Karin Dor: German actress who gained fame as a Bond villain

German actress ​Karin Dor, who has died aged 79, was best known for her role as a glamorous assassin tasked with killing secret agent James Bond in You Only Live Twice. But aside from her fame as a “Bond girl”, she had a long and successful career in the worlds of film, television and theatre in her native Germany and around the world.

​Dor was born Kätherose Derr in Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, in 1938. At school her focus was on acting and ballet. She began her movie career early, aged just 17, in the drama Rosen-Resli (The Rose-Girl Resli) in 1954. The film’s director, Austrian Harald Reinl, became her first husband.

Through the late 1950s she was cast in a number of films in the persona of the ingenue in peril. She went on to work in more sophisticated roles in films based on the stories of Karl May and Edgar Wallace, often directed by her husband. Her first international film appearance was in 1965's The Face of Fu Manchu, an Anglo-German production, in which she plays Maria Muller, kidnapped by the eponymous villain, played by Christopher Lee.

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Dor reached huge audiences in the 1967 Bond classic You Only Live Twice, written by Roald Dahl and directed by Lewis Gilbert. She starred as the beautiful, red-haired assassin ordered to kill Bond, played by Sean Connery. Her character, Helga Brandt (alias Number 11), was predictably unsuccessful against the durable 007. She was rewarded for her failure by being dropped into a pool of piranhas by Bond’s archenemy, Ernst Blofeld.

Around the same time Alfred Hitchcock was looking to cast for 1969’s Topaz, his most expensive film, with a budget of some $4m. Luckily for Dor, the director’s previous film, Torn Curtain – which featured the pricier talents of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews – had left him keen to use lesser-known actors.

Hitchcock hired Dor to play double agent Juanita de Cordoba in this Cold War story, a re-imagining of the events leading up to the Cuban missile crisis. In another dramatic death scene her character was shot in the back and falls to the floor, with her purple dress pooling around her like blood. Hitchcock later said: “Although it was a death scene, I wanted it to look very beautiful.”

During the late 1980s and 1990s Dor lived in America with her third husband, the American stuntman and actor George Robotham, who died in 2007.

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Her last television roles were in two adaptations of Rosamunde Pilcher’s novels in 1997 and 2000. In 2006 she starred in the film Ich bin die Andere (I Am the Other Woman), and in 2008 performed in the theatre production Man lebt nur dreimal (You only love thrice), a piece written specifically for her, hinting at her earlier Bond girl moment and her three marriages.

In a German television interview she confessed that it was “her” Bond who remained her favourite “I prefer Connery to [Daniel] Craig, as he had a warmer charisma and more humour in his eyes.”

Kätherose Derr (Karin Dor), born 22 February 1938, died 6 November 2017