The only actor to have played two different ‘Bond girls’
As a franchise that’s continuously reinvented itself to remain relevant, the debate over the necessity of James Bond girls continues to rage. While the spy series has evolved to make its principal female characters much more than simply eye candy, the catch-all term used to describe them still rankles with some.
Comparing the bevvy of women who hung off the arms of Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Pierce Brosnan to the complex and formidable characters played in recent instalments by the likes of Léa Seydoux and Lashana Lynch is night and day. Still, that doesn’t mean the Bond girl trope as a whole has evolved much beyond being a one-off bit part.
In fact, outside of Moneypenny in her many guises and Judi Dench’s M, there aren’t many prominent female figures to make more than one appearance in 007 canon. Eva Rueber-Staier’s Rublevitch was in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and Octopussy, Eunice Grayson’s Sylvia Trench was in Dr. No and From Russia with Love, Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann was in Spectre and No Time to Die, while Brigitte Millar’s Dr. Vogel was in the same pair.
That’s basically it, although the list of female actors who have played two different parts in separate Bond adventures is significantly longer and includes Nadja Regin, Martine Beswick, Mary Stävin, and Tsai Chin. However, only one has been seen as two Bond girls by the strictest definition of the term as it applies to the property at large, a distinction that falls to Maud Adams.
As well as starring as the mistress of Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, where her vengeful beau murdered her after he discovered she’d quite literally been sleeping with the enemy, she returned as the title character in Octopussy almost a decade later.
When pressed on her thoughts on being the only official two-time Bond girl, Adams admitted to the BBC that it never entered her mind at all. “I really didn’t expect they would cast me again, and I was asked to come to London to screentest with James Brolin, who they were considering for a new Bond,” she said. “I thought it would be a wonderful time to catch up with all my old friends. I didn’t realise until afterwards that they were serious about me as well. Roger Moore ended up re-signing, and I did it! I really haven’t quite figured out why, to be honest.”
It might have been a different decade and a different movie, but Roger Moore ensured it was the same Bond, while the results were much the same after the pair decided to get frisky on a boat, having partnered up to save the world from destruction. That wasn’t even Adams’ final flirtation with 007, either, although she went uncredited as a member of a crowd scene in A View to a Kill, which also marked Moore’s swansong.
