Carey Lowell plays women who are in a hurry and do not much care whether the man keeps up. It made her the most capable woman Bond had been given in years and an assistant district attorney for five seasons; it also kept the offers narrow.
Fi1m perspective
Pam Bouvier does not wait for James Bond. In Licence to Kill (1989) she is a pilot who saves him about as often as he saves her, and Carey Lowell plays her with a hard impatience, as if she had somewhere better to be and he was making her late. It suited Timothy Dalton's sacked, sour Bond better than anything else in that film did, and it is still the thing people mean when they say her name.
She came to acting from modelling, for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren among others, and made her film debut in 1986 in Dangerously Close and Club Paradise. John Glen's Licence to Kill three years later was the break, and it fixed her. She has said that because she did the Bond film she gets offered "a lot of tough-chick-with-big-gun roles", and the film parts that followed were mostly brief or supporting: Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Love Affair (1994), Fierce Creatures (1997). We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here, but none of them is what she is remembered for.
Television gave her the part that is. As Jamie Ross, an assistant district attorney on Law & Order from 1996 to 2001, with returns in 2005 and 2022, she did the thing she does best over a long stretch: authority without shouting, intelligence you can see her using. The producer Dick Wolf cast her for exactly that. A procedural rewards actors who can make a room believe them quickly, and that is her gift.
What we feel about her comes back to Licence to Kill. We went in expecting a decorative part and found ourselves waiting for her scenes, because she was the one person in the film who seemed as fed up as Dalton was, and their shared bad temper was the closest the film came to a relationship. The trouble is that toughness is also all she was hired for. The work is narrow because the offers were, and two roles, a Bond film and a courtroom, carry the whole reputation.
She stepped back from acting in the mid-2000s and turns up now only for the occasional guest part. Since 2021 she has made ceramics under her own name, which, whatever else it is, is not a tough-chick-with-big-gun role.
Biography
Carey Lowell is an American actress and former model. Born in Huntington, New York, she studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder and New York University, and trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.
She began her career as a model before making her acting debut in Club Paradise (1986). Lowell is known for her role as Pam Bouvier in the James Bond film Licence to Kill (1989) and as Assistant District Attorney Jamie Ross in the television series Law & Order (1996–2001, with later guest appearances). Other film credits include Sleepless in Seattle (1993), in which she played Maggie Baldwin, Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Fierce Creatures (1997).
