Samantha Bond kisses goodbye Miss Moneypenny role

Actress Samantha Bond talks to Dominic Cavendish about her famous snog, as Miss Moneypenny, with Pierce Brosnan's 007 - and the more serious kiss at the heart of her new stage role - reports The Telegraph.

What is it about Samantha Bond and kissing? She's beginning to get a bit of a reputation for delivering the best smackers in the biz.

Known to millions as Miss Moneypenny to Pierce Brosnan's 007, she secured in Die Another Day a to-die-for clincher of a kiss with her leading man - a fantasy on the pining secretary's part, to be sure, but to all intents and purposes played "for real" on the big screen.

Then there was that rather endearing tale of her over-zesty approach to Sean Bean when she played opposite him as Lady Macbeth in the West End a few years back. Such was the power of the snog this strawberry-blonde beauty unleashed upon her stage-partner that she brought up a blood-blister on her lips.

And now here she is at the Hampstead Theatre in a new play called The Rubenstein Kiss which demands that she give fully of herself again in the field of pretend-smooching.

Written by a young, unknown playwright - James Phillips - it's a fictionalised account, with altered names, of the story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were found guilty of trying to pass on America's nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and sentenced to death in 1953.

A photograph of the pair snatching a farewell kiss in the back of a police van gave the world an enduring image of their intense love and loyalty to each other which stood in stark contrast to their perceived political treachery.

In the script, Phillips advises: "When the Rubensteins kiss, or touch, they kiss like real people. Not movie kissing, but the intimacy of people who need to be touched or held or kissed." More lip-balm in the offing, then?

Bond laughs good-naturedly and launches into a suitably impassioned explanation for her interest in the play. "That was one of the beautiful things that struck me when reading the script. That there are these two people who absolutely adore one another, and hardly a minute goes by without something passing between them, even if it's just a look. They function as one extraordinary unit.

"There's a moment early on when her husband is spotted by the Communist Party and asked if he wants to get involved. When he takes the decision to do so, there's almost an erotic charge between them."

Suddenly she breaks off. "You're meeting me at the most vulnerable I've ever felt in 20-odd years of being in the profession," she confesses. The kissing and canoodling with actor Will Keen is the easy part, apparently - the huge challenge is to inhabit fully the role of "a short, plump Jewish New Yorker. I've never played a part like it. It's quite frightening and I'm going to have to work very, very hard," she says.

To hear her talk in such earnest, dedicated terms might surprise those who know her only through the Bond films, or her multiple small-screen roles, which feature a fair number of stock murder-mystery female villains and victims.

Her best-known TV role at the moment is the part of Lisa in ITV's Distant Shores, "a harassed mother of two" who relocates to a remote island with her doctor husband (Peter Davison) - and is "possibly more like me than any woman I've ever played in my life".

That profile has eclipsed her consistently impressive but nonetheless intermittent work on the stage - a star at the RSC following her breakthrough performance for Kenneth Branagh in Romeo and Juliet in 1986, her major credits include starring as Amy opposite Judi Dench in Amy's View in the West End and on Broadway and Three Tall Women - alongside Maggie Smith. She outshone Sean Bean in Macbeth, and was quite the best thing in Adrian Noble's recent revival of Wilde's A Woman of No Importance.

Having been advised against going into the profession by her actor father - Philip Bond (who starred in The Onedin Line) - and actress-turned-TV producer mother Pat Sandys - she maintains a healthy level of gratitude for being able to keep the jobs coming, while being selective when it comes to putting herself up for stage parts.

She's doing The Rubenstein Kiss because she believes in it, she says, not on account of any perceived career trajectory ("So many of the scripts you get sent are unexceptional"). It's her strongly held beliefs as much as her brains - a crossword fanatic, she won the ITV Celebrity Spelling Bee in the summer - that define her and defy those who would try to pigeonhole her.

"There's a big political side to me, and to play people of conviction gives me an internal fire", she says. "In the '70s, we marched about everything. That is a big part of who I am. I have an incredibly overdeveloped sense of injustice, so if I think something is unjust I get furious."

Her work in the Bond films enabled all kinds of ongoing charity work and for a while in 2003 she made her mark as a campaigner against London's congestion charge - alongside other actors, Smithfield market traders and the National Union of Teachers - on behalf of London's poorest residents.

Though on record as describing Brosnan as "excessively beautiful" and "gorgeous", she rises unbidden to the defence of his replacement, Daniel Craig: "I don't know why the press are being so shitty to him. I think he'll be absolutely fantastic. He's the best of the names that have been mentioned and he'll make a fabulous Bond. He's bloody sexy so they can all be quiet."

She admits that she was glad enough to call it a day with the role of Moneypenny: "There is a natural life to these things. I'm 43 and I didn't want to turn into Auntie Moneypenny," she says. "I have huge respect for Lois Maxwell but there's a moment in the films when she turns into that. And besides," she beams, "I got my kiss!"

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

Discuss this news here...