“It was just embarrassing”: the “awful” ‘Bond girl’ who failed to win anybody over
For decades, playing a prominent female character in a James Bond movie was one of cinema’s toughest gigs. It was hardly the place for well-written, three-dimensional, and fully-realised parts, with the franchise’s first few decades largely treating them as eye candy, conquests, and duplicitous vixens.
While there are obviously exceptions, when the screenwriters behind several 007 films revealed that they were handed a dossier that contained precisely four archetypes that were deemed fit for purpose, it wasn’t as if there was much room to manoeuvre and break the mould.
Some former ‘Bond girls’ have absolutely no issues being remembered for their one-and-done trysts with the iconic secret agent, and others came to regret their involvement. A View to a Kill‘s Tanya Roberts fell somewhere in the middle, in that she was initially thrilled to become part of such a famous property, only to discover that there wasn’t anything she could do to save herself from scorn and ridicule.
“I thought it might stop me from getting other roles, because none of the ‘Bond girls’ have gone on to do anything else,” she shared. “But it was a good part, and I said to my agent, ‘Will I ever get another job, or will anyone take me seriously?’ He said, ‘Meryl Streep would take it if they offered it to her’. That’s how prestigious a kind of role and a franchise it was. I did it, and it was fun, and I had a great time.”
She enjoyed herself as Stacey Sutton, which is the most important thing. However, her leading man wasn’t quite as enthused. Roger Moore had been hanging around for too long anyway, but the moment he realised he wasn’t cut out for Bond anymore wasn’t because he was 22 years older than Roberts; it was the fact that he was also older than her mother.
There were also her issues with the script, particularly a long-winded monologue about the nefarious plan to flood Silicon Valley. Roberts explained how she’d “asked them if I could make a few changes to the whole big speech,” and she was told “absolutely not,” because Cubby Broccoli’s son, future 007 steward Michael G Wilson, had co-written the script. “It didn’t make a lot of sense to me,” the actor added.
Wilson didn’t pen the script solo, though, so what did his co-scribe, Richard Maibaum, make of her performance? “Tanya Roberts was awful,” he declared. “I was at a screening for that film, and I remember when it premiered, people were literally doubled over with laughter, falling off their seats, over the way she delivered her lines. It was just embarrassing.”
Actors can only recite the lines they’re given, and while Roberts was never going to win an Academy Award for playing a ‘Bond girl’, it’s a bit hypocritical for Maibaum to slate her performance when he was responsible for a lot of those lines that audiences seemed to find unintentionally hilarious.
To add insult to injury, her turn as Sutton also landed her on the Razzies shortlist for ‘Worst Actor’, her second consecutive nomination after 1984’s Sheena had seen her recognised by the awards show that celebrates the worst of the worst. Sure, it’s not a great performance, but it’s not like anyone involved in A View to a Kill was doing her any favours.
