‘Like a velvet whisper’: Nikki van der Zyl – The Voice of James Bond's Women

This article explores the career of voice actress Nikki van der Zyl (1935–2021), who dubbed many of the early ‘Bond girls’. The article takes van der Zyl's re-voicing work on the Bond films as a starting point to highlight some of the methodological challenges involved in researching the history of voice artists – a group of film workers who are doubly invisible in so far as they are neither seen on screen nor are they usually credited. To that end the article considers the contexts and reasons for the re-voicing of performers in films and explores both the archival and anecdotal sources that document van der Zyl's contribution to the Bond films. It argues that the re-voicing of the early ‘Bond girls’ can be seen as a form of ‘cultural ventriloquism’ where the overlaying of the same voice onto actresses of different nationalities creates a uniform cultural identity.