Credit: Far Out / Amazon MGM Studios
The curse of an actor playing a major female role in a James Bond movie and then watching their career go up in smoke has afflicted more than enough people to make it more than an urban legend.
However, it’s not necessarily a global thing. Take Luciana Paluzzi, for instance, who gained international recognition as Thunderball‘s Fiona Volpe. The role opened the doors for her to appear in countless American productions, as B-tier as they were, but she was locked out of the parts she really wanted.
She’d dreamed of returning to her native Italy and working with Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the rest of the country’s most storied auteurs, but because she’d been a ‘Bond girl’, they wanted nothing to do with her, which kept her trapped under a glass ceiling.
That wasn’t the last time a similar fate would befall one of 007’s onscreen love interests, though, for as much as Jane Seymour made a name for herself after Live and Let Die, winning two Golden Globes from eight nominations and a Primetime Emmy from six nods, the British industry treated her with derision.
With almost all of her career highlights unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic, there might still be a few people who have no idea that she’s English, with Seymour born in Middlesex. In the late 1970s, she took her talents to America and never looked back, which had everything to do with that damned Bond.
“The English could not get past the fact I had been a ‘Bond girl,’” she revealed. “I would get through auditions to the final moment when a director would see me for a major part in a movie, then somebody would say, ‘Did you know she was a Bond girl?’ And that would be it. I would never hear from them again.”
After Live and Let Die, Seymour appeared in a couple of British TV shows and made-for-TV movies, but the stigma continued to linger. Her association with cinema’s most iconic secret agent had made her damaged goods in the eyes of local casting directors, making the United States her only viable option.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“In America, they said, ‘Yes, you did a Bond film’, but they saw all the other things I had done, too,” she explained. “I only played Americans for the first year or so. That was funny. I played people from New York, Ohio, the South, you name it. They didn’t realise I was English, or if they did, they forgot.”
It worked out fine for her in the long run, but it says a lot about how ‘Bond girls’ were perceived in the ’70s that even though Live and Let Die‘s Solitaire launched Seymour’s career to new heights, it couldn’t get her a job in the UK, leaving her with no option but to cross the pond to find the respect she’d failed to get back home.
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