After a record six-year gap following Timothy Dalton’s Licence To Kill, Pierce Brosnan ’s GoldenEye – which is on ITV this afternoon – rebooted the James Bond franchise for a post-Cold War world. The 007 movie’s femme fatale was set to be Xenia Onatopp, a Georgian fighter pilot and henchwoman to Sean Bean’s villain Alec Trevelyan. In 1994, Courteney Cox was offered the role but turned it down due to her scheduling conflicts filming Friends.
Yet it wasn’t long before GoldenEye director Martin Campbell spotted his Xenia in Famke Janssen after seeing her early rushes for 1995’s Lord of Illusions. The actress signed on to play the Bond girl, but later admitted she nearly had a heart attack reading in the script how her character killed her victims: by asphyxiating them between her thighs. Nevertheless, the future X-Men star threw herself into the part, even breaking a rib during the sauna fight scene with Brosnan.
It turns out Janssen had insisted that the Bond star run her into the wall as hard as he could believing the walls to be padded. Janssen even performed some of her own driving stunts in the opening car chase between Bond’s Aston Martin and Onatopp’s Ferrari. However, following GoldenEye’s release, the actress seriously struggled with being thrust into the Hollywood limelight.
Speaking previously with The Independent , the 59-year-old admitted: “The Bond movie dictated a lot of my relationship with the press...
honestly, after GoldenEye, I felt li.