Margaret Nolan obit

Margaret Nolan obituary

Glamour model and actress who starred in Goldfinger and the Carry On films and epitomised ‘everything cool in the Sixties’

 

She was not on the list.

Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore may have played the ultimate Bond girl in Goldfinger, but the gold-painted body in the opening sequence that became the film’s most enduring image belonged to Margaret Nolan.

It took Nolan and Robert Brownjohn, the art director, three weeks to shoot the two-and-a-half-minute opening credits to the film, in which the face of Sean Connery’s 007 and the typography of the film’s titles were projected on to her gilded and nearly naked silhouette. “On this type of film the only themes to work with are sex or violence. I chose sex,” said Brownjohn.

Nolan, a stage and screen actress whose gold-painted body was used as a canvas to project the opening credits of the James Bond film Goldfinger and who played the character Dink in the movie, has died. She was 76. She died at her home in Belfast Park, London, on October 5th. The cause of death was cancer, said her son Oscar Deeks, who confirmed her death.

In a career that was predominantly in the 1960s and 1970s, Nolan appeared in numerous BBC television productions and in films, including No Sex Please, We’re British (1973) and Carry On Girls (1973). She also appeared in A Hard Day’s Night (1964), the musical comedy featuring the Beatles.

She appeared in an uncredited role as Grandfather’s Girl at Casino, according to the IMDb.com. But it was the opening title sequence of Goldfinger” (1964), which was projected on to Nolan’s body as if it were a screen, that brought her fame.

“Squeezed into a gold leather bikini, her skin painted the same shimmering hue, the statuesque starlet Margaret Nolan (41-23-37) stood still while scenes from the just-finished James Bond movie Goldfinger were projected on to her curves, The New York Times reported in 2005 of the film shoot, which it also described as “long and meticulous”.

The movie’s title sequence went on to be a featured exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012-13. In an archived version of her official website, Nolan described how she was “quite unexpectedly shot into the limelight” by the movie when she was only 20.

The filmmakers wanted her to be the body for the title sequence, but she agreed to do it only if she were given a role in the movie. She ended up playing a masseuse named Dink who appears briefly with James Bond, played by Sean Connery.

Nolan’s character in Goldfinger was not to be confused with the character who is completely painted in gold and dies of “skin suffocation.” That character, Jill Masterson, was played by Shirley Eaton. (That scene also prompted false accounts that the actress had died during the filming as a result of the paint.)

Nolan turned down a two-year contract to publicise the film because she said she would find it difficult to live down such attention and wanted to be taken seriously as an actor. “As it transpired, I couldn’t ‘live it down’ anyway and to this day get regular fan mail from Bond fans!” she wrote.

Margaret Ann Nolan was born in Hampstead, London, on October 29th, 1943. Her father, Jack Nolan, was a clerk in the army, and her mother, Molly, was a psychiatric nurse. Her mother relocated the family to Co Waterford during the second World War, where they stayed until it ended.

 

The family returned in 1946 to Hampstead and Nolan was training to be a teacher when she met her first husband, Tom Kempinski, who was then an actor with the National Theatre. “He convinced me that I could be an actress,” she wrote. She gave up acting in the late 1980s to focus on homemaking and caring for her two sons, Deeks and Luke O’Sullivan, and in the early 1990s moved to Andalusia, Spain, where she took up drawing and painting.

Her first marriage to Kempinski ended in divorce, as did a second marriage to Mike O’Sullivan. She began making photomontages from some of her earlier portraits and had her work featured in exhibitions. She also became politically active in the Workers Revolutionary Party, Deeks said.

She developed a passion for permaculture, a movement coined in the mid-1970s as a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. At her farmhouse in Spain, she lived off the grid and relied on solar energy, Deeks said.

The director Edgar Wright said on Twitter that Nolan played a small role in his upcoming movie Last Night in Soho. He described her as being in the middle of a Venn diagram of “everything cool in the ’60s” having appeared with the Beatles and in the Bond film.

She returned to the screen in a low-budget independent film The Power of Three (2011), which she described as a feel-good comedy that reinvents the myth of middle age. In a 2012 interview with the site Playerist, she was asked if she wanted to escape glamour or to embrace and use it. “I absolutely embraced it when I was able to, when I was glamorous,” she said. “You don’t go on embracing it – that is pathetic. It was just part of being young and beautiful.”

In addition to her sons Deeks and Luke, Nolan is survived by a sister, Geraldine Ross. – New York Times

Film

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1960      Vertigo Vicki      

1962      One Track Mind                Girl        

1964      The Four Poster                Girl        

It's a Bare, Bare World! Vicki      

Saturday Night Out          Julie      

A Hard Day's Night           Girl at Casino    

The Beauty Jungle            Caroline              

Goldfinger           Dink      

Ferry Cross the Mersey Norah   

1965      Three Rooms in Manhattan         June      

Carry On Cowboy             Miss Jones         

1966      Promise Her Anything    Mail-Order Film Girl       

The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery        Susie Naphill     

1967      Bikini Paradise   Margarita           

1968      Witchfinder General       Girl at Inn            Billed as Maggie Nolan in end credits

Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River Spink's nurse     

1969      Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?   Little Assistance

Crooks and Coronets      Girlfriend            

The Best House in London            Busty Prostitute               

1970      Toomorrow        Johnson              

1971      Carry On Henry Buxom Lass        

Carry On at Your Convenience    Popsy   

1972      Frenzy   Young Woman   (scene cut)

Carry On Matron              Mrs. Tucker       

1973      No Sex Please, We're British        Barbara               

Carry On Girls    Dawn Brakes     

1974      Carry On Dick     Lady Daley         

1983      Positions of Power           Elizabeth Nihell Short Film

1986      Sky Bandits         Waitress             

2011      The Power of Three         Dame Margaret               

2021      Last Night in Soho            Sage Barmaid     Posthumous release

Television

 

    The Saint – "Iris" (1963)

    ITV Play of the Week – "Deep and Crisp and Stolen" (1964)

    Buddenbrooks – "Lengthening Shadows" (1966)

    199 Park Lane – (3 episodes) (1965)

    Danger Man – "Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet" (1965)

    The Bed-Sit Girl – (1 episode) (1966)

    Thirty-Minute Theatre – "The Enchanted Night" (1966)

    The World of Wooster – "Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum" (1966)

    Adam Adamant Lives! – "More Deadly than the Sword" (1966)

    On the Margin – (1 episode) (1966)

    Hugh and I – "Goodbye Dolly" (1966)

    Theatre 625 – "A Man Like That" (1966)

    The Newcomers – (17 episodes) (1966)

    Take a Pair of Private Eyes – (3 episodes) (1966)

    Armchair Theatre – "Compensation Alice" (1967)

    After Many a Summer (TV film) (1965)

    The Des O'Connor Show (1967)

    The Wednesday Play  – "Death of a Private" (1967)

    The Morecambe and Wise Show (ATV) (1967)

    Ooh La La! – "All Night Sitting" (1968)

    Nearest and Dearest – "Take a Letter" (1968)

    Mystery and Imagination – "Dracula" (1968)

    The World of Beachcomber – (4 episodes) (1968–1969)

    World in Ferment – (1 episode) (1969)[citation needed]

    Run a Crooked Mile (TV film) (1969)[citation needed]

    The Adventures of Don Quick – "The Benefits of Earth" (1970)

    Brian Rix Presents... – (3 episodes) (1970–1971)[citation needed]

    The Persuaders! – "Element of Risk" (1971)

    Mr. Tumbleweed (TV short) (1971)

    Budgie – (3 episodes) (1971–1972)

    Steptoe and Son – "A Star is Born" (1972)

    Funny You Should Say That – (1 episode) (1972)[citation needed]

    New Scotland Yard – "Evidence of Character" (1972)

    My Wife Next Door – "Pregnant Moment" (1972)

    Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? – "I'll Never Forget Whatshername" (1973)

    The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin (TV film) (1973)

    Last of the Summer Wine – "Pâté and Chips" (1973)

    Black and Blue – "The Middle-of-the-Road Roadshow for All the Family" (1973)

    Men of Affairs – "Horseface" (1973)

    Crown Court – "A Crime of Passion: Regina v Ager and Lanigan" (1973)

    Late Night Drama – "M + M" (1974)

    The Sweeney – "Thin Ice" (1975)

    Q6 – (3 episodes) (1975)

    I Didn't Know You Cared – "The Way My Wife Looks at Me" (1976)

    Fox – (3 episodes) (1980)

    Brideshead Revisited – "The Bleak Light of Day" (1981)

    Charlie Was a Rich Man (TV film) (1981)[32]

    Crossroads: King's Oak – (1 episode) (1983)[33]

    Crown Court – "Sword in the Hand of David: Part 1" (1983)

    Carry On Forever (ITV3) (2015) (not to be confused with the 1970 BBC Film Night Special of the same name)

 

Theatre

Fringe

 

    Why Bournemouth? (1968)

    It Has No Choice

    A Minor Scene

    Homo

    Stimulation

    Super Santa

    How the Vote Was Won (1986)

    Daughters of Men (1986)

 

               

Provincial

 

    The Bacchae (1970)

    Bus Stop (Cherie) (1970)

    Who Goes Bare (1970)

    Murder in the Office (1972)

    Not Now, Darling (1973)

    Don't Look Now (1974)

    Under the Hill (Aubrey Beardsley) (1976)

 

               

West End

 

    The Giveaway (1969)

    Adam's Apple (1970)

    She's Done It Again (1970)