The only female villains James Bond has ever faced in the movies
We’ve seen a huge increase in demand for female villains during the last few years or so, with the popularity of Villanelle in Killing Eve, Amy in Gone Girl. or even Sue in The Substance proving that people are dying to see sick and twisted women that challenge the dated stereotypes we often see in the movies. But this is sadly something that doesn’t extend to all corners of Hollywood, with the women in the James Bond franchise remaining slightly useless and one-dimensional while the titular character is seen leaping from burning buildings and jumping from bridges.
While the secret agent is doing all of that, the Bond girls are often held hostage, used as bait, or fall in love with Bond despite the fact that he continually proves his lack of commitment and disregard towards women. But while there is an endless list of Bond girls who have fallen to this fate, there are some who have defied the odds and achieved the coveted villain status.
The World is Not Enough, directed by Michael Apted in 1999, was the third Bond film to star Pierce Brosnan. The movie follows Bond as he seeks to protect an oil heiress from a terrorist, with the world’s oil supply on the line as he does so. Although it is one of the less loved films in Brosnan’s contribution to the franchise, it did feature one of the very few female villains, with Elektra King being the criminal mastermind within the story.
French actor Sophie Marceau plays the character, who is the daughter and second wife of Robert King, secretly working with Renard to destroy her family’s oil pipeline and becoming Bond’s lover to throw him off the trail. However, Elektra shares the fate of many Bond women in the franchise and ends up dead by the end of the film.
From Russia with Love was the second in the Bond franchise to star Sean Connery as the double agent, directed by Terence Young in 1963. However, it also features one of the other main female villains, Rosa Klebb, who appears as a member of the secret criminal organisation called Spectre. Klebb was responsible for selecting the henchman tasked with murdering Bond, but her plan is foiled, and she is later killed by Tatiana Romanova, the Bond girl of the film who was initially tasked with acting as bait in the plot against Bond.
While both of these women are considered the main female villains of the franchise, Octopussy and Pola Ivanova should also be recognised for their sinister work, with Maud Adams playing the former with Roger Moore and Fiona Fullerton playing the latter in A View to Kill, also with Roger Moore. Some would also consider Eva Green’s character of Vesper Lynd as a sort of villain, with the actor playing a double agent that works for Quantum, a terrorist organisation working against MI6.
With the franchise’s future hanging in the balance after recent statements from the Broccoli family about Amazon’s involvement in the story, who knows if there will be another instalment in this series? If there is, perhaps we can hope for a more modern approach to the story world and some more multi-faceted women.
