Actress/model Lois Chiles

Texas native Lois Chiles began the seventies as a model and ended the decade as an actress. She became a Bond girl in a James Bond movie that, without the influence of George Lucas, likely would never have been made.

The Bond movie in question was Moonraker, a 1979 Bond movie using space colonization as its theme, which was conceived as an answer to Star Wars.  Lois Chiles played  Dr. Holly Goodhead, an American astronaut and NASA scientist who proved to be Bond's intellectual match - the influence of feminism. :-)   She had a knack at the time for playing headstrong women.  In the 1978 Agatha Christie movie Death On the Nile, her character was so headstrong she gave practically everyone on an Egyptian river cruise a motive to kill her - and so became the story's murder victim.

Family matters that required Lois Chiles to take time off from acting, not the so-called "Bond girl" curse, diminished her star power in the early eighties, but she gave favorable performances in late-eighties movies such as Sweet Liberty (1986) and Broadcast News (1987).  She also made guest appearances on numerous TV shows.

Fun fact:  Her uncle Eddie Chiles was an oil tycoon who also owned the Texas Rangers baseball team from 1980 to 1989.