Elektra King

James Bond character
Elektra King
Gender	Female
Role	Bond girl / Villain
Affiliation	Renard
Current status	Deceased
Portrayed by	Sophie Marceau

Elektra King is a fictional character in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough, played by Sophie Marceau.

History

Elektra is the daughter of oil tycoon Sir Robert King, whose mother's side of the family is of Azeri descent and fled the country immediately after the Soviet Union was established. As Elektra's grandfather had no sons, Sir Robert became the de facto male heir when he married into the family. Elektra was kidnapped by the terrorist Renard and held for ransom, which her father refused to pay the ransom on the advice of family friend (and acting head of MI6) M. Embittered by what she saw as her father's betrayal, Elektra participated in Reynard's scheme to bilk money from her family, going so far as to mutilate her ear so Renard could send it to Robert King as a warning. Bond initially believes her to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome, but may have been blinded by his affection for her.

James Bond and Elektra

Years after "surviving" her kidnapping, Elektra secretly collaborates with Renard to blow up her family's oil pipeline. Her motives are to get revenge on her father as well as M, whom she blames for her father's fateful decision to reject Reynard's ransom. Elektra and Renard arrange an attack on MI6's London office hoping to kill her father and M. The attack is only partially successful, as M survives. Despite being injured, Bond decides to offer his services to protect Elektra, believing that Renard will target her next. To throw off suspicion, Elektra accepts Bond's offer and even becomes his lover. When Renard publicly threatened to destroy the pipeline, however, she shows her true colours and kidnaps M. The pipeline destruction proves to be a diversion to further throw off suspicion to her real plan: contaminating the Bosporus with a nuclear meltdown, forcing oil traders to use her family's pipeline to transport fossil fuel as any other route would require tanker transport across the Bosporus. With her plan minutes away from completion, Elektra places Bond in a torture device designed to break his neck, but Bond gets free with the help of Valentin Zukovsky. Bond chases after Elektra, and during a tense standoff, shoots and kills her.

Last Words: You wouldn't kill me. You'd miss me.

(Bond shoots Elektra dead)

Bond: I never miss.

Personality

Elektra at first gives the impression of being a charitable businesswoman who is using her fortune to aid the third world's poor population. She reveals her true colors to M after believing her attempt to kill Bond has succeeded. For most of the film, Elektra hides her disfigured ear (which would otherwise give her away) behind a large earring. Elektra seems to have developed a taste for torture and masochism during her kidnapping, as she delights in torturing Bond and is perfectly happy to kill him, albeit after "one last screw" (a double entendre, as Bond was then trapped in a torture device featuring a screw-driven rod that would have eventually snapped his neck). She pretends to love Renard, but secretly holds him in contempt and uses sexual favors to manipulate him. Elektra's arrogance proves her undoing, and she disregards Bond's threat to kill her unless she calls off Renard, believing that he will not be able to bring himself to do it. Bond proves her wrong by slaying her with a bullet.

This is only the third occasion in a Bond film that the protagonist kills a woman (the other instances being the killing of Fatima Blush in the non-EON film Never Say Never Again and Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye). Elektra is the first woman to be the main villain of a Bond film (since Rosa Klebb of From Russia with Love is clearly answering to someone else). The director of the film, Michael Apted, explicitly defines her as the main villain of the film in an interview included on the DVD release.

Trivia

King's plan, contaminating a rival institute so that everyone will have to use her own, is similar to Goldfinger's plan to contaminate Fort Knox so that the value of his gold would rise, and to Max Zorin's plan to destroy Silicon Valley in a huge earthquake to overtake the computer chip market, in A View to a Kill.

Henchmen

• Gabor
• Davidov

See also

• John Paul Getty III, wealthy kidnap victim whose ear was amputated by his captors
• Stockholm syndrome
• Goldfinger
• Femme fatale

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