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.

Tracy Draco weds James Bond in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’.

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.

Teresa Draco and James Bond.

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:

• In The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bond meets Anya Amasova in the Mujava Club bar, she recites a few facts from memory about his life, including that he had been married only once and that his wife was killed. Bond quickly changes the subject; Anya recognises and comments upon Bond’s unexpected sensitivity regarding his marriage.
• In For Your Eyes Only, after the gun barrel sequence, Bond lays flowers at her grave (in an English churchyard) before boarding a helicopter that Blofeld has booby-trapped. It’s actually in this sequence where Bond ultimately gets revenge for his wife’s murder, by impaling an uncredited Blofeld’s wheelchair on one of the helicopter’s skids and eventually dropping him (wheelchair and all) down a tall industrial smokestack. The headstone clearly reads: “TERESA BOND 1943-1969 Beloved Wife of JAMES BOND We have all the time in the World” – referencing his words (the final words of OHMSS) and the Louis Armstrong song. Interestingly, the dates are wrong, as Diana Rigg was born in 1938, so five years have been shaved off her age for the character, and Bond proposes in OHMSS at Christmas 1969, we then see them getting married and her being killed the following spring or summer (1970).
• In Licence to Kill, after Felix Leiter’s wedding, his new wife Della throws her garter at Bond, teasing him, “the one who catches this is the next one to…!” Bond looks visibly pained, and when Della asks Felix about it, Felix makes a short, sad reference to the fact that Bond was married once, “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 save. Bond is obviously upset by Trevelyan’s pointed question.
• 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.

See also:

• Bond girls