Talk to former Bond women, and all express deep gratitude for and appreciation of the franchise, which is the longest and most successful in film history.


Jane Seymour, 61, starred as Solitaire in 1973's Live and Let Die. She shares:

I was very young. I didn't know anything about Bond at the time. I never imagined I'd be a Bond girl. They were looking for a virgin and I was a nicely brought-up girl from Wimbledon. I never really auditioned. I went in and met (producer) Harry Saltzman, and he hired me on the spot. He took me to Cubby's (producer Albert R. Broccoli) office. I was on television at the time. When they found me, they made me swear to secrecy for two weeks. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone around me that I got the part. People would ask how I did, and I had to do my best acting to pretend to everyone, including my parents, that I didn't get the part.

Roger Moore was lovely. I have lots of great memories from the shoot. Filming in Jamaica was exciting and exotic. The whole thing was fairly surreal. It was a very big deal at the time in England. They made a really big deal out of it. It was a very big deal in those days. It was a big film made in England. I remember the voodoo scenes. I was a dancer and got very excited about the voodoo dancing that went on. When I get carried in, when I'm held in the air, I thought that would be a fun thing to do.

I remember being at the premiere with the royal family. I saw my father beaming up at me. My parents were very excited. To this day, it's 'Oh, my God, she's a Bond girl.'

GALLERY: Celebrating 50 years of Bond girl sexiness

After that movie, I decided to go back into the theater and resume where I started off and do the classics. I played Ophelia and Lady Macbeth. At one point, people thought I was going backwards, but I thought it was very important to learn how to act. I wanted to be a serious actress rather than a pretty face. And that's pretty much what I did for the rest of my career. I avoided running three paces behind a man. I came to America and started doing lots of miniseries. Americans didn't seem to mind that I was in a Bond film.

It's interesting because a lot of my 16-year-old kids' friends know me from Wedding Crashers, and not so much Bond. My kids have a good laugh. I was 20 then. The look I had then was the look that a lot of their friends are assuming now. They think it's cool. What goes around comes around. When I auditioned for Wedding Crashers, the producers had never seen any of my other work except for Bond. I got Wedding Crashers partly because I was a Bond girl.

Read or Share this story: