Vintage postcard in the Bond Girls series. Maryam d'Abo in The Living Daylights (John Glen, 1987).
English actress Maryam d'Abo (1960) starred as Bond Girl Kara Milovy in The Living Daylights (1987) opposite Timothy Dalton as 007.
Maryam d'Abo was born in London in 1960. She is the daughter of a Georgian mother Nino Kvinitadze and an Anglo-Dutch father Peter Claude Holland d'Abo. She is a cousin of Mike d'Abo, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann's group, whose daughter Olivia d'Abo is also an actress. Maryam was raised in Paris and Geneva. In London, she studied acting at the Drama Centre for a short time and played small roles in film and television from the early 1980s. She also took on theatre roles, including Roxanne in 'Cyrano de Bergerac'. She made her film debut in the British Cult Horror film Xtro (Harry Bromley Davenport, 1983). She played a French au pair, who becomes a human incubator for an alien. D'Abo also appeared in White Nights (Taylor Hackford, 1985) and as a woman pouring champagne to Klaus Maria Brandauer at a hunting party in the Oscar-winning Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985). She starred as Kara Milovy, the sweet and vulnerable Czechoslovakian cellist and would-be sniper who falls for James Bond (Timothy Dalton) in The Living Daylights (John Glen, 1987). As a tie-in, D'Abo posed for both the cover and a photo shoot in Playboy in September 1987, which had a special on Bond Girls in that issue. Even if Her Bond Girl fame did not bring her a lasting breakthrough, she became a busy actress, albeit in less well-known film and television productions. She appeared in The Browning Version (Mike Figgis, 1994) starring Albert Finney and starred in the Science-Fiction film Timelock (Robert Munic, 1996). She also starred in several erotic thrillers such as Tropical Heat (Jag Mundhra, 1993) and Tomcat: Dangerous Desires (Paul Donovan, 1993) with Richard Grieco, and in Horror films such as Immortal Sins (Hervé Hachuel, 1991) and Trespassing (James Merendino, 2004).
Maryam d'Abo reunited with her Bond director John Glen for the action thriller The Point Men (John Glen, 2001) starring Christophe Lambert. In 2002, she released the book 'Bond Girls Are Forever - The Women of James Bond', co-written with John Cork. It contains fifteen interviews with former Bond girls. A television documentary was released the same year, in which D'Abo participated as a producer. On television, she played the mother of Lara (Keira Knightley) in the miniseries Doctor Zhivago (Giacomo Campiotti, 2002), and she was Queen Hecuba in the Emmy-nominated miniseries Helen of Troy (John Kent Harrison, 2003). In 2009, she had a supporting role in the British period fantasy thriller Dorian Gray (Oliver Parker, 2009), based on the novel by Oscar Wilde. D'Abo also appeared in the Indian film Tigers (Danis Tanovic, 2014), the drama Last Words (Jonathan Nossiter, 2020) with Nick Nolte, and the upcoming Horror film The Baby in the Basket (Andy Crane, Nathan Shepka, 2024). In 2003, she married director Hugh Hudson. She played a supporting part in his final film, the biographical Spanish drama Finding Altamira (Hugh Hudson, 2016), about the groundbreaking discovery of Stone Age cave paintings in the Cave of Altamira, and the subsequent controversy by leading religious and scientific figures of the day. The film starring Antonio Banderas was very successful in Spain. The couple remained married until Hudson died in 2023. Maryam d'Abo survived a brain haemorrhage in 2007.
Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch, German and English) and IMDb
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