“They did try”: the 1980s ‘Bond girl’ who refused to be reduced to a “decorative piece”
It wasn’t until after the turn of the millennium that a female actor playing a major role in a James Bond movie could feel confident that they wouldn’t be reduced to eye candy or a walking sex pun.
Then again, Die Another Day managed to deliver the best and worst of both worlds when it hired Academy Award winner Halle Berry to play Jinx, in the same film that saw Rosamund Pike actively try to distance herself from the residual and often unwanted fame that comes with being a ‘Bond girl’.
In a way, Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd ushered in a new era, but it was inevitable when the franchise couldn’t operate in the modern age, never mind compete with the Jason Bournes, Jack Bauers, and Ethan Hunts of the entertainment landscape, when presenting its women as notches on a bedpost or damsels in distress.
Of course, actors have to go where the work is, regardless of where they are in their careers, with Barbara Carrera proving herself as one of the standout ‘Bond girls’ of her era by doing something that none of her peers had ever accomplished, before or since: earning recognition from a major awards ceremony.
While Ursula Andress had won a Golden Globe for ‘New Star of the Year – Actress’ for Dr No, and George Lazenby had landed the same distinction in the corresponding category for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Carrera’s turn as Fatima Blush opposite Sean Connery in 1983’s Never Say Never Again got her on the shortlist for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
She went in with her eyes wide open and was determined to subvert those expectations, which goes a long way to explaining the strength of her work. “The women were more or less a decorative piece,” she pointed out. “They had big smiles, beautiful hair, bikinis. There were exceptions, but most of them weren’t given much to do except look pretty. With Fatima, that’s what I loved.”
“I didn’t want her to be another ‘Bond girl,'” Carrera elaborated. “I wanted her to have a lot of something, a lot of oomph.” As a SPECTRE agent who steals a pair of nuclear weapons and is set on a collision course with 007, it was certainly a more substantial and dimensioned role than many of her peers had gotten.
That said, the purists might want to put an asterisk next to it, since it was in the only unofficial entry in the long-running series, and if you want to play that game and exclude Carrera, then no ‘Bond girl’ has technically ever been nominated for a major competitive award, since she was in a non-Eon flick.
Still, the curse tried to rear its head anyway, with the actor having to fight against typecasting from then on. “They did try,” she lamented. “Every role I got offered was bad women roles, bad women, bad women, and I just kept turning them down.” Bond would be the high point of Carrera’s on-camera career, and it sounded like there was a tinge of regret, with the star acknowledging that she “wanted so much to be a serious actress,” but those opportunities never came, not even after a Golden Globe nod.
