Britt Ekland says ‘Bond girls had more fun’ in her day

James Bond star Britt Ekland thinks Bond girls “had more fun” in her time, saying “political correctness” now plays too much of a role.

But the actress – who played Mary Goodnight opposite Sir Roger Moore in The Man With The Golden Gun – said intimacy coaches, now common on film sets, would have made work less “tough” in the ’70s.

The Swedish star, 80, explained: “There are no more Bond girls, they are Bond women today.

“With the political correctness and the #MeToo, they have a much better time than we had.

“But I don’t think that the end product is as fun as ours was, because we were pretty and we had good bodies and we didn’t try to look sexy, we just were.

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“Today, everything is so, ‘Don’t do that because that will upset that side’…

“We just went out there, we were always in a bikini and all these [other] people are fully dressed, very typical, but it was a job and we did it.

“I think today the Bond women [are], from a political correctness point of view, in a much better position. But I think we had more fun.”

Speaking ahead of 50th-anniversary cinema screenings of her 1973 film The Wicker Man on Wednesday, Britt also recalled learning she was pregnant with her second child on the set of the horror classic in Scotland.

She said: “It was very tough. This was the early 1970s and we didn’t have the kind of facilities that we have today, catering and people taking care of you.

“We certainly didn’t have…an intimacy coach – someone who I think is in the room when you do scenes of a sexual nature.

“We had nothing, we just had to make do, and it was not filmed in a studio, it was filmed in actual rooms and buildings. There were no regulations in those days…

“Maybe today it’s over-regulated – I don’t know because I haven’t done a movie for a long time.”

Asked whether Hollywood has evolved after #MeToo, Britt clarified: “Put it this way, it has changed a little bit but not that much.”

Of Sir Roger, who died in 2017 aged 89, she said: “He was a fabulous person. He was a real people person and I’m a people person.”

But Bond film producer Cubby Broccoli told Britt: “You’ve got to eat more” after she arrived on set in 1974 “with a baby” – her son Nicolai with record producer Lou Adler – “and no boobies”.

She added: “I [was] trying to not eat because I had to be in a bikini all the time, so we were two forces.”