When Moneypenny swapped 007 for sleepy Somerset

03-Oct-2007 • Bond News

It was a grey February day in 1995. Lois Maxwell and I were sitting in the deserted restaurant of her local Somerset pub, toying with an overcooked lunch of breadcrumbed cod fillets and peas, washed down with vodka and tonic. Intrigued by news that the former Miss Moneypenny had moved to a sleepy West Country town and now owned a firm that traded in crowd-control barriers, I had gone to meet her - reports Tim Lusher in The Guardian.

She was living in a tidy cottage on a street called Broadway. Ever the trouper, she got the joke in quickly. "I always said I'd end up on Broadway," she said, wistfully swirling the ice cubes in her empty glass. "I just never thought it would be in Frome."

Maxwell - who died on Saturday in Australia - delivered the line with the same wry playfulness that she used in her 14 fleeting but memorable Bond cameos. When I asked her which 007 she had found most attractive, she said: "If I could have had my fantasy, I think I would have been married to Roger and had Sean as a weekend lover." It probably wasn't an improvised answer, but it sounded fresh and smart.

In reality, she had been happily married to a television executive but, after his death in 1973, returned to her native Canada with their two young children, where she set up a textiles firm that left her with huge debts.

She had just moved back to England to live close to her daughter. She seemed a bit broken by years of money worries and loneliness. She was furious about her long-running column for a Canadian newspaper being dropped. "As though you lose your mind at 65," she said indignantly. "They don't do it to men, and that is what is annoying."

It also still rankled that the Bond film producer Cubby Broccoli hadn't agreed to her idea of making spymaster M a woman and promoting her as Moneypenny, years before Stella Rimington was appointed head of MI5, only to see Judi Dench later land the role. She talked about writing her autobiography, but her heart clearly wasn't in it, despite insisting: "My life has never been dull, ever."

It rang true. You could imagine Miss Moneypenny retiring to Frome, but not the more adventurous Lois Maxwell, who moved to Perth, Australia, in 2001 to be near her son's family. She had run away from home at 16 to join the Canadian army, been an amateur racing driver in Italy, earned a pilot's licence and - she claimed - had once armed herself with an M-16 to see off pirates while sailing in the South China Sea. "I'm pretty handy with a machine gun," she told me proudly. She remained the Bond girl who got away.