Grace Jones
(Mayday)

Name: Grace Jones
Character: Mayday
Movie: A View To A Kill
Date of Birth: 19/05/48
Place of Birth: Spanishtown Jamaica

Perhaps the most outrageous henchwoman in any Bond movie, A View To A Kill's Mayday (played by singer/actress Grace Jones) is one tough cookie.

After assassinating Bond's contact, she makes a dramatic escape by skydiving from the Eiffel Tower, only to be betrayed by her lover, the scheming Max Zorin. Joining forces with 007, she gives her life to stop Zorin's planned earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

Most memorable quote:
Bond: I see you're a woman of very few words.
May Day: What's there to say.

Biography

Born into a family of Jamaican ministers, statuesque and strikingly beautiful Grace Jones broke from family tradition when she moved to Syracuse, New York, and began seeking out work as a model. Gaining fame as the cover girl for such with-it publications as Vogue and Elle, Jones briefly moved into acting in 1973. She was far more successful as a "funk singer" on the pop-music scene, scoring the first of many hits with her 1976 album Portfolio. A darling of the disco scene, she wowed her fans with her outrageous stage appearances, sharing space with wild animals and wilder props. Returning to films in the early 1980s, Grace Jones ignited the screen with her vitriolic, sexually ambivalent characterizations in such actioners as Conan the Destroyer (1984) and A View to a Kill (1985), and more recently in Boomerang (1992).

"Every time Grace saw me [on the set of 1985's A View To A Kill]," recalls Bond regular Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), "she would grab me and just pick me up until I thought my ribs would crack." And what if the 5'9" Jones, doesn't like you? Audiences won't forget the bear hug that Jones, as a dominatrix assassin named May Day, administered to Moore-as-Bond. The Jamaican-born disco singer and model boasts that her character is "the first to put the woman on top." But since her heyday as May Day, Jones, who lives in New York City and Paris with Mourad Castelno, an Algerian-Spanish writer and actor, has been stymied by casting directors who, she says, "think I'd be too strong for a part." Her dream role? "I think I'd make a terrific Norma Desmond in an updated Sunset Boulevard." While she waits, she is concentrating on her music - her single "Sex Drive" was a No. 1 dance club hit in 1993 -- and recently went to Disneyland Paris with Paulo, her son by a former lover, French art director Jean Paul Goude.