favorite film. As a tie-in with the film, she also featured in a Bond themed Playboy cover and multi-page pictorial in the September 1987 edition.