Claudine Auger, a former Miss France (1958), received her dramatic training at the Paris Drama Conservatory and is best known to US / UK audiences as the stunning brunette “Domino” opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond thriller Thunderball(1965), She has kept fairly busy since her Bond days, acting in a number of Italian, French and Spanish films including The Bermuda Triangle (1978), Credo (1983), and La bocca (1990).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: firehouse44@hotmail.com (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymoous)

Beautiful Claudine Auger is best known for her role as Dominique Derval opposite Sean Connery’s James Bond in “Thunderball” in 1965.   She was born in 1941 in Paris.   She also starred with Christopher Plummer and Romy Schneider in “Triple Cross”.

IMDB entry:

Claudine Auger, a former Miss France (1958), received her dramatic training at the Paris Drama Conservatory and is best known to US / UK audiences as the stunning brunette “Domino” opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond thriller Thunderball(1965), She has kept fairly busy since her Bond days, acting in a number of Italian, French and Spanish films including The Bermuda Triangle (1978), Credo (1983), and La bocca (1990).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: firehouse44@hotmail.com (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymoous)

IMDB entry:

Former Miss France (1958), dramatically trained at the Paris Drama Conservatory and best known to US / UK audiences as the stunning brunette “Domino” opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond thriller Thunderball (1965). Has kept fairly busy since her Bond days, acting in a mixture of Italian, French and Spanish film productions includingThe Bermuda Triangle (1978), Credo (1983), and La bocca (1990).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: firehouse44@hotmail.com

Claudine Auger obituary in Daily Telegraph in Dec 2019.

Claudine Auger, who has died in Paris aged 78, will be best remembered as Domino Derval, Sean Connery’s love interest in Thunderball (1965), and as the first Frenchwoman to play a “Bond girl”, preceding Eva Green, Léa Seydoux and others.

Although she had achieved a certain profile by finishing runner-up in the 1958 Miss World contest, Claudine Auger’s dramatic experience had been confined to a few small parts on the stage and in the cinema when she landed the role of Domino.

She was said to have been noticed while swimming on holiday in the Bahamas by Kevin McClory, the screenwriter who had the rights to what became Thunderball. He had previously developed the story with Ian Fleming and, following legal wrangles, it was slated to be shot by Terence Young as the fourth James Bond film.

The mercurial McClory had yet to find an actress to play Domino, “a wilful, high-tempered, sensual girl” in Fleming’s description, the mistress of the villain Emilio Largo, Raquel Welch having eluded the producers.

With her auburn hair and beauty spot, Claudine Auger caught the eye, not least as she swam well and about a quarter of the picture consisted of underwater
scenes.

Indeed, she seemed to spend most of her time in Thunderball and in publicity photos clad in wetsuits and low-cut bikinis which showed off her figure to advantage, even if the role itself was underwritten and her lines dubbed. The part, originally intended to be Italian, had been reworked to make “Dominique” French.

Claudine Auger gamely told reporters that, at 23, she had no problem being courted by older men such as Bond, since her husband was rather her senior. She also agreed to do a semi-nude shoot for Playboy to mark the film’s release.

Huit, whose films included Shéhérazade with Anna Karina in the title role.

Claudine appeared in Le Masque de Fer The Man in the Iron Mask (1962) and the following year she appeared in the Italian fantasy film Kali Yug: Goddess of Vengeance, alongside Klaus Kinski and the former Tarzan actor Lex Barker.

After Thunderball, Terence Young picked her again for Triple Cross (1966), the story of the safebreaker-turned-double agent Eddie Chapman, starring The Sound of Music’s Christopher Plummer. Claudine Auger also featured in a Bing Crosby “Road” television special that year.

Thereafter she found steady work in European cinema, particularly in Italy. She appeared in films by such noted directors as Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Nanny Loy, even if they were not their best efforts, and if the standard of them gradually declined.

In 1968, she and her fellow Bond Girl Ursula Andress were in the sex comedy Le dolci signore, with Virna Lisi, and in 1971 she played opposite Barbara Bach in one of the slew of Italian horror films of the period or gialli – The Black Belly of the Tarantula.

Claudine Auger was seen in another 20 roles over the next two decades, often in increasingly exploitative fare. Among her last appearances on the screen, however, was that in the Sherlock Holmes television episode “The Three Gables” (1994) with Jeremy Brett.

After the end of her first marriage, she was the companion in the 1970s of the director Jacques Deray, whose films included Borsalino (1970).

She later married a British businessman, Peter Brent, and a fortnight before her 50th birthday gave birth to their daughter. Brent died in 2008