The Bond girl Triple X, Barbara Bach, didn’t require saving from the spy who cherished her.
Rather than that, she was searching for her rock and roll hero, Sir Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr.
At the height of her career, 75-year-old Bach—a model and actor—played the love interest and possible rival of Roger Moore’s womanizing 007 agent, James Bond, in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me.
Bach called Bond “a chauvinist pig who uses girls to shield him against bullets,” according to a People article from 1983.
Moore concurred, saying in a People interview that year—1973, the year he starred in his first Bond movie, Live and Let Die—that “Bond, like myself, is a male chauvinist pig.” I’ve spent my entire life attempting to free women from their underwear and brassieres.
Bach had appearances in Italian films before shooting The Spy Who Loved Me. She costarred in Black Belly of the Tarantula, an Italian murder-mystery from 1971, with two other Bond Girls, Claudine Auger from Thunderball (1965) and Barbara Bouchet from Casino Royale (1967).
Bach’s iconic portrayal as a Bond girl cemented her status as a fan favorite and launched her acting career.
She starred in Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy, a 1980 Robert Downey Sr. film, as Major Anya Amasova, a fictional figure part of the KGB. She also costarred in the 1981 slapstick comedy Caveman alongside Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long, and the now-82-year-old Ringo Starr.
Starr portrays a lustful Neanderthal who eventually dumps Bach’s character Lana in favor of a different partner.
Nothing in the screenplay is a true reflection of what actually transpired.
The two met while traveling to the Mexican filming location for Caveman from the Los Angeles airport.
Bach, who was included in a 1981 Playboy picture (according to People), claimed, “A lot of garbage has been written about us, none of it interesting.” Actually, our time together didn’t begin until the very end of Caveman. While at work, we got along well, but we each had our own buddies. Then it just happened in the final week of filming, a week later. From being in friendly love, to being in love, we transformed.
In an interview with the Irish Examiner in 2021, the legendary member of The Beatles raved about his wife, whom he wed almost forty years prior.
“I adore the female. Since the day I spotted her at LAX in 1980, I have adored her. We happened to be heading to Mexico for the same movie—she was at the airport with a boyfriend, and I was checking in. And that’s exactly what transpired,” Star said. All I can say is that I’m grateful that she’s in my life.
Ringo Starr, drummer for The Beatles, and Barbara Bach, former Bond girl, have been inseparable since their 1981 wedding. They have a blended family, with Starr having three children with Maureen Cox and Bach having two with her former husband, Augusto Gregorini.