Why An Unknown Australian Actress Emerged as My First Role Model
When I was in high school, we had a writing assignment during our study of Dante’s Inferno. We were to compile an essay about who we would choose as our personal guide through hell and why. Naturally, I chose my first role model, Cassandra Harris.
“Who is that?” you ask? In the words of her husband, actor Pierce Brosnan, she was “a woman who reinvented herself.”
A glimpse into the evolution of Cassandra Harris’ life paints a picture of a young girl who came of age on the crystalline shores of Avalon Beach, Australia, following the cessation of the second world war. She was exuberant, sensitive, and always straddling the line between imagination and real life. At one point, childhood friends would recount her presence through the stories she would tell about her aristocratic mother. This turned out to be only partially true; the German baron she spoke of was actually her fifth great-grandfather (on her mother’s side).
Ironically, her career as an actress years later would be highlighted by her visage against another paradisal seaboard — the shores of Corfu, Greece — just moments after posing as a countess in a nearby casino. That role, of course, was of Bond girl Countess Lisl opposite Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only.
