The opera singer who bewitched Bond
Eunice Gayson, who has died
aged 90, enjoyed a long, varied
career on stage and film – but
will chiefly be remembered as the first “Bond girl”, said The Independent, and the originator of one of the spy’s most famous lines. Eight minutes into Dr. No, we find 007 sitting at a card table, playing chemin de fer with a beautiful woman. He says to her: “I admire your courage, Miss...?” “Trench, Sylvia Trench,” she replies. “I admire your luck, Mr...?” “Bond,” he says, casually lighting a cigarette as the film’s theme music strikes up. “James Bond.”
In fact, it’s not Gayson speaking those words. Although there was nothing wrong with her voice, her lines – like those of many other female characters in early Bond movies, including Ursula Andress in the same film – were dubbed by the voice actress Nikki van der Zyl. And while Bond may have looked typically calm and collected, Sean Connery was not, said The Daily Telegraph. Indeed, he was so nervous, he kept flunking the now-famous line. Eventually, the director asked Gayson – who’d known Connery for years – to take him for a drink to calm him down, which did the trick. Later in the scene, the pair’s flirtation is interrupted – “just as things were getting interesting” – by a call from MI6. Their lovemaking being cut short by Bond’s work was to become a running joke: a phone call from Miss Moneypenny also puts a stop to their canoodling in From Russia with Love. As well as being the first Bond girl, Gayson was the only one to play the same character in two Bond films. In fact, she was scheduled to appear in six films – until the idea was scotched by Guy Hamilton, the director of Goldfinger.
Eunice Gayson was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a civil servant. The family later moved to Surrey, Glasgow and finally Edinburgh, where she enrolled at the Edinburgh Academy and trained as an opera singer – she was a gifted soprano. She made her stage debut in the West End in 1946, aged 18, and her first film, My Brother Jonathan, in 1948. From the 1950s, she appeared regularly on TV, and in 1958, she played the female lead in Hammer’s The Revenge of Frankenstein. By the time she was cast as Sylvia Trench (having originally been offered the role of Miss Moneypenny), she was starring as the Baroness in the original West End production of The Sound of Music (which ran for more than 2,000 performances). She made her final West End appearance in 1991, in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Gayson was twice married and divorced, and had one daughter, Kate, who had a cameo in the casino scene in the Pierce Brosnan Bond film Goldeneye (1995). Discussing her favourite Bond in 2012, Gayson mused that they all have their “own particular quality”, but “obviously my loyalty is with Sean”.