The Oscar-winner was approached by 007 movie bosses to take a turn as a Bond girl in the 2006 film, but she refused.

And Jolie has no regrets about the decision because she was able to fulfil her action ambitions with her own superspy role in new movie Salt.

She tells Britain's Mail on Sunday, "They wanted me to play a Bond girl in Casino Royale. I said, "Actually, I'd prefer to play him; I'd rather be Bond.' It was a joke - kind of. It was an interesting conversation.

"Salt is nothing like Bond. In so many spy films women are femme fatales and we wanted to avoid that. My character doesn't use her sexuality to get anything. It's the roughest I've looked. When we fight, it gets ugly. Somebody breaks my nose in the film. It's not pretty.

"I think when people write things for women - at least with the films I've done in the past, such as Tomb Raider - they're not serious. They're not raw. They're not hard. So when we wanted a real female action hero, we looked towards something that wasn't written for a woman."