The only two women to receive writing credits on a James Bond movie
As a franchise that originated in 1962, it’s not a revelation that it took a while for the James Bond series to stop giving its women the short end of the stick. The early films were very much products of their time, but as a property that lives in a constant sense of reinvention, modernity eventually caught up.
For decades, female actors in Bond movies were largely used to provide eye candy and love interests or, in many cases, to be killed by the villain to provide extra motivation for the hero. During the Sean Connery and Roger Moore eras especially, the number of well-rounded and complex characters could be counted on two hands at the very most, if there were even that many.
Time stands still for nobody and nothing, though, and by the end of the Daniel Craig era, a clear distinction had been made. Halle Berry may have held her own against Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day, but at the end of the day, she was still introduced emerging from the sea in a bikini and bedded 007, so it wasn’t quite a character who was breaking new ground.
Thanks to the ongoing contributions of Judi Dench’s M, Ana de Armas’ scene-stealing Paloma, Lashana Lynch’s stoic Nomi, Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann, and Naomie Harris’ battle-tested field agent Eve Moneypenny, the most recent set of Bond flicks have made a point of establishing principal female players as more than the one-dimensional molls of decades past, even if there’s the occasional Strawberry Fields who serves as the exception that proves the rule.
It could be a while before a female director is ever handed the reins on one of the globetrotting blockbusters, especially when there have only ever been two women credited as writers on the franchise’s 25 official instalments. Not only that, but they were separated by more than half a century, and there were almost two dozen pictures made in the interim.
Bafta, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy-winning Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge was drafted into the writing team on No Time to Die alongside regular scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. Her contributions included polishing dialogue, enhancing character development, and injecting more humour into the proceedings, with Craig being a huge fan of what she brought to the table.
When No Time to Die finally hit the big screen in September 2021 after several lengthy delays, Waller-Bridge’s name being listed in the credits made her the first woman in 58 years to earn that distinction. What makes it even stranger is that Johanna Harwood co-wrote Dr No and From Russia with Love, meaning that a female writer played a major part in cracking the first two scripts in the Bond saga, but another 22 features would pass before it happened again.
