What is the ‘Bond girl’ curse?
To this day, there is still a certain sense of cultural cache that comes from playing a ‘Bond girl’. In recent years, actors like Ana de Armas, Eva Green, and Lashana Lynch have brought the concept kicking and screaming into the 21st century by playing characters who have compelling lives of their own and aren’t solely defined by being famed superspy James Bond‘s eye candy. However, it wasn’t always this way, and there are many in the industry who continue to believe in the ‘Bond girl curse’. How exactly does this so-called curse manifest, though, and why are so many convinced it’s real?
Landing a role as a Bond girl is undoubtedly an exciting experience for an actor, especially if she is fairly unknown at the time of her casting. When Jane Seymour was cast in 1973’s Live and Let Die, for example, she admitted, “Coming from obscurity, it was a very nice thing. It meant I had a job.” Similarly, Gemma Arterton was excited when she was cast as Strawberry Fields in 2008’s Quantum of Solace, while Luciana Paluzzi said being a Bond girl in Thunderball was a “blessing”.
There was a flipside to becoming one of Bond’s sexy, minimally-clothed conquests, though. Seymour confessed, “For all the doors it opened, it also slammed some shut.” She claimed that acclaimed director John Schlesinger once approached her about a role, but when he found out she’d been a Bond girl, she never heard from him again. She lamented, “That happened a few times.”
Indeed, Paluzzi’s full “blessing” quote, which she said in the Bond Girls Are Forever documentary, was, “To do a Bond picture is a blessing, but it’s also a curse. When I went back to Italy, the Fellinis, Antonionis, and Viscontis wanted nothing to do with me.”
Unfortunately, a perception hung over Bond girls in Hollywood for decades. Because they played roles that traded on their looks in highly mainstream action movies, it cast a pall over how other people working in the industry saw them. Sadly, this stigma hung around so many of them that their career prospects did actually suffer post-Bond, as many of the actors found it hard to shake off their Bond girl past and land other roles.
It even led to an uncomfortable situation in which actors were offered the role of a lifetime in a Bond movie but had to weigh up whether they thought it would be worth it to say yes. After all, the notoriety of being in a Bond film in the short term could wind up coming back to bite them in the long term. Tanya Roberts, who starred in 1985’s A View to a Kill, confessed, “I sort of felt like every girl who’d ever been a Bond girl had seen their career go nowhere, so I was a little cautious.”
Roberts decided to take the risk but admitted that it did affect her career going forward. She lamented, “I think it’s better to come into the limelight really slowly and do a broader range of roles, but I took these glamorous roles, and I think that stereotyped me. They sort of think you’re some dumb, glamorous broad, so it’s difficult, and I think that is the reason most Bond girls don’t go on to have careers because people just don’t take them seriously.”
Intriguingly, there was one actor who used a unique tactic to combat the supposed Bond girl curse – by playing two different Bond girls.
Which ‘Bond girl’ appeared twice?
In 1974, Maud Adams starred as the doomed mistress of Christopher Lee’s villainous Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun and subsequently thought her tour of duty as a Bond girl was over. However, she was confused when she was asked to screentest with James Brolin nearly a decade later. You see, he was being considered to take over from Roger Moore as the iconic spy. However, she assumed she didn’t have a chance of being cast because she’d worked in the franchise before.
Adams chuckled to the BBC, “I thought it would be a wonderful time to catch up with all my old friends. I didn’t realise until afterwards that they were serious about me as well. Roger Moore ended up re-signing, and I did it. I really haven’t quite figured out why, to be honest.” In the end, she was cast as the titular jewel smuggler in 1983’s Octopussy, and nobody batted an eyelid.
…and who has beaten the ‘Bond girl curse’?
These days, there are so many actors who have gone on to have thriving careers after playing Bond girls that the curse seems to be a thing of the past. Kim Basinger, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, Rosamund Pike, Teri Hatcher, and Michelle Yeoh have all proved it’s possible to shake off any Bond baggage.
However, even an actor as acclaimed in world cinema as Yeoh admitted it took a while for her career to stabilise after she starred in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies. She confessed, “I didn’t work for almost two years.”
