Barbara Carrera

By Ken Hall

Barbara Carrera is sometimes referred to as "the most beautiful Bond girl" for her role as the mesmerizing lethal assassin "Fatima Blush" in the 1983 movie Never Say Never Again. It was a role that would earn her a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

There's no doubting Carrera's stunning good looks. The movie critic Leonard Maltin once described her as a "feline, olive-skinned and almond-eyed ex-model whose cool dark looks make her ideally suited to play seductive villainesses or exotic damsels."

And, while her beauty has thrust her into mostly ornamental roles in action and genre fare, Carrera is not all style and no substance. She has traveled the world and mastered five languages, enjoying in the process successful careers in fashion modeling and film. She was born in Nicaragua and educated at an American convent.

Carrera is also a serious artist, one whose work has been showcased since the 1980's at Makk Galleries in Beverly Hills, Calif., and the Roy Miles Gallery in London, England. Recently, she enjoyed a two-month solo exhibition at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum in Hollywood, Calif.

The exhibition featured Hollywood Legends, Carrera's series of larger-than-life portraits of 22 film icons. Many were inspired by her personal associations with some of the actors she's worked with over the years, greats like Bette Davis, Rock Hudson, Paul Newman and Sean Connery.

The others are recognizable film stars from the past, names such as Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Grace Kelly.

The paintings, which took Carrera three years to complete, are sizeable. Most are 30" x 40" and are all oil on canvas. "I'd like to sell them as a complete set, preferably to a museum, a film studio or a fine restaurant," she said. "I really don't want to break them up into single sales."

When she decided to undertake the Hollywood Legends series, Carrera was faced with a challenge common to many portrait artists. 'I wanted to capture each subject's inner beauty as well as their outer charisma," she said. "In each instance, I strove to capture the soul through the eyes."

It wasn't always easy. "Greta Garbo was my most resistant subject," Carrera said. "She was almost mask-like, with eyes that didn't reveal anything, like a doll. I put the portrait aside for a long time and finally said, 'Greta, I'm going to paint you whether you like it or not, so you might as well cooperate."

Again, using the eyes as the gateway to the soul, Carrera achieved her goal -- capturing the mystery and allure of the great Garbo in a way that made her look alive and enigmatic, not detached and vacant. "I've always liked drawing faces," Carrera said. "Eyes fascinate me. They reveal a person's inner essence."

Aside from portraits, Carrera also paints landscapes and spiritually insightful images. She is dedicated to daily meditation and draws inspiration for her art from hours of introspection. Her art embraces the cultural influences, landscapes and people of her life experiences and exotic film locations, from India to Australia, China to Russia, Africa to South America.

Barbara Carrera was born in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1951. Her father was a diplomat working at the American embassy in Managua, her mother a young Nicaraguan woman (who now lives in Florida). Carrera dropped her father's name, Kingsbury, in favor of her mother's maiden name when she started modeling at age 17.

It was her father's decision to send young Barbara to finishing school in the United States, at the young age of 10. For five years she took lessons at a convent in Memphis, not to become a nun but for the value of a superior education. Art was an interest, but music took up more of her study time.

"I dabbled in watercolors back then," she said, "and I was always drawing faces, but I was committed to learning the piano so I would only draw or paint as a lark." She left the convent at 15 with the intention of enrolling at the Sorbonne in Paris. But she never registered for school.

"I resisted wanting to study," she explained. "Even with art, I became interested in painting and working with oils, but I thought there were rules for mixing the colors so I was afraid of it. I also didn't want to learn someone else's way. I wanted my art to emerge naturally out of me."

It was her Indian guru who encouraged Carrera to finally set aside her fears and "just do it." Her early efforts were raw and mystical. "I was mixing colors every which way, very indiscriminately," Carrera said. "Everything had a colorful, illustrative look. The Nautilus shell was a recurring theme." The works were exhibited at a California gallery under the show title "Metamorphosis."

A second exhibition, an extension of the "Metamorphosis" show, took place at a gallery in London. Again, it was all quite mystical, but lucrative, too. "There was this one painting with Elvis in a strange context, and it sold right away," Carrera said. "The pieces sold quite well, actually."

But a breakthrough came when Carrera met someone who did restorative art at various museums in England. "Most of what he restored was work by the Old Masters," she said, "and he explained that they always worked from darkness into light. I was fascinated."

Carrera decided then and there to dedicate herself to the Old Masters technique, fueled by the coincidence that the word "guru" is a paste-up of "gu" (meaning darkness) and "ru" (meaning light). "I start with the darkest tones, like sap green and grey, and work outward toward light," she said.

Original works of art by Barbara Carrera generally sell for $8,000 and up. She is also available for portrait commission work. Interested parties may contact her representative, Cheryl Perkey Fine Art in Los Angeles, at (310) 204-2787, or by e-mail at cperkeyfineart@earthlink.net.

Barbara Carrera, who played "Fatima Blush" in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again, stands in front of a portrait she did of Sean Connery, her co-star in the film.

"I've always liked drawing faces," Carrera said. "Eyes fascinate me. They reveal a person's inner essence.

The four portraits on this page are part of Carrera's "Hollywood Legends" series -- 22 oil-on-canvas paintings, most of them 30"x40".