R.I.P. Moneypenny

(Image found n'yah.)

Lois Maxwell, longtime might-have-been of Agent 007, died over the weekend at age 80:

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."