For a series whose hero embodies the masculine id, the history of women's influence on the James Bond movies is a long and fascinating one. The figure of the Bond girl is the most famous and most analysed, though the importance of the many women who have guided the series from behind the screen is just as great, albeit less widely recognised. A prominent modern example would be Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of one of the series' original producers, Cubby Broccoli, and who now runs the show along with her half-brother, Michael G. Wilson. A less known example would be Johanna Harwood, an Irish screenwriter who was a credited screenwriter on the first two Bond movies, Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and contributed uncredited work to Goldfinger.
One of the least recognised names is Nikki van der Zyl, yet if you haven't heard of her, as a Bond fan you certainly will have heard her. A German voiceover artist who died three days ago aged 85, van der Zyl leaves behind a legacy which shaped the Bond girl icon every bit as much as Ursula Andress - whose voice van der Zyl dubbed.
When describing a Bond girl, one typically thinks in visual terms: figures of exceptional and exotic beauty, draped in iconic fashions; self-reliant, tough and mysterious, yet vulnerable and irreproachably feminine. It is less common to consider how these qualities are not only embodied by their appearance and the performances of the many talented actresses to have entered the pantheon, but also their voices.
It will come as a shock to many that the voice of the first and arguably most iconic Bond girl, Honey Ryder (Honeychile in the books), was not that of the actress who played her, Ursula Andress. That iconic vocal performance, beginning with a soft rendition of the movie's de facto Bond song, 'Underneath The Mango Tree', and conveying Honey's roots with a soft Caribbean accent serrated with the resilience and cynicism of a woman who killed her rapist with a black widow spider, is the work of Nikki van der Zyl.
In fact, van der Zyl voiced all the women of Dr. No outside Lois Maxwell's Moneypenny and Zena Marshall's Miss Taro. Honey Ryder? Van der Zyl. The secretary who is killed in the opening scene and is also the first woman to appear in a Bond movie (excluding extras)? Van der Zyl. Equally as important as her voice role as Honey Ryder is her work dubbing over Eunice Grayson as Sylvia Trench, the first woman in the series Bond romances and the one from whom he inherits his famous introduction.
Contrary to what modern media reports suggest in relation to the return of Madeleine Swann for No Time To Die, Sylvia Trench was in actuality the first returning Bond girl, voiced for a second time by van der Zyl when the character is seen in a second tryst with Connery's Bond in From Russia With Love.
(As an aside, those who claim Quantum Of Solace was the first direct sequel in the Bond film series are also incorrect: From Russia With Love is clearly stated as following the events of Dr. No, with Bond's killing of the eponymous villain cited as the motivation for SPECTRE wanting revenge.)
Van der Zyl voiced a further two of Bond's leading ladies, Thunderball's Domino Derval (played by Claudine Auger) and You Only Live Twice's unnamed-in-the-film Kissy Suzuki (played by Mie Hama), in addition to a range of supporting Bond girls, including but not limited to Shirley Eaton's Jill Masterson, aka the Golden Girl in Goldfinger, and Corinne Clery's Corinne Dufour in Moonraker, the role which marked van der Zyl's final contribution to the Bond series. She also picked up some lines for Jane Seymour's Solitaire - Simone Latrelle in the books - in Live And Let Die and amusingly dubbed Ursula Andress for a second time in a Bond role in the unofficial - and terrible - 1967 comedy version of Casino Royale.
Van der Zyl's importance to Bond movies was not exclusive to its women, however. Perhaps the most famous exchange in the series is when Bond is desperately trying to talk his way out of being vertically bisected by Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger:
