Tania Mallet
Model and actress best known as Tilly Masterson in Goldfinger
TANIA MALLET, who has died aged 77, was a top fashion model of the 1950s and 1960s who achieved wider fame as the Bond girl Tilly Masterson in Goldfinger (1964); but it was to be her only major role.
Many Bond aficionados regard Goldfinger as the best in the series, not least because, in addition to Sean Connery, it featured the unbeatable hat-trick of the fresh-faced Tania Mallet as Tilly, Shirley Eaton as her sister Jill (murdered early on by Auric Goldfinger with a pot of gold paint) and Honor Blackman as the filthily named Pussy Galore.
Tania Mallet’s character is introduced in a dramatic car chase in which Bond in his Aston Martin duels with her Mustang convertible as they speed round blind corners in the Swiss Alps – a sequence that ends with the Mustang’s tyres being destroyed by 007’s extendable tyreshredding device.
Her plans to exact revenge for her sister’s death are rudely interrupted later, however, when she is killed by a razor-rimmed bowler hat dispatched like a Frisbee by Goldfinger’s diminutive sidekick, Oddjob.
Tania Mallet was born in Blackpool on May 19 1941. Her father was a car salesman; her Russian-born mother Olga was a chorus girl. A cousin was the actress Dame Helen Mirren, to whom Tania remained close.
Their grandfather, Pyotr Vassilievich Mironoff, had been sent to Britain in 1917 as an emissary of the Tsar to negotiate an arms deal, only to be stranded with his family by the Russian Revolution. He was reduced to working as a taxi driver.
After leaving school, Tania attended Lucy Clayton’s School of Modelling and began her career aged 16, her beautiful bone structure, inherited from her Russian
ancestors, earning her a place in the top rank. She appeared in Vogue and Harpers & Queen and worked with photographers including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon – and David Bailey, who took a moody 1961 study of her for Vogue in a voluptuous white fur.
Bailey and many other photographers, she recalled, “played a numbers game and believed that if you asked 100 girls to bed, you stood a pretty good chance with 20 of them”. Avedon was, by contrast, “so very, very quiet. Yet he sucks your soul out through your eye sockets, and leaves you utterly drained. I’ve never known anything like it.”
In the early 1960s a photograph of her modelling a bikini was sent to the Bond producer, Cubby Broccoli, and she did a screen test for the role of Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love (1963). The part went to Daniela Bianchi, but a year later she landed the role of Tilly Masterson.
She negotiated her pay of £50 a week to £150. But this was still short of the £1,000-plus she was earning as a model, so the six months she spent filming were a “real sacrifice”. In 1976 she made a brief appearance on television in The New Avengers, but otherwise stuck to modelling.
She later went on tours to Africa and Europe organised by the PR executive David Wynne-morgan to promote British fashions, and in 1990 she joined the over-40s modelling agency Deja Vue, which supplies advertisers targeting the “grey panther” set.
In 1976 Tania Mallet married Simon Radcliffe, who died in 2016. She is survived by his children from a previous marriage.