Ursula Andress celebrating her 70th birthday

Photo: Ursula Andress, surrounded by TV crews, on board the Royal Yacht Britannia celebrating her 70th birthday in 2006 in Edinburgh.

Ursula Andress as Bond girl Honey Ryder in Dr. No

The Swiss actress Ursula Andress was voted top film siren by men according to a poll by Radio Times, famous as the Bond girl Honey Ryder in the James Bond movie ‘Dr. No’. A poll of 2,000 people voted for their favorite and the top 50 film sirens, spanning over 75 years of cinema, was conducted by Radio Times, the result of which was declared on 6 April 2010. Interestingly, women voted in favor of Audrey Hepburn, famous for her role as the sophisticated Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Andress became world famous as the shell diver Honey Ryder, the center of desire of James Bond (Sean Connery) in Dr. No (1962), the first Bond movie, based on the 1958 Ian Fleming novel of the same name. In a memorable scene, she rises out of the Caribbean Sea in a white bikini (see photo above). The scene made Andress the ‘quintessential’ Bond girl.

"My entrance in the film wearing the bikini on that beautiful beach made me world famous as the Bond girl", she said. The bikini from this ‘classic moment in cinema and Bond history’ was sold for £35,000 at auction in 2001. In 2003, in a UK Survey by Channel 4, her entrance in Dr. No was voted #1 in ‘the 100 Greatest Sexy Moments’. In 2007, Australian series 20 to 1 ranked her entrance in Dr. No as the #2 Sexiest Movie Moment.

Also, Andress won a 1964 Golden Globe award for New Star of the Year for her performance in Dr. No.

Barry Norman, the film reviewer, said, “You seem to have a penchant for naughty girls, women who play hookers: Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and, of course – top of the heap – Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, although in the demure age in which it was made, just before the Swinging Sixties got under way, the nature of her profession couldn’t be specified… In fact there could easily have been a fourth – the Oscar-winning Jane Fonda in Klute, but instead you chose her for Barbarella and, as an impressionable young man who interviewed her in Rome in 1967 when she was actually wearing that erotic costume, I can well understand why. It was an unnerving experience, as you can imagine. I didn’t know where to look never mind what to say. As interviews go, it was a washout. Memorable, though.”

Mata Hari: the legend and cultural influences

Image: Mata Hari postcard

A number of postcards/view cards and art items popularizing Mata Hari became a fashion. Immediately after her execution by the French, questions rose about the justification of her execution. The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent, using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers fired the popular imagination, and made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale.

The Hollywood film, Mata Hari (1931) starring Greta Garbo in the lead role, became the greatest hit of Garbo’s career and the top grosser of MGM that year. The film, though based loosely on real events in the life of Margaretha Zelle, who became famous with her stage name Mata Hari, the plot was largely fictional that appealed to the public appetite for fantasy at the expense of historical facts. The exciting and romantic character in this film, Mata Hari, inspired subsequent generations of storytellers. Consequently, Mata Hari was featured in more films, television stories, and in video games. Many books have been written about Mata Hari, some of them being serious historical and biographical accounts, but many others were highly speculative, deviating too far from the real life of Mata Hari.

There is a very popular statue of Mata Hari in Leeuwarden, the place where she was born in The Netherlands.