Life as a Bond girl: 'Of course Sean Connery tried to seduce me'

Martine Beswick describes playing a Bond girl to Sean Connery’s 007 as “one of the happiest times of my life”. The English actress and star of a slew of Sixties hits, 79, can claim that rare accolade, for a woman, of having appeared in the franchise twice: she was a “gypsy girl” called Zora in 1963’s From Russia with Love and netted the rather meatier role of Paula Caplan, Bond’s CIA ally who kills herself rather than divulge information under torture, in Thunderball. And she was nearly cast in the first film, Dr No, but at 21 was ruled out as too young.

It was the halcyon days on the Thunderball set in Nassau in the Bahamas that she recalls most fondly. It was the “zenith of Bond” as she describes it: 1965, the fourth Bond film, and Sean Connery a global celebrity. “Every newspaper and magazine was there,” she says. “It was pretty heavy. People just gathered around him on the beach after a day’s filming and Sean would get really irritated. He’d say, that’s it, and he’d be gone.”

But in private, he was “absolutely part of the party”. Beswick was a member of a “gang” that included director Terence Young, other Bond girls Claudine Auger and Lucianna Paluzzi, Connery and Connery’s wife Diane Cilento and they would have long, leisurely meals together. Connery and she had this “mischief playmate” relationship, that was “all nudge nudge, wink wink” says Beswick. But quite innocent, she insists.

“There are photographs of us In the Bahamas in between scenes, me in a bikini and him in his trunks and me sitting on his lap, but it was nothing to do with sex - we were just having this chat. People thought we were definitely at it, but we weren’t! Not at all… We were giggly and silly, but there was also a friendship there.”

During filming, Connery and Beswick would egg each other on to be as “naughty” as the other, she recalls. “I’d be doing a shot and he’d have to be in my eyeline and he’d start making faces at me and I couldn’t keep a straight face, so there was a bit of a giggle fest with us.”

Bond girl in the Seventies and Eighties - and Carry On star - Valerie Leon, 77, has different recollections. Connery was more serious by the time he was making Never Say Never Again, a Bond old-timer working on what would be his last (seventh) Bond film, and a shoot, also in the Bahamas since the film was essentially a remake of Thunderball, “with quite a lot of problems’ as Leon remembers. The film, made in 1983, was not one sanctioned by the Broccolis, the Bond producing couple that had made the other movies hitherto.

But unlike Beswick’s more chaste screen liaisons with Connery, Leon went to bed with Bond.

“I was cast as, ‘Lady in the Bahamas’. I had the nickname Sexpot,” says Leon, recalling a rather different era from our own. “I remember going to the casting wearing a catsuit and sleeveless gold brocade coat and the producer asked me what I thought I was wearing and I said, ‘a Bond girl outfit’ and it got me the job.”

Her character saved Bond from sharks by pulling him onto a boat. “I even took fishing lessons to fish Sean out of the water,” Leon laughs.

“I remember all my girlfriends saying the role had to be the highlight of my career because I was going to have a bed scene with Sean Connery. He did have an animal magnetism. He did also have a really lovely hairy chest.”

How was he as a kisser? “Sexy,” she laughs. And doesn’t embellish.

“I do remember going to his room for a drink the night before I had the bed scene with him, so obviously he liked to loosen the women up before he had any sex scenes.

“Of course he tried to seduce me..."

And did he succeed? “I’ll leave that to your imagination.”

Like Beswick, Leon also starred in two Bond films, but her other was with Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). “Roger was really charming and Sean was a perfectionist,” she says, admitting that Moore was her favourite. She still has signed photographs from each of them: “From Sean to Valerie, til the next time we get into bed,” says Connery’s. “Valerie how slim I was then and you still are”, says Moore’s.

Both women concur freely that their times filming with Connery were career highlights, but it is Beswick who has the greater nostalgia. “Thunderball was the most amazing shoot I’d ever done,” she says.

She and Connery didn’t stay in touch though. “I think the last time Sean and I saw each other was by chance at Heathrow airport again, maybe 40 years ago, but it was straight back to our old relationship: giggle giggle.”