Tracy Bond

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Bond character

Tracy Bond
Gender	Female
Role	Bond girl
Affiliation	Wife of James Bond
Current status	Deceased
Portrayed by	Diana Rigg

Tracy Bond (born Teresa Draco, aka Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo) is a fictional character in the James Bond film and novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service (OHMSS). To date she is the only cinematic Bond girl to officially marry secret agent Commander James Bond, though Bond would later marry again in John Gardner's Scorpius. In the film version of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Tracy was played by actress Diana Rigg.

[edit] Biography

Born Teresa Draco in 1943, she is the child of Marc-Ange Draco, the head of "The Union Corse", a powerful international Mafia crime syndicate – not quite as large as SPECTRE, but with substantially larger "legal" operations, including Draco Construction. Teresa goes by "Tracy" because she feels "Teresa" is too grand. (As she once said, "Teresa is a saint; I'm known as Tracy.")

Teresa was the only daughter of Marc-Ange Draco and his English-born wife, who had met him while he was hiding out from the authorities in Corsica. Tracy's mother died when Teresa was 12; her father then sent her to a boarding school in Switzerland. Deprived of a stable home life, Teresa joined the "international fast set", committing "one scandal after another"; when Draco cut off her allowance, Teresa committed "a greater folly" out of spite. She later married Italian Count Giulio di Vicenzo who, during their marriage, got ahold of a large portion of her money before eventually leaving her; he subsequently died while driving a Maserati in the company of one of his mistresses. During this marriage, Teresa had a child, who later died of spinal meningitis.

Tracy (Diana Rigg) shortly after her wedding.

Desperate with grief for her child, Tracy attempted suicide by jumping into the sea, to be saved by James Bond. Her father pleaded with Bond to continue to see her, claiming that their relationship had changed her for the better. Bond initially refused, but he changed his mind when Marc-Ange offered his resources for anything Bond desired. Since the events of Thunderball and the demise of SPECTRE, Bond had been hunting for Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and at one point was willing to retire from MI6 because he felt the hunt was folly and that his services and abilities could be used better. Using Draco's resources, however, Bond was able to track Blofeld to Switzerland. In return, Bond continued to see Tracy and eventually fell in love with her. They married, but Tracy was murdered on their wedding day in a drive-by shooting. In the novel, Blofeld fires an automatic weapon from his car killing Tracy, who is at the wheel of her Lancia Aurelia, with Bond in the passenger seat. In the film, Bond and Tracy leave their wedding in his Aston Martin DBS and stop to remove flowers from the car. A Mercedes 600 drives past with Blofeld at the wheel, and Irma Bunt in the back. She fires the gun which kills Tracy, who is shot through the Aston Martin's windscreen.

[edit] Film mentions

The follow up film, Diamonds Are Forever, has James Bond tracking Blofeld in the pre-title credits sequence, but it is only assumed Bond is doing so to avenge Tracy's murder, as she is never mentioned. Originally, it had been planned that On Her Majesty's Secret Service would end with Bond and Tracy driving away from their wedding. The scenes where she was shot were filmed at the same time with the intention that they would form the pre-title sequence of Diamonds Are Forever. However, when George Lazenby declined to return as Bond, this was rendered unviable, as it would have meant either having two actors play Bond in Diamonds Are Forever or re-filming Tracy's death scene with the new actor as Bond, so the scenes were added to the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Subsequent films refer the fact that Bond was previously married, but only rarely:

In The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bond meets Anya Amasova in the Mujava Club bar, in Cairo, Egypt, he recites a few facts about his life, including that he had been married only once and that his wife was killed. Bond's eyes briefly glaze over and he then quickly changes the subject; Anya recognises and comments upon Bond's unexpected sensitivity regarding his marriage; this was the first reference in one of Roger Moore's films.
In For Your Eyes Only, after the gun barrel intro, Bond lays flowers at Tracy's grave (in an English churchyard) before boarding a helicopter which Blofeld has booby-trapped. It is in this sequence that Bond ultimately avenges his wife's murder, by impaling an uncredited Blofeld's wheelchair with one of the helicopter's skids and eventually dropping him (wheelchair and all) down a tall industrial chimney. The headstone clearly reads: "TERESA BOND, 1943-1969, Beloved Wife of JAMES BOND, We have all the time in the World" – referring to the final words in OHMSS and the Louis Armstrong song.
In Licence to Kill, after Felix Leiter's wedding, Felix's new wife Della throws her garter at Bond, teasing him, "the one who catches this is the next one to...!" Bond looks visibly pained; when Della asks Felix about it, Felix makes a short, sad reference to Bond once having been married, "but that was a long time ago."
In GoldenEye, Alec Trevelyan asks Bond if he has "found forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for the dead ones you failed to protect?" Although the statement could refer to several women in Bond's past, Tracy is obviously the most prominent woman he has "failed to protect."
In The World Is Not Enough, Elektra King (whose father has been killed in the pre-credits sequence) asks Bond whether he has ever lost a loved one. Bond appears uncomfortable and does not answer the question, continuing with a different line of conversation. It is possible to interpret this as a reference instead to the death in the previous film (Tomorrow Never Dies) of his former lover Paris Carver, especially for younger fans in the much-expanded audience for the Pierce Brosnan Bond films.