If you are old enough to remember the movie, 10, then you likely remember one of the most famous bathing suit scenes of all time. It was the breakthrough movie for Bo Derek, and she gained millions of fans in a moment.
It’s hard to believe that the movie was filmed back in 1979, and for many of us, Bo Derek has been frozen in time since then. In reality, however, she has continued to grow and change as an actress, and she is still around today.
The woman that we know as Bo Derek was born Mary Cathleen Collins. Her mother worked for a Swedish-American actress, so she was able to get a foothold in Hollywood from a young age. Thanks to that start, Bo had an agent by the time she was 16 and landed a role in the movie, Once Upon a Love.
While shooting that movie, she met the man who would eventually become her husband, John Derek. They fell in love, despite the fact that she was 17 and he was 47 at the time. That was scandalous, but when you also consider that John Derek was married to Linda Evans at the time, it became even more scandalous.
John divorced his wife not long after that. Later, Bo would give an interview in 2016, in which she said: “I was at least halfway responsible for some serious pain she (Linda Evans) went through. She’d been very gracious and kind … And I just saw her yesterday, funny enough. We were at a jewelry trunk show for charity. And she was just as fabulous and wonderful as ever. I always feel like sh*t when I’m around her. It’s just ingrained, years later.”
John was running the risk of being arrested in the United States because Bo was a minor at the time. They went to Europe and Mexico so they didn’t have the age of consent laws that existed in California. In 1976, they were married in Las Vegas when she was 19 and he was 49.
It wasn’t long after they were married that her career was on fire. In the movie 10, she became known as one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood.
She said: “It was the tail end of the 1970s and everything was fluffy, and I’m blond, and … What are you going to do to look different? John had always thought that that would be a good look for me, just for photography—he’s a great photographer. And we tried it. And he said, ‘Why don’t you take these pictures into Blake and see if he’ll go for it. It would be really good for the part, so you don’t look ordinary.”
She appeared in a number of other films after 10, including: Tarzan, The Ape Man (1981), Bolero (1984) and Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990). None of those movies did well at the box office.
More recently, she has been a political activist and has supported the Republican Party, including George W Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 elections. She voted for Barack Obama but says she doesn’t support any party at this time.
Bo also loves horses and has written an autobiography, Riding Lessons: Everything That Matters in Life I Learned from Horses.
These days, she is also married, since August 2021 to her current husband, John Corbett. They seem to be very happy together.