Evening Post
August 6, 1981
Moore than just Bond beauties
GIRLS in Bond movies usually have little to do except lounge about in bikinis beside heated swimming pools, and await The Call To Arms.
Any pretense to acting ability is superfluous, and a sense of humor positively out of place.
Cassandra Harris and Lynn-Holly Johnson don’t fit into this pattern.
True, the roles they play in the latest James Bond spy adventure, For Your Eyes Only, currently showing at Odeon cinema in Reading, call for them to do considerably more than merely look decorative or hopeful. They are required to act.
Australian-born Cassandra, 31, portrays a somewhat dubious “countess” of mature charms who does find her way into the bed of superspy-cum-superstud Bond (Roger Moore).
Lynn, 22, an American, plays Bibi, a teenage nymphomaniac ice-skater whose advances are firmly rejected by Bond because he believes that she is too young. He offers to buy her an ice-cream instead.
Both Cassandra and Lynn are, in real life, quite something…
“One newspaper critic, reviewing the film, said that he was surprised Bond hadn’t kicked Countess Lisl — that’s me — out of his bed because she was just an old boot,” Cassandra told me. “I strongly resented that. I’m not an old boot. Well, you don’t think I’m an old boot, do you? Would you kick me out of. . .” (at which point I interjected, “no, no, no, of course not,” having as an innocent, harmless bachelor, getting on in years, become a trifle embarrassed at the turn which the conversation was taking).
Lynn was a very sweet, wholesome gel, albeit that she has been in show business since the age of four.
“What I like doing best of all at the moment is sailing,” she said happily. “Or to be more exact, racing in sailing boats. I often act as crew in races. In fact, I have got a big race coming up next week. Our boat is an Islander 36. I love the water. I live in Los Angeles, on the beach. And I have often been to Lake Michigan. That’s a huge inland sea. Water. . . as far as the eye can see.”
I met this delightful duo at the London Hilton a few weeks back. It was what you might call an arranged meeting.
A handful of journalists, myself included, sat at little tables and waited for some of the stars and others involved in For Your Eyes Only to toddle in and sit down beside us.
Actually, it isn’t quite as cold-blooded an arrangement as it sounds, and I have conducted interviews in far less convenient circumstances. Even so, the fact that we were sitting at tables prompted me to make a crack about it being like a scene from the Labour Exchange.
“I don’t suppose you know about the Labour Exchange?” I said chattily to Cassandra, by way of breaking the ice.
“I know an awful lot more about the Labour Exchange than you do,” she replied. “I’m in the sort of business which calls for frequent visits to it.”
Nevertheless, Cassandra Harris has come quite a long way since her first appearance on a stage — she played a weasel — in a children’s play at a theatre in Sydney.
She went on to host her own TV chat show and appeared in numerous stage and television productions in her native land before coming to this country.
In Britain she has appeared in such TV series as Space 1999, Dick Barton–Special Agent, and Enemy at the Door. Cassandra has also toured with the National Theatre Company.
Her films include Superman, The Greek Tycoon, and Rough Cut. The Bond role is however by far her biggest break to date.
“I knew that I had the best woman’s part in the film as soon as I saw the script,” she said, “and I was determined to make the most of it.
“We have this mysterious supposedly Austrian. . . or she could be Central European. . . Countess Lisl. Then suddenly, out of the blue, her mask slips, and she reverts to her Liiverpudlian accent.
“I deliberately played her as an older woman, not all that OLDER, I’d say late 30’s. That was to give her a bit of character. After all, she had been around a bit. She was a little bit shop-worn, and looked a little bit older than she was. Yes, I could have made her younger but what would she have been then? Just another Bond girl. Pretty to look at, but the sort of face and figure you forget the moment that you walk out of the cinema.
“John Glen, the director, gave me the opportunity to make something of this character, and I took it. Think about it for a moment. Which women do you remember most vividly from the James Bond pictures? No, you don’t have to say me, although that was the general idea.
“The women who stand out in my mind are Diana Rigg and Honor Blackman. They played strong, forceful, off-beat characters. They were certainly feminine all right, but they were much more than just glamour girls.”
As we were talking a waiter arrived with coffee and biscuits. Cassandra ate all the biscuits. Every crumb.
Cassandra, who is married to actor Pierce Brosnan, said: “Things are going very well for me at the moment, but we mustn’t forget the Labour Exchange.” And she admitted that one of her great ambitions is to play a light comedy role.
Lynn is the complete antithesis of the popular concept of a young woman who has literally grown up in show business.
She began appearing in TV commercials for such products as Burger King, Coca Cola, and Kellog’s, and doing modelling sessions for Esquire, Life, and McCall’s magazines when she was five-years-old.
Over the years, she has become a champion ice-skater, and an accomplished actress. But a less brittle and world-weary person it would be very hard to find. I don’t care how corny it sounds, she is just a thoroughly sweet, tremendously happy little soul, who works like the devil, and enjoys every minute of life.
As a toddler, she used to watch her elder brother and sister, Gregg and Kimberlee skate, and quickly followed in their footsteps. Ice-skating came naturally to her. During her schooldays, Lynn would get up st 6am and put in a couple hours of practice at the local rink before going to school.
At this point, though, she was skating purely for fun. Acting and modelling was work.
When she was ten, Lynn won rave reviews for her performance as the blind, deaf mute Helen Keller in a stage production of The Miracle Worker, opposite Rita Moreno.
She didn’t actually become a professional skater until 1977, and the following year her combined acting-skating talents won her the starring role in the picture Ice Castles. This was about a young girl who dreams of skating in the Olympics and, on the verge of achieving her goal, is nearly blinded in an accident.
“I loved the Bond film,” she said. “It was unlike anything I had ever done before. I was very nervous at first, but everybody was so nice to me that I soon settled down. Roger Moore was very kind to me. The scenes in the film where I am making advances to him look fairly serious, but really we were laughing all the time.”
Lynn hopes to concentrate more on acting than ice-skating in the future. “I love skating,” she said, “but I’ve done quite a lot of it in two big pictures. I would like a different sort of role next time. But I’ll just have to see.
“When I’m not working, I live a very normal life at home. I have lots of fun,” she said with a smile.
