Best Bond Girl?

Don't even joke about that man !

a vote for Barbara Bach for me

Famke Janssen played Xenia Zirgavna Onatopp

Famke Janssen

Great Bond girl picks and the Sheena Easton sung song is pretty damn good, but ain't got SHIT on "Live and Let Die" and "Nobody Does It Better" with "Thunderball" and "View To A Kill" coming in as ties for second place.

Kim Basinger and Barbara Bach are my favorites though, with The Spy who Loved Me being my favorite Bond film ever, mainly because of the appearance of Jaws, Barbara Bach and Carly Simon's masterfully sung theme song. And probably because I am a genXer too.

In real life, Cigar Girl. In the Bond flicks... Fiona Volpe (sp?)

do you mean eva green, or the other girl? I dunno her name, it's Catalina something... if it's the latter, i like her....


Famke's someone i really like though.

From least to best...

1. Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) The Spy Who Loved Me
   Beautiful, deadly, and has a sense of humor. What's not to love? She has to be the least ridiculous Bond girl ever, and loads of fun in bed. I wager she knows the Secret Chinese Basket trick that Wallis Simpson supposedly used to snag Edward VIII. Wai Lin is representative of the type of Bond girl we haven't seen since number one on my list and she's very welcome.
2. Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) Dr. No
   What an impossible job Andress must have had. The first on-screen Bond girl and all those fantasies to live up to! Dr. No is the one film I keep coming back to again and again because it stands the test of time so well. There are no gadgets, no special cars, nothing to date the film beyond the costumes and Dr. No's computer room and, of these, the costumes are still tasteful even now. Andress had to play a naive woman so unworldly that she hadn't even had a proper elementary education, yet wasn't crass and foolish. Andress made Honey Ryder appear like Eve from the ocean, unblemished and sweet, without being stupid. I love the story she tells about how she got revenge on her rapist with a black widow. "Did I do wrong?!," she asks incredulously, and even Bond has to agree that she did not. It took great skill on the part of Andress to make Ryder believable and to make sure she fulfilled every fantasy of Bond fans. She passed with flying colors.
3. Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) The Spy Who Loved Me
   Easily in the ranks of the most beautiful of all Bond babes, Bach was able to make her throwaway character memorable for her subtle acting and depth of character. Has anyone ever looked so good in a black Halston evening gown? No wonder Ringo always looks so happy. She and Moore had chemistry and it showed.
4. Tracy Draco Di Vicenzo Bond (Diana Rigg) On Her Majesty's Secret Service
   Witty, beautiful, and easily the most sophisticated of Bond's various conquests. Rigg gave Tracy a touch of sweetness missing in Emma Peel though just as pragmatic. It's easy to see why Bond married Tracy as she was the only woman to ever prove herself smarter than he was.
5. Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) Goldfinger
   You know she's a lesbian right? It says so right in the book even if the script only hinted at it. Doesn't matter. Blackman gave Bond girls a brain for one brief moment and it sure as Hell worked. The magic of Goldfinger is that it takes the most ludicrously unbelievable plot in the entire series and somehow makes us believe it's all possible. For decades people would warn about, "skin suffocation," and how you could really buy an Aston Martin with all those wonderful gadgets. Blackman's character stood out in a cast of astonishing characters not because she was outlandish, but because you knew she was the most calculating person in the entire film. She let herself be sexy and intelligent to the point she outshone the most outrageous screen name in movie history. It is said few women can wear orchids without orchids wearing the woman and in this case, Blackman could have been draped in them and it wouldn't matter. She's the Bond girl against which all others are compared.

In order of their crapitude:

1. Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland) The Man with the Golden Gun
   Never has there been more of a waste of a hot girl in a bikini. If she's an example of what MI6 was reduced to in the 70s then M may as well have been Benny Hill. Bond essentially spends half the film cleaning-up after Goodnight's mistakes and it not only weakens the believability of the film, but reduces Bond to a glorified babysitter. Ekland's lack of any kind of acting skills only makes you wonder how many times she boinked Cubby Broccoli to get the part. She wasn't even that good-looking!
2. Kara Milovy (Maryam d'Abo) The Living Daylights
   USELESS! Absolutely, completely useless! About as useless as, saaay, dragging a cello all over Europe on a spy mission. Here we thought she may have had some balls, after all, she was an assassin, but no. Turns out the KGB just pulled her out of second chair and told her to go shoot somebody. She wasn't really a spy at all! She then spends the rest of the movie with poor Bond dragging her all over creation while she drags that damned cello along behind her. d'Abo was cute in those days, not sexy. Real Bond girls don't do cute.
3. Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) License to Kill
   Who?? They don't get more forgettable than this. She was so dull I'd rather see Bond sleep with TV's Madame. At least Madame wouldn't nag Bond as much and actually say something pithy now and then. Yet another Bond girl with no purpose save to get fucked in the end, Lowell made an already dull character into a harpy. Needed a good punch in the mouth she did.
4. Stacy Sutton (Tanya Roberts) A View to a Kill
   Yet another in a series of girls reduced to helpless baggage for Bond to rescue and provide minor plot points. Roberts' wholesome yogurt-and-aerobics California image doesn't fit the Bond mould. Seriously. Could you picture Octopussy doing aerobics? How about Solitaire or Melina Havelock? Didn't think so. Sutton's unworldly, unsexy, and far too vapid to be remotely intriguing enough for Bond to want. All the casting apparently called for was an ability to shout, "JAAAAMES!!!!," with some measure of alarm. The only thing less believable than Tanya Roberts being a doctor of geology is....
5. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) The World Is Not Enough
   Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist. In the Bond world, we've been asked to believe that there are:
   • Spies who kill men by squeezing them to death with their thighs,
   • Valets who kill people by throwing hats at them,
   • Assassins who bite people in the neck,
   • Master criminals who kill people with pointy orthopedic shoes,
   • An entire secret fleet of space shuttles somewhere in the Amazon jungle,
   • Exploding a few tons of TNT in the San Andreas fault would cause half of California to sink into the ocean,
   and yet all of these fictions pale before the ultimate absurdity of Richards having even a college degree let alone a doctorate in physics. I can't deny that it's possible there are nuclear physicists who regularly wear patent leather hot pants, but I must say I believe it improbable given how long it takes for even mere geniuses to attain a doctorate in nuclear physics. Richards' take on the role was all wrong. We know Richards can do sexy, she's proved that. But she took Christmas Jones, a joke we already saw coming (ahem) in the credits, and played her as cute, pert, and perky. If Bond women are never cute, then they are absolutely never pert and perky.
   Christmas Jones was almost enough to make Bond go atheist.

Special mention:
Lynn-Holly Johnson (Bibi Dahl) For Your Eyes Only
Bibi tried to be a Bond girl, and I do mean girl, but thankfully Bond kept his pants on and our eyes stayed open. How I wished Melina would have shot her right in the beginning. Buy the damned crossbow, walk out to the ice, and just plug Bibi right there and then. You know that's what she was thinking when she bought it. Pity she was interrupted. Children have no place in a Bond movie.

Great list, Jason, but Wai Lin, was in "Tomorrow Never Dies." :P

and then, i just have a slight comment with the Tracy DiVicenzo pick. Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) from Casino Royale was every bit of Bond's match (epecially mentally) as Tracy.

Aside from my preference for best Bond girl (noted in an above post) I kinda agree with j.els's first list - with the exception of Pussy Galore.

She just didn't do it for me (and maybe it was that subtle characterization that you say was only hinted at in the film). I said I hate wimpy women. But by the same token a woman can be proud, accomplished, sure of oneself, strong-willed, capable, and independent; and still be a damned sexy woman (like Tracy DiVicenzo/Dianna Rigg so marvelously demonstrated.)

On the other hand, if the woman seems to do a better job at "wearing the pants" than the guy does (aka Pussy Galore) then it's a bit of a turn off...for me that is.

As for your second list...spot on. All of them totally useless. (Well, maybe not... totally...)

Unfortunately, in real life the only girls and undercover spy is likely to shack up with are the worst looking temp at the front organization they are staking out. Yeukh !

If I remember right, she was a lesbian in the book until Bond 'converted' her by shagging her really good

Never going to win any prizes in the political correctness stakes was he ?

i love Xenia, Plenty O'Toole, HOney Ryder and Domino