It’s hard to say the phrase “Bond girl” without rolling your eyes. After all, so many of the women who populated the James Bond films of the early 1960s and 1970s were interchangeable: questionably young ingénues with ridiculous names (Kissy Suzuki, Tiffany Case, Plenty O’Toole, Holly Goodhead) who bedded our hero, were promptly killed by some cat-stroking criminal mastermind, and then were forgotten about.
However, there have also been some who defied those limitations—courageous allies and adversaries who proved that they’d never be in need of rescuing—and, thankfully, they’ve grown in number over the last two decades.
Now, with Amazon’s acquisition of the franchise and its future hanging in the balance—not to mention the recent Bond tribute at the 2025 Oscars, which had viewers wondering if Margaret Qualley could soon be entering the fold—we present the 14 most memorable Bond women in cinematic history.