“Women are like Barbie dolls”: the ‘Bond girl’ who wasn’t even allowed to sweat
Like every self-respecting protagonist of a long-running action franchise, James Bond frequently gets the shit kicked out of him and manages to overcome being broken, beaten, and scarred to save the world.
While he’s mostly infallible, since there’s never any danger that he won’t complete his mission, the writers have enjoyed putting him through the physical wringer over the last 60+ years. He’s been bloodied, bereaved, left for dead, and imprisoned, and there haven’t been any issues depicting 007 as less than pristine.
However, that didn’t apply to the women. For years, the ‘Bond girl’ was as much of a blessing as it was a curse for the actors who played them, and while many of them knew exactly what they were getting into when they agreed to be the eye candy of Bond’s latest adventure, some bizarre mandates remained in place.
The series used a playbook of precisely four archetypes that the creative team refused to deviate from for years, and while most of the ‘Bond girls’ from the Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, and occasionally Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan eras were aware of what they’d signed up for, being told you aren’t allowed to be captured on camera perspiring is as nuts as it is quietly misogynistic.
Bond? He’s allowed to be covered in cuts, bruises, scrapes, dirt, and blood, since he’s the hero. His female accomplice, partner, love interest, or any other one-note depiction that ran rampant for more than half of the franchise’s existence? A single bead of sweat, no matter what they were doing, and it was suddenly a no-go.
“I remember one scene in which I am running and running and running with Roger Moore,” The Man with the Golden Gun‘s Mary Goodnight, Britt Ekland, recalled. “Well, I was sweating, and they told me later that Bond women never sweat. That’s what those parts are based on. Bond women are like Barbie dolls.”
By the end of his tenure, Moore was probably caked in sweat after being knackered by a flight of stairs, but if one of his female scene partners was to sprint on camera or take part in an action sequence that involved plenty of physicality, Cubby Broccoli and his inner circle had decreed that they must remain as dry as a bone at all times.
“Anyone who takes a part in a Bond film knows what it’s going to be,” Ekland recognised. “I later realised that maybe one of the reasons you get those sort of things was because your salary was never high. “The Bond movie did nothing for my career; I didn’t have a bad career before the movie, and I didn’t have a bad career after the movie.”
That’s a sentiment shared by many ‘Bond girls’, and the same applies to the one thing that always struck her as being particularly strange: “The movie industry watches the Bond movies very closely, and thinks they’re great. But at the same time, they don’t recognise the women in them as actresses.” There’s that double-edged sword again, and one that the more recent instalments have at least been making concerted efforts to blunt at long last.
