Barbara Bach

Barbara Bach (born Barbara Goldbach) is an American actress and model known as the Bond girl from the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). She is married to musician Ringo Starr of The Beatles fame.

Bach was born in Rosedale, New York, the daughter of Marjorie and Howard I. Goldbach, a policeman. The eldest of five siblings from a family of mixed European heritages, her mother being Irish Catholic, her father was Austrian Jewish and her grandmother Romanian. She attended a Catholic high school, Dominican Commercial, in Jamaica, Queens. Bach left school at age 16 to become a model, quickly rising to the ranks of top models.

In 1971, Bach co-starred with two other Bond girls, Claudine Auger and Barbara Bouchet in the mystery La Tarantola dal ventre nero (a giallo film) and had small roles in other Italian films.

In 1977, her role as the Russian spy Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me gained her recognition as an international sex symbol. Although her character Anya is seen as the first Bond girl who is an equal to Bond, since she is also an experienced spy, Bach still walked away from the film saying that Bond is "a chauvinist pig who uses girls to shield him against bullets." The following year she appeared in the movie Force 10 from Navarone. She lost a role to actress Shelley Hack when she auditioned for the television series Charlie's Angels. Bach has 28 films to her credit. She has not worked as an actress since the mid-1980s. She appeared in Playboy several times, from 1977 to 1981, in 1985, and in 2008.

PERSONAL LIFE

Bach met Italian businessman Augusto Gregorini on a flight to Rome in 1966. They were married in 1968 and moved to Italy where they had a daughter, singer-songwriter Francesca Gregorini (born August 7, 1968) and a son Gianni (born in 1972). In 1975, Bach separated from Gregorini and moved back to the United States with her two children.

Bach met Ringo Starr on the set of the film Caveman in February 1980, and they were married on April 27, 1981, a few weeks after the film's release. In recent years Bach has accompanied Starr on his tours and has appeared on some of Ringo's music videos, playing on some of his songs.

Bach holds a master's degree (UCLA, 1993) in psychology. She started the Self Help Addiction Recovery Program (S.H.A.R.P.) with the help of George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd, the former wife of both Harrison and Clapton. Bach and Starr created The Lotus Foundation, a charity with many sub-charities.

Joe Walsh, guitarist with the band, the Eagles, married Barbara Bach's sister, Marjorie Bach, in Los Angeles on December 13, 2008.