Tracy Bond (born Teresa Draco, aka Countess Teresa di Vicenzo) is a character in the James Bond film and novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. 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.
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 says, “Teresa is a saint; I’m known as Tracy.”)
Teresa is the only daughter of 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 she was only 12; her father then sent her to a boarding school in Switzerland. Deprived of a stable home life, Tracy joins the “international fast set”, committing “one scandal after another”; when Draco cuts off her allowance, Tracy commits “a greater folly” out of spite. She later marries Italian Count Giulio di Vicenzo who, during their marriage, gets hold 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, Tracy has a child, who later dies of spinal meningitis.
Desperate with grief for her child, Tracy attempts suicide by jumping into the sea, to be saved by James Bond. Her father pleads with Bond to let him see her, claiming that their relationship has changed her for the better. Bond initially refuses, but he changes his mind when Marc-Ange offered his resources for anything Bond desires. Since the events of Thunderball and the end of SPECTRE, Bond has 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 is able to track Blofeld to Switzerland. In return, Bond continues to see Tracy and eventually falls in love with her. They marry, but Tracy is 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. She is the first and so far, only, Bond girl to ever marry James Bond (Kissy Suzuki and Anya Amasova have otherwise posed as his wives), as well as being one of the few Bond girls (including Vesper Lynd) with whom it was strongly suggested that Bond was actually in love, not including his flirty relationship with Miss Moneypenny, M’s secretary.
Film legacy: The followup 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. This was rendered unviable, as it would have meant either having two actors play Bond in Diamonds Are Forever or refilming 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 vaguely: