History-maker Michelle Yeoh claimed her rightful Best Actress prize at this year's Academy Awards for her performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, with fellow Oscar-winners Halle Berry and Jessica Chastain announcing the momentous occasion. Both Yeoh and Berry, you'll remember, are former Bond Girls, that ubiquitous term applied to all of James Bond's romantic conquests. Their success proves that the "Bond Girl Curse" is nonsense: i.e., the concept that starring in a Bond film meant certain death for the careers of the actresses in question.
The Bond Girl Curse Isn’t Real, It's Sexism
The supposed curse arose after several actresses, mostly from the Sean Connery and Roger Moore era of Bond-dom, indeed saw their careers arrive at a standstill after their high-profile roles in the franchise. Tanya Roberts of A View to a Kill and Charlie's Angels television fame admitted to concern that accepting the role would ruin her career. Eva Green of Casino Royale hesitated over playing Vesper Lynd: "the Bond girl role is kind of dangerous for an actress," she said, proving how internationally prevalent the idea had become within the film industry. GoldenEye's Famke Janssen was frustrated with Hollywood executives who perceived her as little more than a violent femme fatale following the film, while Rosamund Pike said she avoided the Bond Girl Curse.
As easy as it might seem to assign quick and easy blame to the franchise for some odd streak of bad luck, it's important to realize how profoundly rampant Hollywood sexism and the exploitation of women were in the decades leading up to the 2000s. (Not that the 2000s, and past, didn't have their own severe problems.) And the role of the Bond films can't be overlooked since objectifying their female characters, often to outrageous extents that went past satire and into offensive, was par for the course. It wasn't just one ongoing movie series to blame, but Hollywood's accumulated culpability in perpetuating misogynistic practices.
Michelle Yeoh & Halle Berry’s Continued Successes Prove That History Is Still Being Written
So, let's put the curse idea to rest with some cold hard facts. Michelle Yeoh, a cinematic icon for decades and revered for her contributions within the martial arts film community, played the phenomenally badass Agent Wai Lin in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies. She was more than capable of keeping up physically and witticism-wise with Pierce Brosnan's notorious charmer. Three years later marked the then-height of Yeoh's international fame: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a wuxia masterpiece from visionary Chinese director Ang Lee, shattered barriers to become the highest-grossing international film in American history at the time. Yeoh then took supporting roles in Memoirs of a Geisha, Sunshine, Star Trek: Discovery, and, most notably, 2018's Crazy Rich Asians; the latter in particular earned her acclaim.
2022, obviously, saw Everything Everywhere All At Once take the world by an indomitable storm. Yeoh's performance — as well as those of her costars Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu — in the most-awarded film of all time is one of those performances that tilt the world off its axis, leaving audiences and the industry never quite the same in its wake. Most people are aware that Yeoh's Oscar nomination and subsequent win made her the first Asian-identifying woman to earn the honor and the first woman of color to win the award in over two decades. At sixty years old, Yeoh's at the height of her already distinguished, exalted career.
Halle Berry was also paired with Brosnan in his final Bond outing, 2002's Die Another Day (which also featured Rosamund Pike's film debut as double agent Miranda Frost). Berry had won the Best Actress Oscar the prior year for her performance in Monster's Ball. Berry's frustrations with her career aren't because some nebulous curse snapped away all potential roles, but because powerful executives withheld opportunities. Berry attributed it to an "Oscar curse" more than any other factor. Although she remained a consistently working actor, within the past five years Berry delivered especially sublime turns in the action-heavy Kingsman: The Golden Circle and John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum. (Now can she lead a movie of the same caliber? Please, and thank you.)
Other Bond Girls Are Doing Just Fine, Thank You!
Speaking of Rosamund Pike and Die Another Day: she's doing just fine. After making an eternal mark in the classic romance community for in the Joe Wright-directed, Keira Knightly-starring Pride & Prejudice, Pike hit the spotlight stratosphere for her Oscar-nominated (and about every other award-nominated) turn in Gone Girl. Pike's calculated and spitefully malicious gaze made Amy Dunne an antiheroine for the modern age. In 2021 Pike began her ongoing lead role as Moiraine in Prime Video's The Wheel of Time series.
Another up-and-coming actress with few credits to her name who struck dynamite in her Bond aftermath? Eva Green, who performed opposite Daniel Craig in his first of five super spy outings. Green had only been in three French films and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven prior to Casino Royale and won the BAFTA Rising Star Award for her work as Vesper. Although she notably partnered with Tim Burton three times for Dark Shadows, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, and Dumbo, Green found her most niche in television through Showtime's horror-fantasy Penny Dreadful. This year sees her return to her home country of France for The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan, the first of a two-part adaptation of Alexander Dumas's novel.
The other love of Craig-Bond's life would be Lea Seydoux, another French actress who primarily worked in France until her role in the critically acclaimed Blue is the Warmest Color put her on Western cinema's radar. From there, she won roles in Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos pictures before appearing as Madeleine Swann in Spectre. She's the only Bond love interest to reprise her role in a second film, No Time to Die. Otherwise, she worked with Anderson again for The French Dispatch and starred alongside Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future; in 2019 she even lent her voice and motion capture to revered video game creator Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding game. Seydoux's next venture with an auteur director will be none other than Dune: Part Two. So, no big deal, right?
No Time To Die? It’s Definitely Time for This Idea To Die
Let's see, who else: Kim Basinger starred in Sean Connery's final Bond outing, Never Say Never Again, and later won an Oscar for LA Confidential. There's Olga Kurylenko, Naomie Harris, Lashna Lynch, and Ana de Armas; Monica Bellucci made headlines as a self-described "Bond woman." Yes, it helps these names in particular (as well as Green and Seydoux) that Craig's films updated the Bond Girl idea with a modernized feminist approach. The majority were allowed to be flawed, clever, capable, badass, and sexy all in one, with Kurylenko's character going no further with the man than a kiss. From Yeoh, to Berry, to de Armas and beyond: there's no Bond curse. There's only been the curse of industry misogyny, ageism, and typecasting.