Spy Girls
It's not just in the world of online slots that female spies are big. Some of the most effective agents of all time have been women, and that's been reflected in Hollywood and on TV. These are the female agents that went big on the Silver Screen.
We look at the most famous Spy Girls in the movies.
The Top 5 Female Spies
1. Anne Parillaud
As Nikita Taylor, in La Femme Nikita (1990)
Nikita, played by Anne Parillaud, skips jail on an agreement to become a spy and assassin.
She's a young drug addict who kills a policeman while robbing a chemists.
The French government gives her a new ID, and trains her up as a violent spy.
Her first contract is a foreign diplomat - she assassinates him, after which she "graduates" and starts life as a female agent in Paris with her boyfriend Marco.
Keeping her new identity secret from her fiancé becomes too much to bear in the end, and the film is as much about this emotional torture as her life as a spy.
2. Naomi Watts
Plays Valerie Plame in Fair Game (2010).
Naomi Watts and Sean Penn star in a gripping spy thriller based on the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame in the build up to the Iraq war. While a CIA agent, she worked undercover in dangerous territory. Then her true identity was leaked by KArl Rove to the Washington Post in 2003.
She had found intelligence that showed Iraq had no nuclear weapons programme, a political time bomb at the time.
It’s a fascinating story, not least because it’s very close to the truth in its way of painting a picture of what a spy actually does, but also in how it portrays the chaos in Plame Wilson’s life after her secret identity is made public for political reasons.
She was attacked in public and her family were put at risk, the live of her young twins.
Her friends felt betrayed, and she became increasingly isolated, and the film does a pretty good job in charting the nightmare that her life becomes when it veers out of her control.
3. Tang Wei
Plays Wong Chia Chi, in Lust, Caution
Lust, Caution is a spy thriller set in Shanghai in the 1940s during World War 2.
A young Chinese woman gets sucked in to a high stakes game of politics, power and espionage with a powerful politician, Mr. Yee.
The director, Ang Lee won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for Lust Caution (following his other success with Brokeback).
The movie is based based on events that took place during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. The film courted quite a bit of controversy, as it contains some explicit sex scenes- it was rated NC-17 in the US.
In a some countries, such as China and India, many of the sex scenes were cut before the film could be released.
The film was shown uncut in Hong Kong and Taiwan and eventually in Singapore. Tang Wei was chosen from more than 10,000 actresses to appear in Lust, Caution (2007).
The movie also stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Joan Chen, and Leehom Wang.
4. Cate Blanchett
Plays Charlotte, in Charlotte Gray
The story of a young Scottish woman who joins the French Resistance during WW II to save her RAF boyfriend who is lost in France.
This is a 2001 British–Australian–German production directed by Gillian Armstrong and based on the novel by Sebastian Faulks.
The action takes place in Nazi occupied France and stars Cate Blanchett, James Fleet, Abigail Cruttenden, Rupert Penry-Jones and Billy Crudup.
Charlotte Gray is loosely based on female spies such as Pearl Cornioley, Nancy Wake, Odette Sansom and Violette Szabo.
5: Diana Rigg. Mrs Peel
Emma Peel was one of the first strong sassy female characters to hit the screens in the sixties. This was ground breaking stuff in its day.
The sassy spy was played by Diana Rigg in the British TV series The Avengers.
Mrs Peel was also played by Uma Thurman in the 1998 movie.
