Elektra King

James Bond character
Elektra King
Gender	Female
Affiliation	Renard
Status	Deceased
Relatives	Father: Sir Robert King
Role	Bond girl / Villain
Portrayed by	Sophie Marceau

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

Fictional character 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. It is for this reason that Elektra believes her father "stole" the oil reserves that rightfully belonged to her mother's side. 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 Renard's scheme to bilk money from her father, going so far as to mutilate her ear so Renard could send it to Sir Robert as a warning. Years after "surviving" her kidnapping, Elektra secretly collaborates with Renard to blow up her family's oil pipeline. Her motives are to kill her father and seize his oil business, which she believes is rightfully hers. She also holds a personal grudge toward M for influencing Sir Robert's decision not to pay the ransom demands. Elektra and Renard arrange an attack on MI6's London office hoping to kill her father and M. The attack is only partly successful, as M survives. 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 threatens 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... Dive! Bond-

(Bond shoots Elektra dead)

Bond: I never miss.

Personality

Elektra tortures James Bond

Elektra at first gives the impression of being a charitable person 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 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. She is proven wrong when Bond shoots her dead. 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 was a subordinate of Ernst Stavro Blofeld).^[1] 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. Bond initially believes that her collaboration with Renard is due to Stockholm syndrome, but it appears to go a lot further than that. She also displays signs of claustrophobia when caught in a envelopping balloon protecting her and Bond from an avalanche.

Similarities to other Bond films

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

• Femme fatale

References