The ‘Bond girl’ who hated it so much they quit acting: “I could not anticipate living my life like that”
Becoming the object of affection in a James Bond movie is one of cinema’s most notorious double-edged swords, with the attention that comes from playing the love interest in a 007 adventure being as much of a blessing as it is a curse.
Of course, things have changed in recent years as the franchise continues to move with the times, and it’s hard to imagine actors like Monica Bellucci, Lashana Lynch, Ana de Armas, or Lea Seydoux ever having their future opportunities stymied and limited expressly because they were women cast in high-profile Bond roles.
Unfortunately, things were very different in the 1960s and 1970s, and it didn’t stop there. Rosamund Pike made her feature debut as Miranda Frost in 2002’s Die Another Day, and despite being an Academy Award-nominated performer for her work in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, she still found herself in a position where she denied she was the ‘Bond girl’ people thought she was when out and about in public.
There’s a very good reason so many early-era ‘Bond girls’ gave rise to the theory that it was a poisoned chalice. Luciana Paluzzi, Jane Seymour, and Martine Beswick are just three of the names who confess that the tag became an albatross around their necks in the aftermath of their onscreen dalliances with cinema’s most famous secret agent.
However, one of them had such a miserable experience while making a classic 007 outing that she decided acting no longer lay in her future. Tania Mallet made exactly two on-camera outings: her first film was as Tilly Masterson in Sean Connery’s third instalment, Goldfinger, and the second came a dozen years later when she popped up for a single-episode guest spot in the TV series The New Avengers.
The model and very occasional actor, a cousin of Oscar-winning legend Helen Mirren, worked as a model before she was cast in Goldfinger. After she’d captured the attention of producers and filmmakers everywhere with her turn as the sister of Shirley Eaton’s Jill, she subsequently rejected any and all acting offers that came her way in favour of a permanent return to modelling.
In many cases, embodying the ‘Bond girl’ archetype in a blockbuster seen by millions of viewers around the world would be a huge boon to a fledgling career, but not for Mallet. She was making good money in magazines and on the catwalk as it was, and the rules imposed upon her activities during shooting convinced her that it was something she never wanted to do again.
“The restrictions placed on me for the duration of the filming grated, were dreadful, and I could not anticipate living my life like that,” she told MI6. “For instance, being forbidden to ride in case I had an accident. Apart from that, the money was dreadful.”
Mallet had been “offered £50 per week, which I managed to push up to £150,” and it was a lot less than she’d become accustomed to. “Even so, I earned more than that in a day modelling,” she explained. “So the six months I worked or was retained to work on Goldfinger were a real sacrifice.” Needless to say, she wasn’t bitten by the acting bug, with her Bond experience more than enough to make it the beginning and virtual end of her onscreen exploits in one fell swoop.
