The recent death of Raquel Welch produced a lot of obituaries talking about her role as an iconic sex symbol; a woman whose talents and sheer beauty made her transcend being a mere actress and turned her into an icon. Many of those obituaries also mentioned how, in an alternate universe, Raquel Welch was Domino in Thunderball, until she was released for FantasticVoyage.
This isn't a blog post about the Domino we could have had. Instead it's a blog post about mortality, and about how we're now facing up to a new era.
In my head, Bond villains died all the time. When I was a kid, getting into 007 around the time of the 25th anniversary, many of the great villains were already gone. Gert Frobe. Robert Shaw. Lotte Lenya. Curt Jurgens. It was unsurprising.
The 007 support staff were going too. Bernard Lee died, and so did Desmond Llewellyn, and Lois Maxwell. But we'd watched them age and so it felt inevitable.
Then Bonds themself passed away; Roger Moore and Sean Connery. But again, that seemed like something that would happen eventually.
Now though? Now we're losing Bond Girls, and that carries a sadness all of its own. To quote the documentary, Bond Girls Are Forever, preserved. Bond Girls are the high point of human existence: beautiful, brave, athletic, smart. Every Bond Girl is a woman at her absolute peak.
Raquel Welch's death somehow reminded me that the girls of the sixties are now in their eighties at least and, sadly, some of them have already passed. Honor Blackman has gone. So has Tania Mallet, and Eunice Gayson, and Zena Marshall. Molly Peters and Claudine Auger and Mitsouko; Karin Dor and Angela Scoular; Diana Rigg. These iconic women of the Sixties Bond movies are slowly succumbing to age and there is a deep sadness to it - a different sadness to the loss of Tanya Roberts or Cassandra Harris, Bond Girls taken too soon.
This is a world in which these beautiful, young, lithe, happy women are quietly passing away. There is a strange sadness to it I can't really articulate. They were captured on film in iconic roles as a moment of astonishing beauty. Claudine Auger is that girl in a swimsuit on a beach in the Bahamas - she is eternal. I can't quite reconcile that with her death. There's also the sadness of knowing that where these Bond Girls go, others will follow; as John Gardner once wrote, Nothing Lasts For Ever. It's a strange sadness but it's one I feel profoundly. A death of hope and beauty that will never be regained.
