Her emergence from the sea, bikini-clad, in the first James Bond film,
Dr. No (1962), provided the swinging sixties with its splashy equivalent
of the Birth of Venus; none of her subsequent, multifarious film
appearances has been nearly as memorable. She had appeared in several
racy-for-their-time Italian pictures beginning with 1954's The Loves of
Casanova and has not shown terrific discrimination or talent since. Her
stoic beauty-and the Bond notorietypropelled her career in the 1960s, with
such credits as 4 for Texas, Fun in Acapulco (both 1963, the latter with
Elvis Presley), She, What's New, Pussycat?, The Tenth Victim (all 1965),
The Blue Max (1966), and Casino Royale (1967), but by the 1970s she had
exhausted her appeal and showed little but her epidermis in The Sensuous
Nurse (1976) and Slaves of the Cannibal God (1978). Once married to actor
John Derek (with whom she costarred in 1965's Nightmare in the Sun she met
much younger hunk Harry Hamlin on the set of Clash of the Titans (1981)
and later bore his child. |