May Day is a character in the James Bond film A View to a Kill, played by actress and singer Grace Jones.

May Day on top of James Bond.

Biography: May Day is the henchman and lover of Max Zorin. She is portrayed as the head of an all-female group of guards for Zorin. She also has superhuman strength; in one scene, she lifts a man over her head with no apparent effort.

Early in the film, she kills Bond’s French contact using a poisoned stage prop. Bond then goes on a chase to try to track her down. She first climbs the Eiffel Tower, with Bond in pursuit, and then parachutes from the structure. Bond then tries to follow her in a car, but she eventually gets away.

May Day and Bond next encounter one another at Zorin’s horse farm during his annual thoroughbred sale. The two share an intimate evening, but shortly afterwards, she kills Bond’s MI6 companion Sir Godfrey Tibbett while he is taking a Rolls-Royce through a car wash, and then collaborates with Zorin to try to drown Bond in the car.

She is one of a select few henchmen to switch sides during a Bond film; others include (arguably) Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and (unquestionably) Jaws in Moonraker. The switch comes after Zorin floods a mine near Silicon Valley which he is using in his scheme to destroy the region, thereby cornering the market in microchips. Bond and companion Stacey Sutton try to escape the mine, with May Day in pursuit; Sutton gets away, but Bond and May Day fall into the floodwaters.

Once the waters start to subside, the two wind up together again, and see the bodies of some of her colleagues. She is angry at Zorin, and is more than willing to help Bond foil Zorin’s plan. The pair then go to a fault where Zorin has set a bomb whose detonation would cause a massive earthquake that would lead to the flooding of Silicon Valley. She uses her strength to lower Bond to the bomb, lift Bond and the bomb back to the surface, and put the bomb on a handcar to send it out of the mine on an existing railroad line. However, the brakes on the car malfunction and unexpectedly activate. May Day realises that the bomb can only be removed from the mine if she stays on the car and holds the brakes open. Bond tries to get her to jump and save herself, but she tells Bond about the brake problem. Her last words to Bond are “Get Zorin for me!”

As Zorin and his remaining henchmen are sitting in an airship over San Francisco Bay, looking at the culmination of their plan, they suddenly see May Day exiting the mine with the bomb. Zorin suddenly exclaims “May Day!”, and the camera then changes to focus on her giving Zorin a defiant stare. The bomb then explodes, killing her, but heroically foiling Zorin’s plan.

See also:

• Bond girls
• Bond henchmen