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Bond Girl Role Cursed My Career, Says A View To A Kill's Tanya Roberts

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Actress Tanya Roberts has said that her role as a Bond girl cursed her acting career.

Roberts, now 60, played Stacey Sutton in 1985 Bond movie ‘A View To A Kill’ with Roger Moore, his last outing as 007.

- The Bond girls: then and now

But rather than help her career – she was in 'Charlie’s Angels’ prior to her turn with Moore, and in Don Coscarelli’s ‘The Beastmaster’ – she now says it hindered her, preventing her from getting lead roles.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, she spoke about her feelings once she was offered the Bong girl role.

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“I sort of felt like every girl who’d ever been a Bond Girl had seen their career go nowhere, so I was a little cautious,” says Roberts.

“I remember I said to my agent, 'No one ever works after they get a Bond movie’ and they said to me, 'Are you kidding? Glen Close would do it if she could’.

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“And I thought to myself, 'well you can have regrets if you wish, but what’s the point?’ At the time I didn’t know what I know now, and to be honest, who would turn that role down, really?

“Nobody would. All you have to think to yourself is, 'Could I have been better in the part?’ That’s all you can say to yourself because turning the part down would have been ridiculous, you know? I mean nobody would do that, nobody. I was very young and I did what I felt was the right choice to make.

“I’ve made a lot of good choices and a lot of bad choices and that’s part of life. Whether you’re really successful or moderately successful, I’m sure that to get there you have made some bad decisions and good decisions on some level, but that’s how I see life.

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“You can’t go through life defeated, it’s just trial and error.”

But she adds that she might have done things differently, given the chance again.

“Before James Bond I’d been in Charlie’s Angels, which pigeon-holed me, so it was always going to be hard to get myself out of that pigeon hole after that,” she said.

“I think it’s better to come into the limelight really slowly and do a broader range of roles, but I took these glamorous roles and I think that stereotyped me.

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“They sort of think you’re some dumb, glamorous broad, so it’s difficult, and I think that is the reason most Bond Girls don’t go on to have careers after they have done the movie because people just don’t take them seriously and I guess they shouldn’t because it’s so tongue-in-cheek, you know what I mean?”

She goes on to say that Bond girls these days may have it better.

“People think you’ll get all this extra attention and have things sent to you from fashion designers, but believe it or not I didn’t get all that. It’s very different now to how it was then.

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“Perhaps Bond Girls today do get better offers and free clothes from designers, but I don’t see many ex-Bond women on the red carpet these days.

“But honestly, it’s no horrible thing, it’s just the way it is. It’s just life.”

Following Bond, Roberts appeared in a string of straight-to-video type movies, but scored a recurring role as Midge Pinciotti in 'That 70s Show’.

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Image credits: Rex Features