Margaret Nolan, a stage and film actress whose gold-painted body was used as a screen for the opening credits of the James Bond film “Goldfinger” and who played the character Dink in the film, died on October 5th at her home in Belfast Park , London. She was 76 years old.
The cause was cancer, said her son Oscar Deeks.
In a career that predominantly took place in the 1960s and 1970s, Ms. Nolan appeared in numerous BBC television productions and in films, including “No Sex Please, We’re Brits” (1973) and “Carry On Girls” (1973).
She also appeared in A Hard Day’s Night (1964), the musical comedy with the Beatles. And she played an uncredited role as “Grandfather’s Girl at Casino”, according to IMDb, the entertainment database.
But it was the first title sequence from “Goldfinger” (1964) that was projected onto Ms. Nolan’s body as if it were a screen that brought her fame.
“Pressed into a gold leather bikini, her skin was the same shimmering hue. The statuesque starlet Margaret Nolan (41-23-37) paused while scenes from the recently completed James Bond film ‘Goldfinger’ were projected onto her curves. ” The New York Times reported on the shoot in 2005, which it described as “long and meticulous”.
The title sequence of the film was a special exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012-13.
In an archived version of her official website, Ms. Nolan described how she was “unexpectedly brought into the limelight” by film when she was just 20 years old.
The filmmakers wanted her to be the body for the title sequence, but she only agreed to that if she was given a role in the film. She ended up playing a masseuse named Dink who made brief appearances with James Bond, played by Sean Connery.
Ms. Nolan’s character in “Goldfinger” should not be confused with the character who is painted entirely in gold and dies of “congestion”. This character, Jill Masterson, was played by Shirley Eaton. (This scene also led to false reports that the actress died from the effects of the paint while filming.)
Ms. Nolan turned down a two-year contract to release the film because she said it would be difficult for her to live that attention and she wanted to be taken seriously as an actress.
“As it turned out, I couldn’t” live it out “anyway and still get regular fan mail from Bond fans!” She wrote.
Margaret Ann Nolan was born on October 29, 1943 in Hampstead, London. Her father, Jack Nolan, was an army employee, and her mother, Molly, was a psychiatric nurse. Her mother moved the family to Waterford, Ireland during World War II until it ended.
The family returned to Hampstead in 1946 and Ms. Nolan was training to be a teacher when she met her first husband, Tom Kempinski, who was then an actor at the National Theater.
“He convinced me that I could be an actress,” she wrote.
She quit acting in the late 1980s to focus on household chores and looking after her two sons. In the early 1990s she moved to Andalusia, Spain, where she started drawing and painting.
Her marriage to Mr. Kempinski ended in divorce, as did a second marriage to Mike O’Sullivan. In addition to her son, Ms. Nolan survives another son, Luke O’Sullivan, and a sister, Geraldine Ross.
She began making photomontages of some of her earlier portraits and had her work shown in exhibitions. She also became politically active in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, said Mr Deeks.
She developed a passion for permaculture, a movement that was coined in the mid-1970s as the Portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. In her farmhouse in Spain, she lived on the electricity grid and relied on solar energy, said Deeks.
Director Edgar Wright said on Twitter that Ms. Nolan played a small role in his upcoming film “Last Night in Soho”. He described her as being in the middle of a Venn diagram of “everything cool in the 60s” after she appeared with the Beatles and in the Bond movie.
She returned to the big screen for “The Power of Three” (2011), an independent, low-budget film that she described as a feel-good comedy that reinvents the myth of the Middle Ages.
In a 2012 interview with Site Playerist, she was asked whether she wanted to escape glamor or embrace it and use it.
“I absolutely embraced it when I could when I was glamorous,” she said. “You don’t take it any further – that’s pathetic. It was only part of being young and beautiful. “
Alain Delaquérière contributed to the research.
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