The ‘Bond girl’ who knew what they were up against: “It could actually ruin your career”
Signing on for a role that has the potential to affect an entire career for better or worse requires a certain amount of inherent risk, especially when the track record for women cast in major roles in James Bond movies wasn’t particularly great in the 1960s and 1970s.
For every ‘Bond girl’ that used the publicity of starring opposite one of cinema’s most iconic characters as a springboard to bigger and better things, there would inevitably be another who found themselves permanently typecast and tainted in the eyes of casting directors, producers, and filmmakers.
Obviously, it’s incredibly unfair to judge any performer on a single one-dimensional archetype, but that was the nature of the business back then. Jane Seymour carved out a successful career for herself despite confessing that her ‘Bond girl’ past did just as much harm as it did good when she was auditioning for other parts.
Luciana Paluzzi confessed that playing Thunderball‘s femme fatale Fiona Volpe made it harder than ever to secure meaningful roles when she returned to her native Italy, while Tania Mallet had seen enough to effectively retire from acting altogether after she’d starred opposite Sean Connery in Goldfinger.
Of course, the constant evolution of the globetrotting spy saga has ensured that the ‘Bond girl’ will no longer be treated as a vapid love interest, notch on 007’s bedpost, or eye candy, but Madeline Smith was fully aware of what she could be up against when she signed on to play Miss Caruso and enjoy a brief fling with Roger Moore in 1973’s Live and Let Die.
The two had already worked together on an episode of The Persuaders, and the debuting Bond suggested her for the part. Still, the actor knew that there were risks involved with becoming a ‘Bond girl’. “It could actually ruin your career because they would typecast you forever,” she admitted to MI6. “Sometimes, people were not always happy to accept the part, and that’s actually true.”
Smith was “delighted to have done” Live and Let Die, and her career flourished in the aftermath. By then, she was already a staple of Hammer horror, having previously appeared in The Vampire Lovers, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Theatre of Blood, and Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, so she wasn’t an unknown quantity beforehand, to fans of British genre cinema, at least.
Smith was also a staple of the British sex comedy with Up Pompeii, Up the Front, and Carry on Matron under her belt before Live and Let Die, ensuring that she wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the relatively unknown ‘Bond girls’ who struggled to establish themselves outside of their 007 outings.
Her confidence in her abilities to avoid the curse paid off in the long run, with Smith avoiding the ignominy of having Bond dent her career by amassing dozens of credits across film and television until the early 2020s.
