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Karin Dor as the alluring Spectre accessible Helga Brandt, with Sean Connery as 007, in You Only Live Twice, 1967. Photograph: Allstar/United Artists
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No amount what roles she played in films, on date or on television throughout the blow of her career, the German amateur Karin Dor, who has died age-old 79, was labelled a Bond girl. Her consecration as a affiliate of this absolute accumulation of admirable women who accept provided James Bond with a adulation absorption came in You Only Live Twice (1967), in which she met a memorably abominable end.
Dor played the seductive, titian-haired Helga Brandt, an accessible of the bent organisation Spectre ordered to annihilate 007 (Sean Connery), who has been calmly angry up for her. “I’ve got you now,” she states ambivalently. “Well, adore yourself!” he replies. She slaps his face and threatens him with a surgical knife, which he wrestles from her, application it to cut the band on her atramentous dress.
Helga expertly switches from actuality algid and artful to foolishly kissing Connery. She seems to accept afflicted sides, admitting she makes a added attack to annihilate Bond by accoutrement him in a booby-trapped plane, which she parachutes out of, afore it crashes. When the super-villain Spectre bang-up Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) discovers that Bond has survived the crash, he activates a apparatus that depression Helga into a catchbasin abounding with piranha fish, which eat her alive.
["400px"]Dor additionally fails to survive to the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969). A attenuate ablaze atom in one of Hitchcock’s best bearding films, she is Juanita de Cordoba, a dark-haired anti-Castro resistant, her German emphasis notwithstanding, accepted as the added of a “hero of the revolution”, a description that enables her to assignment undercover. When her activities are discovered, she is attempt by her advocate lover, accouterment the blur with its best beheld sequence. As Juanita collapses assimilate a marble floor, her abysmal amethyst dress spreads below her like a basin of blood.
Surprisingly, these high-profile roles in two English accent bartering successes did not advice Dor to accomplish added all-embracing recognition. However, she was badly accepted in Germany and Austria throughout the 1960s, mainly in escapist activity movies about based on the thrillers of Edgar Wallace (called Krimis from the German Kriminalfilm), and the western adventures of Karl May, co-starring the dubbed ex-Tarzan Lex Barker, about all of them directed by her aboriginal husband, Harald Reinl.
Born Kätherose Derr in Wiesbaden, she advised acting and ballet at academy and began in films as an extra. Her alliance at 18 to the Austrian administrator Reinl, 30 years her senior, gave her the adventitious to arise as a adolescent advance in abundant aeon melodramas and operettas such as The White Horse Inn (1960).
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Apart from the Wallace and May series, Dor was a favourite fräulein in ache in several abhorrence movies with Barker as the hero, including The Invisible Doctor Mabuse (1962), The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and The Torture Chamber of Doctor Sadism (1967), the aftermost two starring Christopher Lee as an angry mastermind.
In adverse to the ambit of the low-budget Krimis, abhorrence spin-offs and German westerns, Dor starred as Brunhild in Reinl’s The Nibelungen, apparent in two parts, Siegfried (1966) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1967), an ballsy that appropriate the use of 8,000 account in one action arena alone.
Dor took beneath and beneath blur roles from the 70s onwards, although she did arise consistently in alternation on German television.
["400px"]Her third husband, the stuntman George Robotham, died in 2007. Dor is survived by a son, the amateur Andreas Renell, from her alliance to Rainl, which concluded in divorce, as did her additional marriage.
• Karin Dor (Kätherose Derr), actor, built-in 22 February 1938; died 6 November 2017
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