Cowering underneath a railway bridge in the rain, and being forced to smoke outside because of the cursed ban, is not a scenario in which glamour or sophistication tend to prosper. Yet somehow, Samantha Bond pulls it off, inexorably reminding me of Rita Hayworth - shocking red hair and the kind of beauty that I thought had disappeared at the end of the 40s - just without the faux-modesty or multiple husbands. A classically trained theatre actress, Bond is one of the most powerful stage presences in British theatre. Her career has spanned decades, and she has an uncanny knack for choosing parts that will endure – whether playing Shakespearean tragedy or twentieth century farce, she brings the same emotional and dramatic intensity to her roles. To my mind, she is also one of the last proponents of a school of post-war acting to which Judi Dench and Maggie Smith belong: intelligent, feminine, never crass. Thanks to this ability, she is also able to take on work which is less rewarding – for the wonderfully pragmatic reason that “I don’t mind doing crap on television to pay the bills” - and escape unscathed; reputation fully intact.
Bond has become best known, to the public at least, for one role; that of Moneypenny, which she filled for all four of the Pierce Brosnan 007 outings. It has been six years since Die Another Day,, but she is happy to talk about it’s impact on her career - “The irony is that the smallest part I have ever played is the one that gets the most recognition”. When I say that I thought that her and Judi Dench – who played the role of ‘M’ – heralded a new, distinctly modern era for the films, she is quiet for a moment. “I think you have to see it all in context. I adored Lois Maxwell [her predecessor as Moneypenny], and for a woman playing the part in the 60s, she was just as feisty.” Bond smiles and continues: “Lois claims that her Moneypenny and Bond slept together at spy school, where as I am adamant that I’ve never slept with him”.
In spite of her international profile, Bond remains dedicated to the theatre: “It’s my first love, it’s the place where an actor has most control. When you’re in front of a camera, you’re dependent on so many other people, whereas on stage, for better or for worse, you are the person making the choices”. We discuss her choice of roles over the years, and I mention one from several years ago, a fictionalised version of Ethel Rosenberg, the only woman to be executed for espionage in America during the Cold War, that she played in The Rubenstein Kiss. Bond describes it in faintly absurd terms:
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“I played a short, plump, Jewish New Yorker. I read the script, fell in love it, and it wasn’t until the read through that I realised quite how miscast I was. All I did was react to the animal instinct that says, ‘That’s good writing’”. I am curious then, given her position inhabiting both the worlds of classical theatre and big-budget cinema, how she feels about the infringement of celebrity culture into the arts. Her answers have a refreshing candor to them, and Bond does not hesitate to say what she thinks, beginning by mentioning the recent spate of Andrew Lloyd Webber-endorsed talent searches for West End musicals on the BBC. “One’s keenly aware of it. I don’t know where the loathsome tradition of casting by television will end up.”
Still, she is eager not to dismiss celebrity per se as an evil of the modern world. “When I did Macbeth with Sean Bean [her co-star in Goldeneye], we played to an extraordinary audience; people who had never been to the theatre before. I would sit in my dressing room thinking ‘Oh God, it’s going to be a nightmare’. And then they sat in rapt silence until the end of the play, and when I came out for curtain call it was like being one of the Spice Girls. That experience was a useful way of using celebrity in the theatre – taking someone who can do it, who’s seen as a sex symbol and has been in the Bond films” – at this point she leans further towards my tape recorder to say “I’m talking about Sean Bean here – and we played to capacity”.
Her candid sense of humour returns as she continues. “What’s quite cheering, in a peculiar sort of way, is that when Madonna was in a West End play, it flopped, as it obviously would, because acting on stage is quite tricky. So there are two sides to it really, and the ultimate difference is that Sean Bean can act and Madonna can’t.”
Tom Bonnick interviews Samantha Bond
