Karin Dor
Actress who played Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice
KARIN DOR, the actress, who has died aged 79, was largely confined to playing wideeyed ingénues before breaking out as tempestuous leading lady in crime thrillers and horrors; it was, however, her role as the Bond Girl Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice (1967) which made her a household name.
She was born Kätherose Derr in Wiesbaden, Germany, on February 22 1938. While still at ballet school she was spotted by a talent scout and offered a series of bit parts in films. She soon drew attention from directors and producers, including Harald Reinl, who cast her in a series of films under his direction. In 1954, aged 16, she married Reinl who was 30 years her senior.
By the following year, she had earned enough credibility to be billed above the title for the tense drama, As Long as You Live (1955).
In the 1960s Karin Dor shone in the terrifying thriller The Terrible People (1960), followed by Der grüne Bogenschütze (The Green Archer) and Der Fälscher von London (The Forger of London), both based on stories by Edgar Wallace. She supported June Wilkinson in the Fritz Umgelter comedy The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962). Francis Ford Coppola was hired to shoot the sex scenes which were inserted for the film’s US release.
She followed this with a series of lukewarm westerns, directed by Harald Reinl and starring Lex Barker. She joined Barker again in the sci-fi thriller The Invisible Dr Mabuse (1962) and took the lead in The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle (1963), who brands his victims foreheads with a “M” before decapitating them.
In 1964, she played Denise, a pathological serial killer in Room 13. Her positive reviews led her to be cast as a scientist’s daughter menaced by a psychopathic villain (Christopher Lee) in the crime thriller The Face of Fu Manchu (1965).
In her most famous role, as the alluring redhead Helga Brandt (alias Number 11) in You Only Live Twice (1967), Karin Dor managed to pull off a scene which moved, in a matter of minutes, from her threatening to slice off Sean Connery’s face with a scalpel to allowing him to remove her dress with the same implement. She came to a sorry end, however, when her boss, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence), discovering that she has failed to eliminate Bond, has her dropped into a pool of piranha fish.
She followed this with the comedy Dear Caroline (1968), and was reunited with Lex Barker again in the western, The Valley of Death (1968), directed by Harald Reinl, whom she divorced the same year. In 1969 she played Juanita de Cordoba, the Cuban resistance leader, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969), which failed at the box office.
By the 1970s, newly married to the businessman Günther Schmucker, she began to cut back on her acting. They settled in California for a while, where Karin Dor appeared in popular US crime shows, including Ironside and It Takes a Thief.
When their marriage failed after less than two years, she returned to Germany where she began to focus more on television guest roles and made for television films. There were a couple of fleeting attempts to recapture her earlier successes, most notably as the female lead in the thriller, Warhead (1977).
In 1988 she married the US stunt director George Robotham, with whom she shared homes in Los Angeles and Munich.
For the next two decades, she combined her film and television work with appearances on the German stage, her last being Der dressierte Mann, at the Komödie am Bayerischen Hof in Munich in November 2016.
George Robotham died in 2007. She is survived by a son from her first marriage.
Karin Dor, born February 22 1938, died November 8 2017