It's a dull Saturday afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio, and young Halle Berry is flipping through the TV stations. She's bored in the deep, almost desolate way that 8-and 9-year-olds get bored--but something on the screen grabs her attention. A blond in a white bikini is rising from the sea. There's a knife in her white-leather belt. Suddenly the afternoon isn't dull anymore. A local channel is showing the first James Bond film, Dr. No, from 1962. "I remember that bikini coming out of the water and thinking how beautiful Ursula Andress was," Berry says. "I thought, 'Wow! Wouldn't it be great to be like her?'"
Berry's memory of her first Bond moment might seem suspicious, even a p.r. flack's invention, if the same image weren't frozen in the minds of millions of other 007 fans. But when you're an Oscar winner and one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood, fantasies have a way of coming true. Berry gets to live hers out on an April afternoon in Cadiz, Spain. Wearing a fluorescent orange bikini, she slips off her flip-flops, adjusts the white-leather knife belt slung low around her hips, wades about 10 yards out into the shallows of the Atlantic and turns back toward the beach. "And action!" director Lee Tamahori calls through a megaphone. Berry dips under the surface, pops back up, runs her hands through her hair, then sashays toward shore, her wet skin glistening in the sunlight. Tamahori asks her to do it again. And again. Then he has her swim toward the camera. "And action!" Cut, action, cut, action, one final "Cut!"--and the set bursts into applause.
When Berry comes out of the water, her teeth are chattering. The locals say April was never this frigid, this windy--"Nunca," they insist, never--until the week she had to pretend the icy Atlantic was the bath-warm Gulf of Mexico and shoot Scene 102, her big entrance as Jinx, the mysterious assassin in the new Bond film Die Another Day.
That the Bond Girl rising from the sea is the reigning Oscar queen says plenty about the staying power of the understated British spy whom Ian Fleming created 50 years ago. Though Fleming's 14th and last Bond book was published 36 years ago--two years after his death--his character launched the most successful franchise in film history. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary with the release this month of the 20th official Bond film, the series has come roaring back from its midlife crisis of the 1980s. The past three outings, all starring Pierce Brosnan, have together grossed more than $1 billion at the box office. If the story lines were not always coherent, at least the action was reliably high octane, the stunts spectacular, the women lovely (and increasingly lethal) and the hero an island of imperturbable British cool amid the mayhem. In the Irish Brosnan, with his nimble brow and arch half-smiles, the franchise has found its most persuasive Bond since Scotsman Sean Connery. Decades of critics have asked when the superspy will mothball the tux and retire. Yet Berry speaks for a lot of post--cold war babies when she says, "Bond is still so sexy and so cool."