Maud Adams is the Bond woman who behaves like an adult. Twice, opposite Roger Moore, she played someone who had already weighed the man she was standing next to and decided to stay anyway, and both films are better for having her in them.
Fi1m perspective
In a Hong Kong hotel room in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Roger Moore's Bond twists Andrea Anders's arm and threatens to break it. Moore plays the scene as if someone off camera had told him to. Maud Adams plays it as if she has been threatened before, by better men than this one, and is deciding how much to give him. She is the only person in the film who seems to have thought about what living with Christopher Lee's Scaramanga would cost, and the film, which has a sheriff on holiday to attend to, does not give her nearly enough time to tell us.
That was her breakthrough, and it set the pattern. She had come to acting from modelling, discovered in a shop in Sweden in the early 1960s and put to work in Paris and New York, and her first parts leaned on how she looked. Producers kept casting her for glamour and asking little else of her, and for a stretch that was the whole of her reputation. Rollerball (1975), for Norman Jewison, gave her a proper supporting role; Playing for Time (1980) and Tattoo (1981) got her noticed as an actress rather than a face. We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here.
Then Albert R. Broccoli asked her back, and she became the only actress to play a Bond woman in two different films. Octopussy (1983) makes her the title character, a businesswoman who has made her peace with smuggling and lives in a palace on a lake that Peter Lamont fills with brass and silk. She and Moore are easy together, two adults with a history they are too polite to raise, and there is not much of that in Bond films. We found ourselves, somewhere in the second hour of chases and jokes, wishing the film would go back to the palace and let the two of them talk. It never quite does. Neither she nor Kristina Wayborn is given much to want beyond Bond, and the octopus cult is decoration.
The criticism that follows her is fair as far as it goes: the roles emphasised beauty over depth, and she never became a leading star in Hollywood once the Bond association had done its work. She said herself, of the move from modelling, "I feel I've made the transition from model to actress, but I'm not that secure about it." What the criticism misses is what she did with the parts she was given. In two films built to make women decorative, she found a way to be the one person on screen who had considered the consequences.
Watch The Man with the Golden Gun for Lee and notice who else walks out of it intact. Watch Octopussy for India and for her. The rest of the career went to television and to a Swedish series she directed in 1994, and it is Bond that people remember. She seems, on the record, to have made her peace with that too.
Biography
Maud Adams is a Swedish actress and model. Born Maud Solveig Christina Wikström on 12 February 1945 in Luleå, she began her career as a model after being discovered in 1963. She moved to Paris and then New York, where she studied acting, before making her film debut in an uncredited role in The Boys in the Band (1970).
Adams gained international recognition for her roles in two James Bond films: as Andrea Anders in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and as the title character in Octopussy (1983). She also appeared uncredited in A View to a Kill (1985). Other notable film roles include Rollerball (1975) and Tattoo (1981). She has appeared in various television series and hosted a Swedish talk show.
She was married to photographer Roy Adams from 1966 to 1975 and to Charles Rubin since 1999. Adams has served as president of the cosmetics company Scandinavian Biocosmetics.
