New Idea Magazine
June 27, 1981
A year ago, she was so poor she bought clothes at opportunity shops and stuffed newspapers into gaping holes in her car.
AUSTRALIAN actress Cassandra Harris may never forget her first day on the set of the newest James Bond Film.
The location was a beautiful beach on the Greek island of Corfu.
Cassandra as Countess Lisle, the woman Bond falls in love with in For Your Eyes Only, had to play a ‘lovey dovey’ scene with Roger Moore, alias super secret agent 007.
“I remember walking down the beach, my legs actually shaking, and thinking, ‘My God, how am I going to do this?’
“I’ve never actually kissed a big time movie star on screen before. I was so nervous I literally grabbed him.”
Eventually the scene was filmed with Roger Moore, now 53, and making his fifth Bond film in seven years, oozing charm and humor which put his co-star very much at ease.
“I found him very attractive as a personality,” Cassandra says.
“He was so funny. They do call him Moore the Merrier on the set. I learned wonderful little techniques from him: how to flick my hair off my face, how to walk to show off my figure, things you wouldn’t expect a man to know.”
Cassandra, 31, mother of two, once married to Dermot Harris, brother of famous temperamental actor Richard Harris, is now married to Pierce Brosnan.
They live at Wimbledon in London and recently bought a lovely house nearby overlooking the common.
A little more than a year ago they were so poor that Cassandra picked up coats for her children at opportunity shops and stuffed newspapers into the gaping holes of her old Ford Anglia.
“At the beginning, it was terrible. We were both in repertory earning a pittance.
“It’s only been in the past year that the money has started to come in.”
Cassandra co-starred in the $26 million Bond epic and has been asked to join the Royal Shakespeare Company.
She says this could be the “absolute making” of her in legitimate theatre.
Pierce, 29, is going to be “absolutely hot” this year. He is the star of a new American television series called The Manions of America, “an Irish Roots” which tells the story of Ireland’s potato famine.
It stars David Soul, Barbara Parkins, Kate Mulgrew (Ms Columbo) with Pierce playing the lead character.
The series has been pre-sold to Australia where Cassandra was born and raised, and received an enormous amount of publicity when she appeared nude (back view only) in Bruce Beresford’s film, Five Days.
At the time, she was the youngest-ever panelist on Channel Seven’s Beauty and the Beast.
Cassandra was not asked back on the show after the publicity about her nude scene on Sydney’s Avalon Beach.
From school she went straight to the National Institute of Dramatic Art, then into Boeing Boeing with Peter Jones and Ron Frazer.
She recalls it being pretty heady stuff for a 17-year-old.
She moved to London to work at the National Theatre, stayed for one play and moved into television.
She had been in London only four months when Sammy Davis Jr. leaped out of a limousine near the Palladium and asked if he could take her photograph.
“I didn’t even recognize him. I told him to ring my agent and he did.”
Sammy’s photograph of Cassandr appeared on the front page of the Telegraph supplement.
“And that’s how I began modeling.”
Lumley’s, a very exclusive agency with just 20 girls on its books, asked her to replace the magnificent model called Sarah who was giving up the business to marry the Aga Khan.
Then there was a screen test for Jane Eyre with Richard Harris. If Richard played Rochester, she would be Jane.
The parts went to George C. Scott and Susannah York.
Around that time, she met and married Dermot.
“I was married to Richard Harris’ brother, so I was in it for a while but it’s the most fatal thing to be involved with anybody else who has really made it and who’s a star.”
The marriage lasted four years, then Cassandra needed to go back to work. It was a very nerve-wracking time — until she met a handsome dark-eyed actor called Pierce Brosnan at a party.
He told her to start from scratch, go back to rep and really work hard.
Gradually, Cassandra regained her reputation. She landed small roles in television productions, then a lead in a series called Boy Merlin for Thames Television. And there was modeling, too, for pin money.
“In a way, the James Bond film has been a merger of the modeling career . . . the glamor side, and it’s a very good acting role.”
Cassandra had starred in an excellent TV production, Enemy At The Door. The Bond people saw her performance and “just rang and asked for me.”
She also had small parts in Rough Cut with Lesley Ann Down, The Greek Tycoon with Jacqueline Bisset and played a reporter in Superman I.
“I couldn’t believe it when I suddenly did a James Bond,” says Cassandra who is due here soon to promote the film.
“I was so excited but it’s worn off slightly now.
“I’m beginning to expect bigger roles. My ambitions are getting higher and higher.”‘
NENE KING
