URSULA ANDRESS |
Before the opening of "Dr. No", Ursula Andress was almost
completely unknown, yet within two weeks of the opening she was
being commonly labeled "the most beautiful girl in the world". By
the end of the year she was also labeled "the most photographed
girl in the world."
Previous frenzies in celebrity chasing had been sparked by romantic sensations - Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton when making "Cleopatra" - but here was a married woman just going about her business, and photographers could not get enough of her. Their fervour was due partly to genuine public interest in this blindingly beautiful woman, and partly because Ursula's face was so well shaped that it was almost impossible to photograph her badly. Any picture, no matter how hurriedly taken, would find a buyer; and buyers there certainly were because Ursula had never bothered to assemble a portfolio of photographs for distribution to magazine editors.
Ursula Andress was born in Berne in Switzerland in 1936, and arrived in America in the mid 1950s via Rome, where she had appeared on a few magazine covers and allegedly had also appeared in three "skin" movies.
In Hollywood, she was given a starlet's contract with Paramount and gained some publicity by being seen and photographed with James Dean. In "Past Imperfect" Joan Collins, a not ungenerous raconteur, describes Ursula as "a gorgeous starlet . . . She had a fabulous body and the shortest haircut I had ever seen." Not long after, Ursula married the Hollywood "pretty-boy" actor John Derek, whose career was about to stall.
As Ursula admitted, prior to the opening of "Dr. No", to a young journalist named
Michael Parkinson, she had then led a lazy, self-indulgent life, not making any attempt to further
her career, casually traveling the world. On such a trip to Greece, John Derek had taken photographs of his wife, and one had been published in a magazine.
The photograph was seen by Harry Saltzman, co-producer of the first James Bond film, which was scheduled to start shooting within a few weeks even though the female lead had not yet been cast. One glance at the picture was enough. Ursula was offered the part.
Harry Saltzman was not the only one impressed. United Artists, the distributors, saw Ursula's potential and hired the renowned Bunny Yeager to photograph her on location in Jamaica. Yeager had been a pin-up girl herself before moving behind the camera, and the results she achieved with Ursula still impress today. That time in Jamaica is the only occasion Ursula has set aside a lengthy period for publicity photographs. Even now, most of the pictures of her in libraries or on Internet web-sites are either from the "Dr. No" location or are 'impromptu' shots of her in public.
"Dr. No" was a stunning success, bringing enormous fame to the main participants and converting Ursula overnight into a star. The movie world was suddenly at her feet, but did this previously lazy young woman want a movie career?
At first Ursula did work, sadly in poor films, but she did not try to create a consistent public image. Because wherever she went, photographs were being taken of her and published in newspapers and magazines, publicity itself was unnecessary. However other film stars in her position of extreme public interest tried to marshal that interest into acceptance of a particular image. Sophia Loren for example, at that time a huge star, was hammering home an image of herself as a struggling girl from a very poor background who still had not achieved happiness - and therefore was deserving of public sympathy - because she was having difficulty bearing children. Ursula seemed uninterested in creating an image.
Although Ursula was offered a large number of film projects in
the mid 1960s, she chose her movies carelessly, apparently
more interested in the location than the screenplay, possibly
with a view to tax avoidance. She admitted in one interview
that Terence Young, her "Dr. No" director, was constantly
telephoning her with film offers. The result was movies that
pleased very few people and which today are mainly
forgotten.
In April 1965 "Playboy" published some photographs of Ursula taken by John Derek. The pictures were very stylish but they removed the mystery from the magnificent body which, in a white bikini, had so startled the world in "Dr. No". Now, instead of being this magical creature of unbelievable beauty, Ursula Andress was just another girl who had paraded her wares in "Playboy".
In the late 1960s Ursula left her husband and started a much-publicised relationship with Jean-Paul Belmondo which ran for several years. There was also considerable press gossip about Marcello Mastroianni's attachment to her.
The combination of her poor movies and the pictures in "Playboy" caused people to lose interest in Ursula's work, and she became merely another celebrity who sold magazines rather than cinema tickets, and who was famous for being a celebrity, not for doing anything worthwhile or interesting.
Paradoxically, as public interest in her film work was waning, Ursula was becoming a more professional actress. She was particularly good playing a hedonistic bitch in "The Blue Max". Unassisted by the screenplay, Ursula made her character recognisably human while still making clear she was a pampered adultress devoid of a moral code. Stanley Baker, her co-star in "Perfect Friday" and a man not normally well disposed towards glamour girls, admitted that he was pleasantly surprised by Ursula's disciplined approach to her work. However in that film Ursula had scenes in bed with Baker which further robbed her of any mystery and which speeded the decline of her career.
"Perfect Friday"
was the last film Ursula made which has been given a general release in English
speaking countries. Since then Ursula has maintained her career only by
making a series of shoddy movies in obscure locations. She has not worked consistently;
sometime she has gone several years between films and then made three of four
in quick succession. In recent years she has also worked in television.
All the evidence suggests that Ursula simply did not take her film career seriously, and felt that other things were far more important. No-one can criticise her for that, but it does mean that the movies were denied a great star, who might have done work that lived on for decades or more.
Ursula Andress remains an icon, and is one of the great classical beauties of the twentieth century, firmly in the pantheon of awe-inspiring faces alongside Marlene Dietrich, Maureen O'Hara and Ava Gardner. However, as far as working in the movies is concerned, she should be seen as the opposite of Claudia Cardinale. Unlike Cardinale, Ursula Andress has almost no films which stand the test of time, and unlike Cardinale she diminished her box office potency by disrobing in both magazines and movies.
Nevertheless, when fifty years, one hundred years from now, a compilation of film clips portraying idealised womanhood is assembled, then, along with Greta Garbo staring into space at the end of "Queen Christina", Rita Hayworth tormenting Glenn Ford to the strains of "Put The Blame On Mame", and Lauren Bacall asking Bogart if he knows how to whistle, Ursula Andress will be coming out of the sea in "Dr.No."