Lois Maxwell played Miss Moneypenny fourteen times over twenty-three years, seldom for more than a few minutes, and made M's outer office feel like a room with a history. It is a small thing done well, which is rarer than it sounds.
Fi1m perspective
In Dr. No (1962), Bond comes in from the casino and has to get past a desk before he gets to M. Bernard Lee is sour behind his own desk, Lois Maxwell is flirting in the outer room, and between them and Connery they sketch a whole civil service in about four minutes. Maxwell plays the flirting as a routine both parties know by heart. She wore her own clothes for the part, and it shows: Moneypenny dresses for the office, not for the camera, and that is half of why we believe she runs it.
The career before that was a wander. Hollywood in the late 1940s, with That Hagen Girl (1947); Italian films through the 1950s; British television after that. Then 1962 gave her two parts, a nurse in Kubrick's Lolita and Moneypenny, and she asked for the second. Offered the choice, she took the secretary over Sylvia Trench, the woman at the card table in our Dr. No review, because Trench came with a scene she did not want to play. Fourteen films followed, Dr. No to A View to a Kill (1985), opposite three Bonds, seven of them with Roger Moore, whom she had known since RADA.
What made it work was a decision she and Connery took off screen. "Sean and I agreed that we wanted to give Bond and Moneypenny a background... they'd had a marvellous affair when she was in the typing pool." The scripts never mention it, but the playing does. The teasing has the tone of two people who have been through something and agreed not to bring it up, and Maxwell lets the disappointment sit just under the wit without ever reaching for it. In From Russia with Love (1963) we found ourselves fonder of her few minutes than of Daniela Bianchi's whole part, because Moneypenny is the only woman in the film allowed to want Bond and be dry about it.
The honest caveat is size. Across fourteen films she is on screen for under an hour in total, with few lines, and the exchange barely changed; our review of From Russia with Love notes that she and Lee "do what they will go on doing for a decade", and that steadiness is both the pleasure and the limit. The role typecast her and the industry did not find much else for her to do. Beyond Moneypenny there is not a great deal to judge, and we will not pretend the Lolita nurse is more than a footnote.
Where she went next tells you how the part stuck. From 1979 to 1994 she wrote a newspaper column in Toronto under the byline "Miss Moneypenny". The films let her go in 1985. The name never did.
Biography
Lois Maxwell was a Canadian actress best known for portraying Miss Moneypenny in the first 14 Eon James Bond films, from Dr. No (1962) to A View to a Kill (1985). She appeared in the role opposite Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore.
Born Lois Ruth Hooker in Kitchener, Ontario, she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She made her film debut in the late 1940s and won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer – Actress for her performance in That Hagen Girl (1947). Other credits include a role in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962).
Maxwell was married to Peter Marriott from 1957 until his death in 1973; they had two children.
