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This week I watched dark comedy LUCKY GRANDMA, starring Tsai Chin as an inscrutable curmudgeonly gambler who makes enemies with the mob. She’s fantastic in it, and I really recommend the film. Why am I telling you this?
Well, Tsai Chin belongs to a select group of Bond women who’ve appeared in more than one movie; firstly as Ling - who memorably gives Sean her very best duck in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE...
...then as Madam Wu in 2006’s CASINO ROYALE. Here she is sniffing her finger in said movie. Sorry. By my reckoning this makes her an actor with one of the longest time periods between first and last appearances in the Bond series (beating even Desmond Llewelyn by approx 3 years).
But there’s another minor character in Royale who’s played by long-time Bond alumni... Diane Hartford is credited as ‘Card Player #3’. She also played the woman James dances with at the Kiss Kiss Club in THUNDERBALL... so I think she may hold the record for longest ‘tenure’.
The only other person who I think can claim a longer tenure is producer Michael G Wilson who first popped up in GOLDFINGER and continues to cameo in each Bond movie (presumably including NO TIME TO DIE), but he’s not strictly speaking an actor. #burn
Anyway, Tsai Chin is 86 years old and absolutely owning it. I can’t stress how great she is in Lucky Grandma (which sees her back at the gambling table, so the Bond vibes linger).
Oh and she also had a brief pop career - here’s The Ding Dong Song, sounding an awful lot like the sort of thing Hong Kong might enter at Eurovision.
