Who founded the first James Bond club?

As I prepared my paper for the Spies on British Screens conference, which took place in Plymouth last weekend (more about that event soon), I reminded myself about what must have been one of earliest James Bond clubs to have been founded. What's more, I discovered that its founders were later to become eminent in the world of British politics. 

In my paper, I discussed some of the Bondian words and phrases, such as ‘Bond, James Bond’, ‘shaken, not stirred’, and 'Bond girls', that have become part of everyday lexicon, used and adapted in contexts away from the specific world of Bond. I traced their evolution and usage, and examined why these terms have become so successful; that is, long-lasting and widespread.

I've written about the origin of the word 'Bond girl' before on this blog, and so already knew that one of the earliest appearances of the term is in the Daily Express, published 1st February 1963. Curiously, the term didn't refer to James Bond's female companion in either Fleming's novels or the film of Dr No (the second Bond film, From Russia With Love, had yet to be released when the article was published), but was used as a shorthand term within a headline of an article.

In the article, 'Perfect Bond Girl', Express columnist William Hickey described how Oxford University student, Joanna Hare, had been voted Oxford University's nearest answer to the type of woman that James Bond meets by members of the university's newly formed James Bond club. William Hickey continued that members of the James Bond club were dedicated fans of the Bond novels and pledged to live up to the standards of living and behaviour of their literary hero.

Looking up the article to remind myself of the details, I was surprised to discover the identities of the club's founder members: Mark Lennox-Boyd, who would become a Conservative member of parliament, serving in Margaret Thatcher's, then John Major's governments, and Jonathan Aitken, who served in John Major's cabinet as Minister of State for Defence Procurement in 1992 and was later jailed for perjury following a scandal about a stay in the Paris Ritz. During his time in prison, he turned to Christianity, and has since become a Christian writer.

What of (possibly) the first Bond girl, Joanna Hare? She's the daughter of Conservative politician John Hare (1st Viscount Blakenham), who at the time that the article written was serving as Minister of Labour in Harold Macmillan's cabinet. In 1967, the Hon. Joanna Hare married Stephen Breyer, who is now an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

If you look up Jonathan Aitken and Mark Lennox-Boyd on Wikipedia, you won't find any mention of their Bond fandom and the setting up of the James Bond club. As Marc-Ange Draco from On Her Majesty's Secret Service might have said, Wikipedia's dossier on them is not entirely complete.

There is a footnote to this story. In the following day's Express, William Hickey reported that five undergraduates at Oxford University had formed a university section of SMERSH in response to the creation of the James Bond club. How serious this rival group was is uncertain, but the incident suggests that the university's James Bond fans were motivated in their activities by the books, rather than the first Bond film, Dr No, which had pitted Bond against SPECTRE (although SMERSH is mentioned in the film).

From Bond girl to Bond woman

In interviews following the press event to launch Spectre, and leading up to the release of the film, Monica Bellucci, cast in the role of Lucia Sciarra, rejected the term Bond girl in favour of Bond woman or lady. “I am so much more mature. I'd prefer to be called a Bond woman or perhaps a Bond lady,” she told the Mail of Sunday in February 2015. In an interview for the Sunday Times, she said, “I am a Bond lady.”

The rejection of Bond girl was on the basis of her age, the description of girl simply being inappropriate for an older woman. This was echoed by former Bond girl Fiona Fullerton, who appeared as Pola Ivanova in A View To A Kill (1985). She told the Daily Express in August this year: “I kind of cringe when I'm referred to as a Bond girl because I'm not a girl any more. I'm very much of the older fraternity so I'm a Bond woman.”

A similar view was expressed in the reaction, some 20 years earlier, of actor Michael Williams to the news that his wife, Judi Dench, had been cast as M in GoldenEye. “Oh brilliant”, he said, “Bond-woman!” Judi Dench has used the term herself, writing in her autobiography, “I really shouldn't be called a Bond woman at all, but I call myself one”.

Others have accepted the term Bond women because they have considered Bond girl inappropriate for any woman, young or old, or have associated the term with passive female characters who provide little more than decoration. Halle Berry told the Daily Express in November 2002 that “Jinx [her character in Die Another Day] is the next step in the evolution of the Bond woman. Year after year, they become a little bit stronger, a little smarter.... Now they're Bond's intellectual equals and physical rivals.”

When Léa Seydoux was asked in the October 2015 issue of Total Film whether her character, Madeleine Swann was a Bond woman rather than a Bond girl, she replied, “She's a strong woman”, a response that neatly side-stepped the requirement to accept either label. The Daily Star claimed in October 2008 that Izabella Scorupco demanded to be called a Bond woman in GoldenEye, because she thought the usual term Bond girl was demeaning (although judging by interviews published in 1995, Bond girl appears not to have been so problematic).

Notably, in her foreword and chapter introductions in Bond Girls are Forever (2003), co-author Maryam d'Abo (Kara in The Living Daylights) rarely uses the term Bond girl. She writes, for example, that “it is the casting of the Bond women that garner the most attention,” and that “there has never been a Bond film without a Bond woman.” Reading this, one gets the sense that Maryam d'Abo is not entirely comfortable with the term Bond girl, although Bond girl is not rejected explicitly, and is naturally retained in the title of the book.

The earliest use of the term Bond woman that I know of dates to 1989. An advert for Elle magazine that appeared in the Daily Express in 1989 trailed the contents of the June issue. Women in the Bond films were the subject of one of the articles, presumably coinciding with the release of Licence to Kill. “A Bond girl's life has never been easy,” the advert claimed. “Wham. Bam. Thank you, ma'am. Then bang bang, you're dead. But the role of the Bond woman is changing,” the implication being that term Bond girl was not appropriate for characters such as Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), who was perceived as being Bond's equal. 

This trawl through various sources has traced the emergence of the term Bond woman and revealed two definitions. In one sense, it is a term that reflects age, being associated with older women. Despite the use of this newer term, Bond girl itself is not rejected. In another sense of the term, Bond woman is presented as an alternative to Bond girl, reflecting the perception that female roles in the Bond films have changed through the course of the series, and making the obvious point that the actors are women, not girls.

Whether women in the Bond films are Bond girls or Bond women, it could be argued that such labels, Bond girl especially, have largely been imposed on the actors, seemingly first emerging in the media (the earliest reference to Bond girl I know of is in the Daily Express and dates to February 1963), and becoming deeply embedded in the cultural environment. The result is that every interview at press conferences or in newspapers and magazines seems to oblige actors to engage with the term Bond girl. This may be the reason why many of the actors (beginning at least as far back as 1969 with Diana Rigg) claim that their characters are stronger, more independent, and more on equal terms with Bond than their predecessors.

Bondian words in the dictionary

Wiktionary's definition of 'Bond girl'

In an earlier post, I argued that the word 'Bond girl' ought to be in the dictionary. Easily fulfilling the standard criteria for inclusion for most major dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the term has been in use since 1963, it has, as the OED stipulates, attained a level of currency that allows it to be used without the expectation of an immediate explanation of its meaning, and it has been used independently many times in newspapers and literature, on TV and in other media. Remarkably the word has not yet made it to the OED, but Bond girl does now appear in the Wiktionary, along with a number of other Bond-related words.

Two meanings of the word Bond girl are offered in the Wiktionary: 1) “One of the beautiful, seductive young women who appear in James Bond movies”; and in a transferred sense, 2) “A beautiful, seductive young woman.”

If using Wiktionary as their principal reference, Scrabble players (Blofeld included) would not be able to place Bond girl, comprising as it does two words, but they would be able to play Bondiana, which is defined by Wiktionary as “Items relating to the fictional spy James Bond.” Players might also wish to remember the adjective, Bondlike, which means “Characteristic of James Bond.” Curiously, the example of use quoted below the Wiktionary definition – in this case from an edition of Popular Science (“With a host of Bond-like gadgets, the Army's latest peacekeeping machine protects without taking lives.”), the word is hyphenated, which would not be permitted in Scrabble. I think my inclination would be to hyphenate the word, but I'd be in a minority, as these days the trend is to remove hyphens.

The final Bond-related (or is that Bondrelated?) word to appear in the Wiktionary is Bond villain, which describes “An evil mastermind who attempts to take over the world.”

There are some words which I think also deserve a place in the Wiktionary, among them Bondian, Bond song, and Flemingesque. Bondmania (or Bondomania) may have had a chance in the 1960s, but now the word is rarely heard, and only with reference to the public reaction that greeted the release of the films Goldfinger, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. Bondmanship, which dates to 1963, never really caught on, and doesn't appear to have survived the year.

Like its sister project, Wikipedia, the Wiktionary is an open-content resource that depends on its users to contribute and edit entries. It has criteria for inclusion, which are stated to be strictly applied. In any case, I would not disagree that Bond girl and other Bond-related words merit inclusion, being terms that, as the Wiktionary demands, “someone would run across”, are attested through “widespread use, use in a well-known work, or use in permanently recorded media in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year”, and are idiomatic. That Bond girl and other memes have made it to a dictionary is testament to the success of the James Bond phenomenon in popular culture.

Bond girls, villains and catchphrases: some analysis

Among the many articles about James Bond published in recent weeks ahead of the release of Skyfall was an interesting piece for the BBC news website, titled 'James Bond: cars, catchphrases and kisses'. The item, researched and compiled by Helene Sears, Tom Housden, Mark Savage, and Steven Atherton, attempted to present “definitive data on women kissed, villains dispatched and catchphrases [specifically 'Bond, James Bond'] uttered.” While there are arguably more interesting statistics, for example the number of martinis consumed, one-liners delivered, or gadgets used (though see my own data on Bond's drinks and gadgets), the data were presented in the form of counts, and, as I can't resist playing with data, I thought I'd carry out some analysis on the numbers to identify any further insights on the evolution of the film series and the differences in the way Bond has been portrayed.

According to the BBC article, the total number of villains killed is 218. Sixty-four women have been kissed, while 'Bond, James Bond' has been said 25 times. Over the 23-film series, an average of 9.5 villains have been killed per film, while each film has seen an average of 2.8 women kissed. 'Bond, James Bond' has been uttered an average of 1.1 times per film.

Looking at the individual Bond actors, Sean Connery's Bond has been responsible, on average, for the deaths of 9.3 villains. This compares with 7 villains for George Lazenby, 7.1 for Roger Moore, nine for Timothy Dalton, 12 for Pierce Brosnan, and 13 villains for Daniel Craig. These values suggest that there has been an increase over the course of the series in the number of villains killed per film. Notably, the standard deviation for Sean Connery (6.3 villains) is larger than that, say, for Pierce Brosnan (5.9), pointing to a more variable record for Connery's Bond. In other words, some of Connery's films have relatively few deaths (as few as four), while others are far more lethal, with as many as 18 deaths. The body count in Brosnan's films, by comparison, is generally higher (ranging from 8 to 18).

Turning to the number of women kissed, Sean Connery's Bond kissed on average three women per film. George Lazenby also kissed three women in his single film, and Pierce Brosnan's average is three as well. Roger Moore's Bond has a slightly lower average of 2.9 women kissed, and Daniel Craig's average is lower still – 2.3 women kissed per film. Timothy Dalton has the lowest average, just two women kissed per film, although Dalton's dataset of just two films is really too small for statistical purposes; after all, Dalton's Bond kissed three women in Licence to Kill, which is above the series average. As with the villains killed category, the standard deviation for Sean Connery is higher than that for Roger Moore (1.3 women kissed, compared with 0.7), suggesting that Connery's Bond is again the most variable (the range of Connery's Bond is between 1 and 4 women kissed).

Of the catchphrase, 'Bond, James Bond', there is very little variation across the film series; the phrase has more or less been uttered once in every film. The phrase, however, has not been used in every Connery film, and only George Lazenby and Roger Moore have used the phrase twice in a single film.
 
Some of the trends outlined above also emerge when we examine the data from a chronological perspective. From the chart, the general increase in the number of villains killed over time is clear, although there has been enormous fluctuation throughout the series. Connery's films quickly ramped up the body count as each film attempted to better the last, and some of the most spectacular films, including You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and The World is not Enough, have had high values to match – 18 villain-deaths each. The Roger Moore era (1973-85), in contrast, is generally characterised by the fewest villain-deaths, a product, perhaps, of Moore's take on the role of Bond; Roger Moore has often said that his Bond didn't like to kill and was more likely to use brains rather than violence to get him out of trouble.

As for utterances of 'Bond, James Bond', the trend is flatter still, but where there is fluctuation, it occurs in the Sean Connery and Roger Moore eras, and it is only from the Timothy Dalton era onwards that the numbers largely settle down. A possible reason for this may be that the 'Bond formula' became especially fixed after the Moore era, particularly following the introduction of Pierce Brosnan's Bond in 1995.

In the early films, as the series was establishing itself, there was more room for variation and experimentation, and essential series traits or memes had yet to become well established in popular culture. The Moore era saw a certain redefining of some of these traits initially to establish the actor in the part of Bond and separate his portrayal from Connery's (Moore's Bond, for instance, never ordered a drink 'shaken, not stirred'). The Moore style was then repeated until the introduction of Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights. As the 1990s ushered in the Brosnan era, there was a certain expectation of what memes should be included and how they could be expressed. This appears to be the case with the phrase, 'Bond, James Bond'. The phrase is now hugely anticipated, causing a frisson when it occurs (just think of the cheer that greeted Bond's utterance of the phrase at the end of Casino Royale). The weight placed on the phrase naturally leads to its use being restricted; if repeated often in the same film, then the phrase is devalued.

The Daniel Craig era has seen a 'reboot' and a desire to re-introduce or even discard elements of Bond lore. The amount of discussion (and ire) that has met these changes – notably the repositioning of the gun barrel – is a measure of how successfully series traits or memes have become embedded in the cultural environment, and how rigidly the Bond formula has been applied in recent decades.

To see the data on which this analysis is based, please click here.

Shouldn't 'Bond girl' be in the dictionary?

As far as I'm aware, the term 'Bond girl' isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). While I haven't checked the latest edition of the full OED, I recently looked the term up in the shorter and concise editions, but didn't see it there. Each new edition of the OED brings newspaper lists of modish, but often transitory, neologisms. Yet there's still no place for 'Bond girl', a phrase which is almost 50 years old and well established in popular culture.

I discussed the origin of the term 'Bond girl' in an article posted last year. One of the earliest uses of 'Bond girl' is in an article published in the Daily Express dating to 1st February 1963. A story about the daughter of Labour minister John Hare was headlined, 'Perfect Bond girl'. The term was used in the paper fairly regularly afterwards, but it also appeared in critical analyses of the James Bond phenomenon. For example, O F Snelling, in his 1964 book, 007 James Bond: A Report, describes Thunderball's Patricia Fearing, on the staff at Shrublands health farm, as being “rather unusual for a Bond girl.” Then, in The James Bond Dossier (1965), Kingsley Amis used the term 'Bond-girl' as a label for an essential element of the Bond novel. And in the 1966 English translation of The Bond Affair, edited by Oreste del Buono and Umberto Eco, the term is used in Furio Colombo's essay, 'Bond's Women' (“The Bond girl uses glances and looks”, to take one example).

Since then, of course, the term has become synonymous with the actresses who have appeared in the Bond films as Bond's companion or the film's femme fatale, but it has also been applied to supporting characters, such as Miss Moneypenny, and indeed any actress who has been cast in a Bond film, no matter how fleeting her role. The term 'Bond girl' is so closely associated with the actresses and female characters of the Bond films, that any book about them must inevitably incorporate the term into its title (for example, Bond Girls are Forever: the women of James Bond (2003), by Maryam d'Abo and John Cork).

More recently, 'Bond girl' has been used more loosely. For example, when Adele was confirmed as the singer/songwriter of Skyfall's theme song, she was quoted as saying, “I'll be back-combing my hair when I'm 60, telling people I was a Bond girl back in the day, I'm sure!”, while in the current series of BBC's Strictly Come Dancing, the phrase has been used to describe Kristina Rihanoff, the dancing partner of contestant Colin Salmon, who played MI6 agent Charles Robinson in Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day. Even the Queen has been described as a Bond girl, thanks to her role alongside Daniel Craig's Bond in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.

According to the OED online, to qualify for inclusion in the OED a word “requires several independent examples of the word being used, and also evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable amount of time.” The word must also attain a level of currency and understanding that allows it to be used without explanation of its meaning. As we have seen from the evidence presented above, the term 'Bond girl', while by no means uncontentious, undoubtedly fulfils these criteria. If 'Bond girl' is not already in the dictionary, it certainly should be. 

Update: I've been told by the OED that 'Bond girl' is on its tracking list. 

The first Bond girl

Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, claims that Ian Fleming's heroines were inspired by Playboy bunnies. The magazine was first published in 1953, the same year as the publication of the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. Hefner suggests that Fleming read the magazine, and was inevitably influenced by the women who featured in it. The claim is arguable to say the least, but might Hefner be right in another way? Did Playboy coin the phrase, 'Bond girl'? And once established, how did the phrase become so successful that it forms part of the title of at least three books and many articles and academic papers?

The relatively slow take-up of Bond novels in the United States (sales of the books didn't significantly increase until 1961, when John F Kennedy included From Russia, with Love in his top ten books) meant that Playboy discovered James Bond relatively late, and not until the film series had been well established. The first issue to feature James Bond was that for November 1965, which included the article, 'James Bond's girls'. This showed actresses from the first four Bond films in recreations of some of their scenes, though wearing little of their original costumes.

Although the phrase 'James Bond's girls' groups all the actresses together, it is unlikely that the shorter and more succinct 'Bond girls' phrase evolved from it. In fact, the term, 'Bond girls' was used before then. One of the earliest accounts of the Bond phenomenon was O F Snelling's 007 James Bond: a report, first published in 1964. The term appears in the book, but is used sparingly. For example, Snelling suggests that Patricia Fearing, on the staff at Shrublands health farm in Thunderball, is a rather unusual Bond girl for remaining decently clothed (Snelling 1965, 105). A year later, Kingsley Amis, in The James Bond dossier (1965), used 'Bond-girl' (without definite or indefinite article) as a label for an archetype of a component of the Bond novel. It is unlikely that Amis had been influenced by Snelling's use of the phrase. The meaning of Amis' phrase is in contrast to the 'Bond girl' used by Snelling and of later popularity, which is meant as a general description for the actresses who featured in the Bond films.

In any case, the phrase has an earlier origin, as a search through the archives of the Daily Express reveals. The first use of the term in that paper dates to 1st February 1963. A story, headlined 'Perfect Bond girl' was about one Joanna Hare, a daughter of Labour minister John Hare, and undergraduate at Oxford University. She'd been identified by Oxford University's James Bond Club as the university's answer to the type of women James Bond meets.

The term was used in the paper subsequently, but for most of its early use it was confined to headlines and captions. It also had to compete with the alternative 'Bond's girl'. For example, an article published in March 1963 about Daniela Bianchi, who had just secured the role of Tatiana in From Russia With Love, is headlined, 'Colonel's daughter puts 199 in the shade as... Bond's girl'. An article dated from February 1965 carries the headline, 'Looking for Bond's girl: Now – the final gorgeous line-up'. In September 1965, a caption accompanying a photo of Shirley Maclaine introduced her as 'The new Bond girl' (for the spoof Casino Royale).

Curiously, 'Bond girl' was used rarely in the main text of these and other articles; instead, the description 'James Bond's girlfriend' was preferred. Indeed, 'Bond girl' was still largely reserved for captions and headlines until the mid 70s. A caption in a piece published in February 1973 invited readers to 'Meet a Bond girl from the film Live and Let Die'. However, in September 1974, the main text of an article referred to 'the former Bond girl' Jenny Hanley, and Barbara Bach, in piece from January 1977, was described as 'just what a Bond girl should be'. The phrase 'James Bond's girlfriend' continued to be used (for instance in an article about Jane Seymour from October 1976), though it was gradually disappearing.

Still, the 'Bond girl' phrase took a while to escape the confines of the media. It appears just once in The James Bond films (1981), by Steven Jay Rubin, and then as a caption requiring the same sort of conciseness which newspaper headline writers needed. It appeared in the main text of Raymond Benson's James Bond's bedside companion, first published in 1984 – we read that Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) 'serves not only as the Bond-girl in the film, but also as the ally' (Benson 1988, 220) – but the term competed with 'Bond heroine'. However, by 1987, 'Bond girl' was dominant. Peter Haining (1987) included a chapter on 'The Bond Girls' in his book, James Bond: a celebration, and Sally Hibbin (1987) had the standard heading, 'The Bond girl' for each film she described in The official 007 movie book.

That dominance has continued. At least three books have incorporated the phrase in their titles (Graham Rye's The James Bond girls (1989), Maryam d'Abo and John Cork's Bond girls are forever (2003), and Alistair Dougall's Bond girls (2010)). And few academic papers on the women of Bond's world leave out a reference to 'Bond girls'.

In this short review, we have identified three phases of use for the term 'Bond girl'. It emerged in 1963 (at least in the Daily Express) as convenient shorthand for newspaper headline and caption writers, but was not regarded as a term that was deemed appropriate for the main text of the reports. This changed in the 1970s, when it graduated as a proper term to the main text. It was still very much a newspaper term, though, and this continued until well into the 1980s. Only then had it become sufficiently well established in popular culture for it to appear in more serious and academic treatments of the James Bond phenomenon (its use by Amis and Snelling in 1964/5 appearing to not to be very influential).

Naming Fleming's heroines

The leading lady of Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche is named Felicity Willing. Bond is amused by the name (chapter 42), and presumably the name was meant to amuse readers too. Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care featured Scarlett Papava, which was a pun on the botanical name and colour of the opium poppy, one of the book's plot devices (and in case the reference was too obtuse, Scarlett's sister is called Poppy). In both cases, the authors devised exotic names for their heroines; names designed to raise a smile or smirk. A Times review of Carte Blanche claims that the character is named in the best Fleming tradition. Examination of the names Fleming gave his heroines, however, suggests that while many of the names are undoubtedly exotic, only a few are as suggestive as the names used in more recent literary efforts. What's more, Felicity Willing and Scarlett Papava and others are named more in the tradition of the film series than Fleming.

Fleming chose names that interested him. Some were named after things. Vesper Lynd, the heroine of Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale, was named after a cocktail that Fleming was served in Jamaica (not the same recipe as the cocktail he invents for the book). Both Solitaire (Live and Let Die) and Domino Vitali (Thunderball) were named after Caribbean birds. Gala Brand (Moonraker) was named after Galatea, the sea nymph of Greek mythology. Judy Havelock, who appears in the short story, 'For Your Eyes Only', was named after a havelock, a flap at the back of an army cap that protects the neck from the sun.

Other heroines were named after people Fleming knew. For Honeychile Rider, Pussy Galore and Vivienne Michel (who feature in Dr No, Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me respectively), Fleming took the names or nicknames of his friends and acquaintances. Kissy Suzuki, who appears in You Only Live Twice, was named after a masseuse or prostitute Fleming met in Japan.

Admittedly, Tiffany Case (Diamonds Are Forever), referring to a jewellery box provided by the New York store, was a play on words reasonably close in style to Scarlett Papava, and Mary Goodnight, Bond's secretary and leading lady of The Man with the Golden Gun, is on a par with Felicity Willing, but these are rare occurrences.

In contrast, names used for the films are more likely to have elements of sexual innuendo. For the first film, Dr No, Honeychile Rider is shortened to the far more suggestive Honey Ryder. In Goldfinger, Bond's response to Honor Blackman's introduction, 'I'm Pussy Galore', is 'I must be dreaming', emphasising the sexual connotation. In Moonraker, Gala Brand is replaced by Holly Goodhead. In the short story, the eponymous Octopussy is the name of an octopus, not Bond's love interest. And, although a villain rather than lover, GoldenEye's Xenia Onatopp's name raises Bond's eyebrow, if nothing else.

The advice for future continuation authors is clear. Look to the names of friends or interesting things, rather than the films, for inspiration of the names of the books' heroines.

Reference:
Chancellor, H, 2005 James Bond: the man and his world, John Murray

Bond meets his match - every time.

The release of a James Bond film is traditionally accompanied by huge press interest, promotion of featured products, magazine and TV specials, and the leading actress’ claim that her character is different from the Bond girls that preceded her – this time, she’s Bond’s equal.

With Quantum of Solace (2008) in the cinemas, Olga Kurylenko said of her character, Camille, ‘She very strong and independent, but at the same time vulnerable’. Eva Green thought that, in Casino Royale (2006), Vesper Lynd was ‘an equal match’ to Bond. Die Another Day’s (2002) Jinx, played by Halle Berry, was ‘very intelligent, she was Bond’s equal’. Denise Richards thought Dr Christmas Jones in The World is not Enough (1999) ‘very smart’ who ‘plays well off of (sic) Bond’. For Michelle Yeoh, starring in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), it was important that ‘Wai Lin was as intelligent as Bond’, and not ‘another of his side-kick floozies’. Izabella Scorupco’s Natalya Simonova in Goldeneye (1995) was ‘so intelligent’ and ‘without her Bond is not going to be able to accomplish his mission’.

Many claimed that the strong, intelligent woman appeared in the earlier films, too. Honor Blackman relished her role as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964). The academic Camille Paglia viewed the character as ‘one of the most commanding, authoritative women in popular culture of the time’. It was especially the physical aspects of the role that, like Cathy Gale, Blackman’s character in The Avengers, meant that she ‘fought like a man, fought better than a man’. Diana Rigg, playing Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), thought her character ‘much more dimensional than most of the other women who’ve ever been in the Bond pictures’. Lois Chiles regarded Holly Goodhead in Moonraker (1979) as being ‘capable of doing everything that Bond could do’. Octopussy, played by Maud Adams in 1983, was billed as Bond’s equal: ‘We’re two of a kind’, Octopussy tells Bond. In interviews, Adams stressed her character’s role as an adventurer, smuggler and businesswoman.

The implication of the emphasis that the principal actresses give to the intelligence, emotional and physical strength and resourcefulness of their characters is that the Bond girls before them were regarded as having none of those qualities. The previous-Bond-girls-were-bimbos meme has been very successful. It is widespread, being reproduced by the press and commentators wherever the films show. It is cyclical, being propagated with the release of each film and, because it carries the weight of the entire series, has greater survival value than the memes (the criticisms, reviews and quotations) accompanying each individual film, which generally last only the long as the film plays in the cinemas. And, without the need to refer to specific cases, the meme replicates faithfully.

But the meme also adapts well to the changing cultural or memetic environment. The notion of what constitutes equality between men and women now is different from that during the 1960s. The sexual revolution of the Sixties paved the way for improved opportunities for women in the Seventies. In the Eighties, concerns about HIV/AIDS influenced the way sexual relationships were depicted, and the Nineties onwards have brought, at least in most Western countries, full(er) equality in pay, opportunities, pensions, and law. The Bond girl character has reflected those changes, but yet the ‘the-previous-Bond-girls-were-bimbos’ meme survives.

The curse of the Bond girl - fact or fiction?

For actresses, James Bond films should a carry health warning: ‘Starring in a Bond film may cause your career to go down as well as up.’ There is a persistent view, most recently expressed in a paper by Claire Hines,* that being a ‘Bond girl’ is damaging to careers. Despite the usually high-profile and successful appearance in a Bond film, the actress rarely seems to achieve anything comparable subsequently, and is becomes confined to the television treadmill or pops up from time to time in low-budget sub-Bond thrillers. But is this really the case, or is the Bond girl curse an idea – a meme – that is replicated with little connection to the evidence?

We can test the validity of this successful meme, transmitted in books and cyberspace, with the help of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). First, we must establish the relative merits of the Bond girls’ post-Bond films – and their pre-Bond films to better trace career trajectories – and compare the values against Bond films. Box-office receipts is a useful measure, but the data are unavailable for older and obscure films. The alternative is the IMDb rating, which gives for each film an average of website users’ scores out of ten. The average score for Dr No, for example, is 7.3.

For convenience, I have limited my dataset to up to five films before or after Bond, giving me a potential series of 11 films for each actress. Of course, each film usually has a number of Bond girls – Roald Dahl famously stuck to a three-girl formula – but for my purposes, the Bond girl in all cases is the main ally of Bond, the girl who is in Bond’s arms at the end of the film (yes, I know Olga Kurylenko was not in Bond’s arms at the end of Quantum of Solace, but she did survive the film, which comes to the same thing).

Let us examine the main trends. In chart 1, we see the mean score for each film (-5 being the fifth film before Bond, 0 the Bond film, and 5 the fifth post-Bond film). On average, Bond films have the highest scores, enjoying a mean of 6.84. Films before and after Bond films rarely achieve comparable scores and consequently their means are lower, largely scoring between 5 and 6 out of 10. Is there a curse of the Bond girl? The answer must be no, because the level of film success that Bond girls enjoyed after their Bond roles was generally no different from the level of success they had before Bond.


Chart 2 shows the difference between the overall mean for each actress and her Bond film rating in Bond film order. For many actresses, the difference is relatively large, highlighting the fact that the sort of success the actresses enjoyed in Bond films was rather exceptional. Lois Chiles, Michelle Yeoh, and Halle Berry, however, featured in non-Bond films which were on average as successful as Bond or in fact more successful. (To be fair on all actresses, some of their pre-Bond films were so obscure or otherwise little seen and were not rated on IMDb. This unfortunately lowered their averages. We should note too that celebrated stage careers, for instance that of Diana Rigg, are not reflected in the scoring.)

What can we conclude from this analysis? Looking again at chart 2, we see that in chronological terms the gap between non-Bond and Bond success becomes smaller with time, suggesting that the Bond producers were increasingly prone as the series progressed to select actresses who had been in films as well regarded as Bond films. Possibly the factor of beauty became less important through time, while acting ability became more important. We can now see the ‘Bond girl curse’ as a successful, but false, meme, which has been propagated well to become deeply embedded within popular culture. In reality, the pattern fits a phenomenon known as ‘regression to the mean’. In his book, Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, explains the phenomenon with the example of a cold. Colds tend to have a cyclical pattern. People feel fine most of the time, get colds, feel terrible, then improve. Some people do seek remedies, though, usually when they’re feeling at their worst, and credit their improvement to the remedy, rather than the fact that the cold would in any case disappear naturally. This is regression to the mean. The mean in terms of Bond girls is mediocre or poor film success. Bond films represent a blip – the once in a while cold – that punctuates that trajectory.

*Hines, C, 010 ‘For his eyes only? Men’s magazines and the curse of the Bond girl’, in James Bond in world and popular culture: The films are not enough (eds R G Weiner, B L Whitfield and J Becker), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, 167-175