The shockingly racist reason Diana Ross was banned from being a ‘Bond girl’: “Just change it”
She might be a musical icon, first and foremost, but Diana Ross showed herself to be a pretty good actor, too, not that talent mattered when it came to ruling her out of a James Bond movie.
To make things even more galling, she’d literally just won a Golden Globe and been nominated for an Academy Award after making her feature-length debut in 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues, with her performance as Billie Holliday winning the Supremes legend widespread critical acclaim.
As sad as it is to say, her reasons for not being allowed to board one of cinema’s most iconic franchises came out of nothing but racism. Unfortunately, that was the way things frequently worked back then, with producers and studio executives having both eyes on the bottom line, and neither on equality.
After Sean Connery had briefly returned to steady the ship with Diamonds Are Forever, Roger Moore was gearing up to make his first outing as 007 in 1973’s Live and Let Die, with director Guy Hamilton and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz among the high-profile creatives carrying over to provide a sense of continuity, even if the secret agent himself had a new face.
Mankiewicz’s script had Bond digging into the murders of three agents, and the plan is to make him the fourth. As he unravels the conspiracy, he’s set on a collision course with the drug lord Dr Kananga, and he picks up a love interest along the way in the beguiling form of an alleged psychic, Solitaire.
Despite featuring more Black representation than your average Bond flick at the time, which hasn’t aged entirely gracefully, with Yaphet Kotto, Julius W Harris, Geoffrey Holder, and Gloria Hendry all principal cast members, then-United Artists boss David Picker drew a firm line under the notion of casting Ross as Solitaire. He may have put it down to business reasons, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking.
“I wrote Solitaire Black, and Diana Ross was going to play her, but at the last minute, David Picker said, ‘No! First of all, there’s two or three countries where I can’t open this in if he sleeps with a Black girl, one being Japan, they don’t like race-mixing at all on the screen,'” Mankiewicz explained. Beyond that, the exec had concerns over how Moore would fare against a recent Oscar nominee.
“‘Secondly, we don’t know how good Roger is going to be; Ross might blow him off the screen; we don’t know,'” the scribe was informed. “‘But the Black thing: don’t do it’. I said, ‘It’s a much better picture, David’, and he said, ‘Don’t be a James Bond about this, just change it’. I said, ‘OK’, so Solitaire became white.”
Ultimately, Jane Seymour was cast as Solitaire after Picker ruled Ross out of the running without giving anyone else a say in the matter, although his objections still don’t quite explain why it was perfectly fine for Moore’s 007 to bed Carver, a character played by a Black actor, but casting a Black actor, and a globally renowned superstar, no less, as the female lead was out of the question.
