Jane Seymour: The ‘Bond girl’ who thought the role was beneath her
It’s probably not a generalisation or assumption to say that not many aspiring actors have grown up harbouring dreams of being a ‘Bond girl’, especially in the days when playing a prominent female character in a James Bond movie was hardly going to present a showcase for their dramatic chops.
On the other hand, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with anybody wanting to be part of one of cinema’s most iconic, enduring, and indelible franchises, especially when the amount of eyeballs that taking on a major part in a guaranteed box office splash will bring can often work wonders for a fledgling career.
It’s continued to be a double-edged sword for many of the women who’ve shared the screen opposite 007, with several having voiced their regrets. The earlier entries in the long-running series were very much products of their time that haven’t aged too gracefully, although there are at least a couple of modern-era ‘Bond girls’ who don’t look back on their roles with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia.
One of them could have never envisioned that they’d end up being cast as a one-dimensional, poorly written, and stereotypical love interest for the most famous spy on the planet, for the sole reason that such light-hearted escapades and superficial blockbuster material were the last things on their mind when they were planning how to manoeuvre their way towards the top of the industry.
Jane Seymour only had three credited big screen roles under her belt and a handful of television appearances to her name when she was cast as Solitaire opposite Roger Moore in 1973’s Live and Let Die. She’d been trained at a school for the performing arts and worked with Richard Attenborough by the time she entered the Bond world, which wasn’t where she saw herself ending up.
“I was the only woman on the planet that was not trying to be a Bond girl, literally,” she explained to Entertainment Weekly. “That was not the trajectory I was looking for. I was going to go and do Shakespeare and Ibsen and all the classics. They were looking for a virgin to play the High Priestess of Tarot, and I was playing a virgin on television, so I’m assuming they thought I had some memory of the experience.”
She did admit that despite her preference for playwrights, she “took the whole thing terribly seriously like it was a major acting role,” so she can’t be accused of phoning it in. Still, Seymour would confess in the years to follow that despite all of the doors that were immediately opened up by her status as a ‘Bond girl’, just as many were slammed shut because a lot of the people she’d envisioned herself working with refused to take her seriously after the shadow of typecasting loomed large.
