Barbara Bach, who played Bond girl Triple X, wasn’t needing to be rescued from the spy who loved her.
Instead she was looking for her knight in shining armor – her rocker husband, Sir Richard Starkey, better known as Ringo Starr.
Now 75, Bach, an actor and model, was at the pinnacle of her career with her appearance in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, where she played the love interest, and potential adversary, to the womanizing 007 agent, James Bond played by Roger Moore.
According to a 1983 story in People, Bach referred to Bond as “a chauvinist pig who uses girls to shield him against bullets.”
Moore agreed and in 1973, the year he starred in his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, he said in an interview with People, “Bond, like myself, is a male chauvinist pig. All my life I’ve been trying to get women out of brassieres and pants.”
Prior to filming The Spy Who Loved Me, Bach had roles in Italian films, one with other Bond Girls–Claudine Auger from Thunderball (1965) and Barbara Bouchet from Casino Royale (1967)– in Black Belly of the Tarantula, a 1971 Italian murder-mystery.
Bach’s starring performance as a Bond girl made the brown-haired beauty an all-time favorite and paved her acting career with gold.
After playing Major Anya Amasova, the fictional character part of the KGB, she had leading roles in Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy, a 1980 film directed by Robert Downey Sr, and in Caveman, a 1981 slapstick comedy where she co-starred with Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long and Ringo Starr, now 82.
Starr plays Neanderthal lusting after Lana, played by Bach, but in the end, he dumps her and choses another mate.
The screenplay in no way reflects what happened in real life.
The pair saw each other at the Los Angeles airport, flying to the set of Caveman, which was filmed in Mexico.
Featured in a 1981 Playboy pictorial (per People), Bach said, “A lot of garbage has been written about us, none of it interesting,” she said. “The truth is, we weren’t together until the very end of Caveman. Working, we got along fine, but we each had other people, our respective friends. Then, all of a sudden, within a week–the last week of shooting–it just happened. We changed from friendly love to being in love.”
Speaking with the Irish Examiner in 2021, The Beatles superstar gushed over his wife, whom he married more than four decades ago.
“I love the woman. I loved her from when I first saw her at LAX in 1980. She was at the airport with a boyfriend and I was at the airport checking in, and we happened to be going to Mexico to do the same movie. And that’s how it happened,” Star recalled. “I’m blessed she’s in my life, that’s all I can ever say.”
Starr, of supernova stardom, is the drummer for the most influential band of all time, The Beatles. And Bach was in the audience for a Beatles show at New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965, where as part of the Fab Four, he played alongside the late John Lennon and George Harrison, and Paul McCartney.
Bach admits that though she was there, she wasn’t the biggest Beatles fan. She was there with her friend Joe Walsh and her sister Marjorie, who was so wild about the band that she showed up wearing a Beatles wig.
“My sister Marjorie was crazy about the Beatles,” Bach told People in a 1981 interview. “I liked [Bob] Dylan, Ray Charles and the Rolling Stones.”
Marjorie went on and married Walsh, who became the Eagles guitarist in 1975. Walsh also played with his brother-in-law in Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, a live rock supergroup.
Only months after Lennon was killed, Bach and Starr married April 27, 1981 with a guest that included McCartney and Harrison.
The pair have been inseparable since.
Right before the pair wed, they were in a near-fatal crash, where the car they were driving swerved to avoid a truck and rolled over twice before coming to a stop.
Starr said after the accident, “We decided we wouldn’t spend any time apart. So far the longest break was five days, and that was too long. I want to live every minute with Barbara.”
They also entered rehab together in 1988 and have been sober since.
When the adorable couple celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2021, Starr posted a photo from their wedding day–McCartney and Harrison are also in the image–with the captioned, “It was 40 years ago today The love of my life said yes yes yes.”
The pair’s love spreads beyond their blended family–Starr has three kids with late wife Maureen Cox and Bach has two with her former husband, Augusto Gregorini–they also run a charity called The Lotus Foundation. The foundation supports various projects for animals, substance abuse, homelessness and cancer. Starr, also an artist, donates 100 percent of sales to the organization.
There’s no question that if they could, they’d be together “Eight Days a Week.”
“I love the man, and that’s it,” Bach said.
Starr adds, “There’s no escape … I think I love Barbara as much [today] as I did [when we met] – and I’m beyond blessed that she loves me and we’re still together.”
