Wrapped up with Bo
Looking back at movie that made actress a star
With her hair braided into cornrows, and dressed in a near-transparent skin-tone swimsuit, Bo Derek had to film her famous scene from the 1979 sex comedy 10 — a slow-motion run along the beach — three times: once in Mexico and twice in Hawaii. “Run. Go back! Run again,” the director, Blake Edwards, told her. “I hate to run,” Derek later said. “I never, ever run.”
But it remains the scene for which Derek, now 63, is best remembered. Up there with Ursula Andress emerging from the sea or Raquel Welch’s fur bikini, it instantly transformed her into a sex symbol. It’s easy to forget that the scene is actually played for laughs — the fevered daydream of Dudley Moore’s mid-life crisis-stricken composer, framed like a poorly planned commercial for some nose-assaulting cologne. It’s also a sharp commentary on objectification. As soon as Derek’s character becomes a person — not just a body ogled from across the beach — Moore’s loses interest.
10 was a $75-million hit, and Derek’s brazen nudity was big news.
Derek was just 22 at the time, but already four years into her marriage with John Derek, an actor, photographer and director 30 years her senior. Her husband did as much to craft her sex bomb image as that scene in 10: he suggested the braids and swimsuit; he shot her for Playboy, and went on to direct her in censor-baiting soft-core films.
Bo, then known as Mary Cathleen Collins, was just 16 when she first auditioned for John. He told her that to make his film — shot in Greece in 1973, and eventually released as Fantasies in 1981 — she’d have to drop out of school. “It took me about two seconds to make that decision,” she said. She began an affair with John, who was then married to the actress Linda Evans. John and Bo stayed in Europe to avoid statutory rape laws, before returning to the U.S., married, when she was 18.
The relationship, which seems especially grubby in 2020, was controversial even at the time, and not helped by such skin-crawling comments as “I don’t like her fat, so I tell her,” as John said to People in 1980. “He’s very critical,” Bo once told Johnny Carson. “If I don’t look good one day, we don’t have a very good day, usually.” Bo has defended the dynamic of their relationship, denying she was a “puppet” and saying “he admired strong women, always did.” They remained together until John’s death in 1998.
10 has stood the test of time. As one critic said in 1979: “This is the sort of classical Hollywood comedy that will still look good in 30 years.” Warner Bros. recently announced a remake with original co-star Julie Andrews as executive producer.