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.