Barbara Bach, who played Bond girl Triple X, wasn’t needing to be rescued from the spy who loved her.
Instead she was looking for her knight in shining armor – her rocker husband, Sir Richard Starkey, better known as Ringo Starr.
Now 75, Bach, an actor and model, was at the pinnacle of her career with her appearance in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, where she played the love interest, and potential adversary, to the womanizing 007 agent, James Bond played by Roger Moore.
According to a 1983 story in People, Bach referred to Bond as “a chauvinist pig who uses girls to shield him against bullets.”
Moore agreed and in 1973, the year he starred in his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, he said in an interview with People, “Bond, like myself, is a male chauvinist pig. All my life I’ve been trying to get women out of brassieres and pants.”
Prior to filming The Spy Who Loved Me, Bach had roles in Italian films, one with other Bond Girls–Claudine Auger from Thunderball (1965) and Barbara Bouchet from Casino Royale (1967)– in Black Belly of the Tarantula, a 1971 Italian murder-mystery.
Bach’s starring performance as a Bond girl made the brown-haired beauty an all-time favorite and paved her acting career with gold.
After playing Major Anya Amasova, the fictional character part of the KGB, she had leading roles in Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy, a 1980 film directed by Robert Downey Sr, and in Caveman, a 1981 slapstick comedy where she co-starred with Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long and Ringo Starr, now 82.
Starr plays Neanderthal lusting after Lana, played by Bach, but in the end, he dumps her and choses another mate.
The screenplay in no way reflects what happened in real life.
The pair saw each other at the Los Angeles airport, flying to the set of Caveman, which was filmed in Mexico.
Featured in a 1981 Playboy pictorial (per People), Bach said, “A lot of garbage has been written about us, none of it interesting,” she said. “The truth is, we weren’t together until the very end of Caveman. Working, we got along fine, but we each had other people, our respective friends. Then, all of a sudden, within a week–the last week of shooting–it just happened. We changed from friendly love to being in love.”
Speaking with the Irish Examiner in 2021, The Beatles superstar gushed over his wife, whom he married more than four decades ago.
“I love the woman. I loved her from when I first saw her at LAX in 1980. She was at the airport with a boyfriend and I was at the airport checking in, and we happened to be going to Mexico to do the same movie. And that’s how it happened,” Star recalled. “I’m blessed she’s in my life, that’s all I can ever say.”
