Tanya Roberts on the 'curse of the Bond girl'

American actress Tanya Roberts, who played Stacey Sutton in Roger Moore's swansong 007 adventure 'A View To A Kill' in 1989, has given a new interview to the Daily Mail about life after a Bond girl role.

'I sort of felt like every girl who'd ever been a Bond Girl had seen their career go nowhere, so I was a little cautious,' says Roberts.

'I remember I said to my agent, 'No one ever works after they get a Bond movie' and they said to me, 'Are you kidding? Glen Close would do it if she could'.

'And I thought to myself, well you can have regrets if you wish, but what's the point?'

'At the time I didn't know what I know now, and to be honest, who would turn that role down, really?

'Nobody would. All you have to think to yourself is, 'Could I have been better in the part?' That's all you can say to yourself because turning the part down would have been ridiculous, you know? I mean nobody would do that, nobody.

'I was very young and I did what I felt was the right choice to make.

'I've made a lot of good choices and a lot of bad choices and that's part of life. Whether you're really successful or moderately successful, I'm sure that to get there you have made some bad decisions and good decisions on some level, but that's how I see life.

'You can't go through life defeated, it's just trial and error.

Roberts' career was just beginning to takeoff when she was called in to audition for the role as the beautiful granddaughter of an oil tycoon, Stacy Sutton.

'I had just done a movie called The Beastmaster with all these wild animals and Humphrey Burton just called me in for a meeting and that was that.

'Before James Bond I'd been in Charlie's Angels, which pigeon-holed me, so it was always going to be hard to get myself out of that pigeon hole after that.

'I think it's better to come into the limelight really slowly and do a broader range of roles, but I took these glamorous roles and I think that stereotyped me.
'They sort of think you're some dumb, glamorous broad, so it's difficult, and I think that is the reason most Bond Girls don't go on to have careers after they have done the movie because people just don't take them seriously and I guess they shouldn't because it's so tongue-in-cheek, you know what I mean?'

Roberts says her life changed little after the 14th Bond film 'A View to a Kill' was released achieving global commercial success.

'My life didn't actually change much after being a Bond Girl because I'd already experienced the biggest life change when I became a Charlie's Angel,' she recalls.

'Sure, I had to do public appearances and television and radio interviews, and all that stuff, but aside from that, my life just seemed to go on as normal.

'People think you'll get all this extra attention and have things sent to you from fashion designers, but believe it or not I didn't get all that. It's very different now to how it was then.

'Perhaps Bond Girls today do get better offers and free clothes from designers, but I don't see many ex-Bond women on the red carpet these days.

'But honestly, it's no horrible thing, it's just the way it is. It's just life.

'Certain things present an open door and certain things present not the best opportunities to go forward.
'I think it was so tongue-in-cheek that I think that's just the way people perceived the actresses – as shallow and pretty.

'I've got to believe that because it just seems like I should have got a million offers coming in the door after that, but it wasn't the case.'

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