Barbara Bach's Real Name: Barbara Goldbach

Quick answer: She is known as Barbara Bach. A Library of Congress record citing a published film reference says she was born Barbara Goldbach, and Cinema Scholars says the same. Cinema Scholars and TV Insider both place her birth in Queens, New York, but they give different dates, so the exact date is unresolved. She shortened Goldbach to Bach when she began modeling.

Real name and early life

Cinema Scholars says Barbara Goldbach was born in the Rosedale neighborhood of Queens. Her father, Howard, was a New York City police officer of Jewish descent, and her mother, Marjorie, was a homemaker of Irish ancestry. She was the second of four children.

Cinema Scholars gives her birth date as August 28, 1946. TV Insider lists August 27, 1947, and the Library of Congress also uses 1947. The sources disagree on both day and year.

She graduated in 1964 from Dominican Commercial High School, an all-girls Catholic school in Queens. Cinema Scholars says she then started a modeling career using a shortened version of her surname and soon signed with the Eileen Ford agency.

Career highlights

Cinema Scholars says she quickly became one of the most sought-after models of the 1960s, appearing in 1966 on the covers of Seventeen, Vogue, and ELLE France. That year she began a relationship with the Italian businessman Augusto, Count Gregorini di Savignano di Romagna. They married and had two children before divorcing in 1975.

She began acting in Italy. Her first role was in the television miniseries L'Odissea (1968), based on Homer's Odyssey, and she appeared in the thriller Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971).

Her breakout came in 1977, when she starred opposite Roger Moore as the Soviet agent Anya Amasova in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. She followed it with Force 10 from Navarone (1978), alongside Robert Shaw and Harrison Ford. Cinema Scholars says she was considered for Charlie's Angels in 1979, but producers wanted an American actress, not realizing she was born and raised in New York City.

Marriage and charity work

Cinema Scholars says she met Beatles drummer Ringo Starr in 1980 while filming Caveman (1981), and they married in 1981. The couple has been involved in charities including the Self Help Addiction Recovery Program (SHARP) and the Lotus Foundation, which supports social welfare causes.

Name notes for searchers

Bach is a shortened form of her birth surname, Goldbach. The Library of Congress lists Goldbach, Barbara as a variant of her name. Searches for Barbara Goldbach, or for Ringo Starr's wife Barbara, refer to the same actress. She is not related to the composer Johann Sebastian Bach.