Tiffany Case

Background

In the novel her father, embittered that she was not a boy, gave her mother a thousand dollars and a powder case from Tiffany's and walked out; the film instead says she was named for her accidental premature birth at Tiffany & Co while her parents chose wedding bands, leading Bond to joke that she was lucky it was not Van Cleef & Arpels. Fleming's Tiffany works for the Spangled Mob, taking orders from a telephone voice known only as "A B C", really Jack Spang, keeping watch on couriers who carry diamonds from Europe to the United States and dealing blackjack at the Tiara, the Las Vegas casino owned by his brother Seraffimo.

Bond, posing as a petty crook, uses her as his gateway into the pipeline; Felix Leiter tells him she was gang-raped as a teenager and hates men, yet she is attracted to Bond, turns against the Spangs, is kidnapped by Wint and Kidd on the Queen Elizabeth and rescued by him. They live together briefly, but by From Russia, with Love she has returned to America with a military officer.

The 1971 film reworks her as a small-time smuggler unwittingly working for Blofeld and SPECTRE. Bond, posing as the gangster Peter Franks, arranges a partnership to investigate Blofeld's scheme while the henchmen Mr Wint and Mr Kidd eliminate every link in the smuggling chain; after they kill Plenty O'Toole by mistaking her for Tiffany, she helps Bond follow the diamonds to Blofeld. She hires a red Ford Mustang Mach 1 to leave Las Vegas with the stones, and the film ends with the couple on a romantic cruise, foiling a last attempt by Wint and Kidd and wondering how to get the diamonds back from Blofeld's non-functional satellite.

Boel Ulfsdotter argues that the hardworking, independent woman of the novel was watered down on screen, partly by the addition of Plenty O'Toole.