(Credits: Far Out / Amazon MGM Studios)
Thu 21 August 2025 14:45, UK
Although there’s almost no chance of the James Bond franchise receding into the cultural spotlight at any point in the near or distant future, it’s safe to say that some of its archetypes have been permanently retired.
The most obvious and notable is the stereotypical ‘Bond girl’. For decades, almost every female actor who played a major role in one of the globetrotting espionage films was there to fulfil a very strict, rigid, and limiting set of criteria, something the creative team would admit, considering there was literally a document containing the only four acceptable types.
They were eye candy, love interests, mistresses, notches on a bedpost, secondary villains, duplicitous backstabbers, but very rarely, if ever, three-dimensional characters. There were a few exceptions from the 1960s through to the 1990s, but not many, which the Daniel Craig era helped finally remedy.
Of course, his five-film tenure’s track record wasn’t perfect, as Gemma Arterton’s Strawberry Fields can attest with her moniker pulled right out of the silly name generator and quick demise after bedding Bond, but she was hardly the first former ‘Bond girl’ to voice their regrets over how they were portrayed onscreen.
It’s not endemic, with many women to have sparred with 007 having nothing but nice things to say about their ties to the spy saga, but it took one of them half a century to overcome her shame. When she did, it was all thanks to an assist from quite possibly the most unlikely source anyone could imagine.
Technically, Nadja Regin counts as a two-time ‘Bond girl’. Her first brush with the series came when she played, funnily enough, the mistress of Pedro Armendáriz’s Kerim Bey in From Russia with Love, and it was a sign of the times that her character wasn’t even given a name in the credits.
She returned in a completely different guise for Goldfinger, playing Bonita in the pre-credits sequence, a part that revealed her to be, funnily enough, a duplicitous backstabber who was really working for the unseen heroin-smuggling antagonist, Mr Ramirez. Regin retired from acting by the end of the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 2012 that she finally embraced her ‘Bond girl’ status.
“To be honest, in the beginning, I was very embarrassed, because they were such tiny little roles,” she told 007 Magazine. “But once the Queen had a tiny role as a ‘Bond girl’, I thought, ‘Well, if it’s good enough for Her Majesty, I shouldn’t be so embarrassed!”
For five decades, Regin had been embarrassed by making two minor outings as relatively forgettable figures in a pair of consecutive Bond flicks, and all she needed to overcome those feelings was to see the Queen share the screen with Craig’s 007 in the Danny Boyle-directed segment during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. As far as assists go, that’s about as random as it gets.
If the monarch had no problems enjoying minimal screentime as an associate of a current Bond, then Regin realised that neither should she. Unexpected, sure, but almost endearingly odd.
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