Maud Adams (Rollerball) Rollerball
Maud Adams arrived on the Rollerball set in 1974 directly off The Man with the Golden Gun — the Bond film that introduced her to international audiences as Andrea Anders, Scaramanga's mistress. She was twenty-nine, six years into her acting career and a decade past the Stockholm modeling agency that had sent her to Eileen Ford in New York. She is the only actress to have played two major Bond girls — Andrea Anders (1974) and the title role in Octopussy (1983) — and Rollerball is the role between the two Bonds that explains what kind of actress she could be when not framed as a Bond-girl mystery.
From Luleå to the Ford Agency
Maud Solveig Christina Wikström was born February 12, 1945, in Luleå, in the far north of Sweden, the daughter of a tax inspector. She trained as an interpreter (she speaks five languages) before being discovered in 1963 by a photographer who submitted her photograph to Miss Sweden. The modeling career took off through Paris and New York, where she joined Eileen Ford and became one of the highest-paid models of the late 1960s. Her first film was The Boys in the Band (1970) — a non-speaking appearance as a photo-shoot model — and her first speaking role was as the love interest in The Christian Licorice Store (1971).
The Bond films
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) cast Adams opposite Christopher Lee's Scaramanga as Andrea Anders, the assassin's enslaved mistress who eventually betrays him to James Bond and is killed for it. Albert R. Broccoli liked her enough that he brought her back nine years later as the title character in Octopussy (1983) — a smuggler, jewel thief, and circus impresario operating outside the Cold War game.
"Bond was the door, but I was always trying to find the parts the door wasn't going to give me. The interesting work between Golden Gun and Octopussy is what I had to look for. The Bond films opened agents' doors but they shut casting directors' minds." — Maud Adams, MI6 HQ (interview, 2003)
Ella is the part between the two Bonds
In Rollerball, Adams plays Ella — Jonathan's former wife, the corporate gift Jonathan demands as a concession and the corporation finally produces. Her two scenes (b28 and b29) carry the film's most explicit corporate sales pitch and its most explicit delivery of the death-match rules.
She enters the ranch "counting your scars,"b28 describes her new life — a city-engineer husband in Rome, a son, two cats, a place in the Alps — and delivers the corporate position in its cleanest, most domestic form:
"All they want is a kind of incidental control over just a part of our lives... they have control economically and politically, but they also provide." — Ella, in b28
Jonathan responds, "Them privileges just buy us off," and Ella does not contradict him. She is not making the argument; she is reporting it. In the second scene she tells him the next game will be played with no substitutions and no time limit, and Jonathan asks the question that names what she is: "You my big reward?"b29 She admits she was sent to convince him to quit, and she also admits it is not why she came.
"Ella is the hardest scene in the film for the actress to play. The character has been managed — has been kept by the corporation for years — and the actress has to keep both the management and the residue of the marriage on the same face. Adams does it with very little dialogue and almost no movement. The scene is essentially one extended close-up against Caan's, and the film moves only because she does not." — Andrew Nette, Substack (2025)
The casting is structurally important. Mackie and Daphne — the two corporate-supplied companions earlier in the film — are played by actresses of similar look (Pamela Hensley and Barbara Trentham), as if the corporation had a single specification. Ella looks different, sounds different, is treated by the camera differently. The corporation cannot rotate Ella in and out. She is the one woman in the film who has a history with Jonathan, and the corporation has nonetheless taken her.
After Rollerball
Adams worked steadily through the 1970s and 1980s — The Killer Force (1976), Tattoo (1981), Octopussy (1983), Jane and the Lost City (1987) — and largely retreated from acting in the 1990s. She has worked as a producer (the documentary Bond Girls Are Forever) and lectured on her Bond career. She lives in Los Angeles.
"She is one of the very few Bond actresses whose career outside Bond is more interesting than her career inside it. Rollerball and Tattoo are the two pieces of work that say what she can do when the script lets her." — Empire, retrospective feature (2018)