“I was disgusted with her”: the two ‘Bond girls’ who absolutely despised each other
For roughly half a century, playing a female character in a James Bond movie wasn’t the most rewarding acting job in the world, with the women mostly there to provide eye candy.
There were only four archetypes that were allowed to make it onscreen, and ‘well-written character with depth and nuance’ wasn’t among them, shockingly enough. Most of the ‘Bond girls’ knew what they’d signed up for, but what they didn’t sign up for was working with someone they despised.
Presumably, nobody cared much because they were largely treated like afterthoughts. Even the audition process was based on aesthetics above acting ability, and for many of 007’s early paramours, it was a means to an end for either paying the bills or getting their foot in the door, with the one thing a ‘Bond girl’ role always guaranteed being exposure to a global audience.
Several of them have regretted doing it once, but Martine Beswick did it twice. After making her Bond debut as Vida in From Russia with Love, she was rewarded with a much bigger part in Thunderball, becoming the first two-time ‘Bond girl’ when she was cast as Paula Caplan.
She definitely enjoyed her second outing in the spy series more than the first, largely because she was nowhere near Aliza Gur. In her franchise debut, Beswick and Gur’s Zora spent weeks honing the choreography for their fight scene with the stunt team, only for director Terence Young to throw a spanner into the works.
While the pair had the staging down pat, the filmmaker suggested they add a little more realism to their scrap. Beswick tried to be professional, but Gur wanted to make things more authentic, which might have had something to do with the fact that at no point had the two even been close to getting along.
“I was a very nice girl, but Aliza was a cow,” Beswick matter-of-factly explained. “We had terrible clashes, and I was disgusted with her. I had a lot of anger inside of me, so that scene was the perfect way to work it out. We rehearsed the fight for three weeks, but when we shot it, Aliza was really fighting.”
After being bulldozed by her off-screen nemesis when the cameras were rolling, there was only one thing she could do. “Everyone encouraged me to fight back, so I did,” the actor remembered. “We got into a real scrapping match.” It certainly helped make things more realistic, even if the crew may not have been aware that Beswick and Gur were genuinely thrilled at being allowed to beat the shit out of each other.
Having never seen eye to eye, or even enjoyed a moment in each other’s company, it must have been cathartic for them to put their fight training, and mutual hatred, to good use by duking it out in a James Bond flick.
