Posted on 09/30/2007 5:51:40 PM PDT by dighton
Lois Maxwell, the Canadian actress who died on Saturday aged 80, played Miss Moneypenny in 14 James Bond films; although other younger women later took over the part, she was widely regarded as the definitive Moneypenny, M’s spinsterly secretary secretly in love with 007.
She was 33 when she screen-tested for Dr No (1962), the first Bond film, and was originally offered the part eventually played by Eunice Grayson, one of Bond’s conquests, seen putting golf balls down the hall of his flat dressed only in his pyjama top.
But Lois Maxwell did not regard her legs as her strongest point, and while Bond’s creator Ian Fleming told her she had the most kissable lips in the world, one film director took a different view: “Lois, you don’t smell of sin. You look as though you smell of soap.”
Accordingly - in crisp blouse and skirt - she landed the Moneypenny role, cast originally against Sean Connery in Dr No. Lois Maxwell later mused on the on-screen chemistry between the chaste Miss Moneypenny and the swashbuckling agent, licensed to kill: “Say there’d been an affair a long time before, only she knew he would have broken her heart, just as he knew it would have ruined his career in the Secret Service. So they were doomed to appreciate each other’s qualities.”
Although she played the part for 23 years, she was on screen for less for an hour and spoke fewer than 200 words in all 14 films, her lines running an emotional gamut from “James, you’re late” to “When are we going to have that dinner?” Her last Moneypenny appearance was opposite Roger Moore as Bond in A View To A Kill (1985).
Never paid more than £100 a day, her first appearance in Dr No took only two days to shoot, and those in her 13 subsequent Bond films were just as modest in scale. For her first five films, Lois Maxwell wore her own clothes.
“Always the same role, the smallest,” she remarked ruefully in an interview for the Telegraph Magazine in 1997. The camera would find her sitting at a desk in the corner of a nondescript office, on the telephone or riffling papers. But when Bond enters, she greets him with a grin of pure joy.
“It is not a beautiful face,” observed Byron Rogers, who interviewed her for the Telegraph 10 years ago, “it is a wonderful face, long and funny and older than all the others… The other women in Bond films are two-dimensional, who only ever want to go to bed with him or stab him, but there is one who loves him, though she knows nothing will ever come of this.
“That is the way Lois Maxwell played Moneypenny, making her the one grown-up among sexpots and psychopaths.”
Not everyone realised that she was Canadian. “Moneypenny,” exclaimed the Prince of Wales on meeting her. “I would never have believed you’re not English. I must tell the family.”
Born Lois Ruth Hooker on February 14 1927 at Kitchener, Ontario, one of four children, her early career as a child radio performer was disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War when her father, a teacher, enlisted and sailed for England. At the age of 16 she ran away from home to join the Canadian Army Show, but failed to tell the authorities about her age, and after touring England in the back of a truck was eventually dishonourably dismissed. Just before she was due to be shipped home, she went AWOL in London.
While living in a garret in Paddington, Lois won a Lady Louis Mountbatten scholarship to Rada, where she first met Roger Moore, then 17 and later to star in seven Bond films, and - crowned in a red wig - played his uncle in a student production of Henry V.
At 20 she was working in the professional theatre when a talent scout spotted her and took her to Hollywood. At Warner Brothers, Lois found herself in the same intake as another promising actress named Norma Jeane Baker, with whom she was photographed for Life magazine. Both changed their name, Norma Jeane becoming Marilyn Monroe and Lois Hooker, advised that this was an infelicitous name for an starlet, changing to Lois Maxwell, a name borrowed from a gay ballet dancer friend and which was adopted by the rest of her family too.
She won a Golden Globe award as best newcomer for her role in the Shirley Temple comedy That Hagen Girl (1947).
Playing opposite Ronald Reagan in Bedtime For Bonzo (1951) she found the future president handsome and attractive, but became less enamoured of the studio system, and moved to Rome for five years, becoming an amateur racing driver. After a broken love affair with the brother of an Italian prince, she married a British television executive called Peter Marriott, a former commander of the Viceroy of India’s household troops who, by coincidence, was screen-tested as a possible James Bond by the producer Cubby Broccoli.
In addition to her career in the Bond films Lois Maxwell was a successful television actress, appearing in episodes of UFO, The Persuaders, The Baron, The Saint and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). She also provided the voice for Troy Tempest’s love interest, Atlanta Shore, in Gerry Anderson’s puppet series Stingray.
In the late 1960s she starred in Adventures In Rainbow Country, a popular Canadian television series, and in 1967 appeared as Moneypenny in a television special Welcome To Japan, Mr Bond. More recently, she became a regular fixture at Bond film festivals.
Her last feature film was The Fourth Angel (2001) starring Jeremy Irons and Forest Whitaker.
Widowed at 46 when her husband died of a heart attack in 1973, Lois Maxwell returned to her native Canada, bought a farm and worked for a business importing crowd-control barriers. She later wrote a column for the Toronto Sun which she signed “Moneypenny” and in which, for 14 years, she expounded trenchant Right-wing opinions.
Always an adventurous woman, she held a pilot’s licence, regularly went on safari and in the 1980s sailed the South China Sea from Hong Kong to Singapore, armed with M16 machine guns and incendiary rockets to ward off pirates.
In the 1980s she settled at Frome in Somerset, and after a successful cancer operation went to recuperate at her son’s home at Freemantle, near Perth, western Australia. At the time of her death, she was working on her autobiography, to be called Born A Hooker.
Lois Maxwell is survived by her daughter and son.
RIP, Miss Moneypenny.
RIP. Thanks for your contribution to society. :^)
amen to that!
Farewell, Miss Moneypenny. You were a charmer.
Prayers for her family and friends. My being female, Moneypenny was my favorite female James Bond movie character.
I agree.
RIP
Not to the people who work on my floor.
Moneypenny, and Q “Lewellen” were always my favorite charecters in James Bond- Farewell, and God Bless their families!
"You Only Live Twice"
God's grace, Lois Maxwell
Thanks for the post. I read this to my husband. We loved Miss Moneypenny.
God bless and comfort her family.
What a gal!
RIP.
I like trenchant Right-wing opinions.
Always an adventurous woman, she held a pilot’s licence, regularly went on safari and in the 1980s sailed the South China Sea from Hong Kong to Singapore, armed with M16 machine guns and incendiary rockets to ward off pirates.
I admire women who carry machine guns and rockets to ward off pirates.
Penny, R.I.P.
She later wrote a column for the Toronto Sun which she signed “Moneypenny” and in which, for 14 years, she expounded trenchant Right-wing opinions.
I like trenchant Right-wing opinions.
Always an adventurous woman, she held a pilot’s licence, regularly went on safari and in the 1980s sailed the South China Sea from Hong Kong to Singapore, armed with M16 machine guns and incendiary rockets to ward off pirates.
I admire women who carry machine guns and rockets to ward off pirates.
now that’s a aphrodesiac
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.