Playing the part of a nurse tasked with looking after James Bond’s every need at a health farm in the film Thunderball (1965), it did not take Molly Peters long to get her kit off.
Indeed, she became the first Bond girl to remove her clothes on-screen. The scene was racy enough for the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) to tell the film-makers that the sight of the naked Peters was likely to result in the film being given a commercially ruinous X certificate. In the end she was seen partially covered with strategically placed bed linen.
The scene was one of 32 objections raised by the censor, many of them involving Sean Connery’s predatory agent and Peters’s blonde and sensuous nurse, Patricia Fearing. “I get the impression that this screenplay has been deliberately hotted up with a view to its including more sex, sadism and violence than the previous Bond pictures,” John Trevelyan, the secretary of the BBFC, told Harry Saltzman, co-producer of Thunderball.
In one of the film’s most erotic scenes, Connery massages the naked Peters’s back with a mink glove. The fur “reduces the tension”, Bond explained. “Not mine,” the aroused nurse responds. After considerable negotiation, most of the controversial scenes were allowed to remain, but Trevelyan insisted that the mink glove was a stroke too far.
Reluctantly, the film-makers agreed to remove the scene in return for the movie receiving an A rating, as the previous three Bond films had done. Papers in the BBFC archive confirm that they had little choice and that Thunderball came within an inch of being X-rated, which would have wiped out the film’s under-18 audience and hit box-office takings hard.
Advertisement
The Bond franchise later extracted a mild revenge on Trevelyan, who,according to his obituary in The Times (August 18, 1986) “never shrank from using his scissors, especially when it came to protecting the young”. The villain played by Sean Bean in GoldenEye in 1995 — the first Bond film not based on a story by Ian Fleming — was given the name “Trevelyan”.
To coincide with the cinematic release of Thunderball, Peters posed for Playboy with a bevy of other Bond girls, including Honor Blackman, Claudine Auger and Shirley Eaton. The pictures were accompanied by an essay by the Bond screenplay writer Richard Maibaum, who described them as “these sensuous cinema sirens with whom 007 has to put up and bed down”. Peters was not perturbed and saw the film a total of 16 times, which she admitted was in part because “I looked at the screen and thought, ‘You look all right, girl!’ ”
After Thunderball, Peters made a handful of TV appearances and had one further minor film role, playing a secretary in the comedy Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River, with Jerry Lewis. Yet after 1968 she wasn’t seen on screen again and joined a long list of Bond girls who were loved and left on the shelf.
She revealed in a Bond documentary many years later that her career had been derailed because of a disagreement with her agent. She declined to expand on the circumstances, but walked away from the acting profession and lived quietly in Ipswich, where she raised a son, who predeceased her.
Born Mollie [sic] Peters on March 15, 1942 in Walsham-le-Willows, Suffolk, she began her career as a teenage model, appearing in a state of semiundress on the covers of such men’s magazines as Cavalcade, Beau, Parade, Best for Men, Dapper and Escapade.
Advertisement
She made her film debut in Peter Studies Form (1964), a piece of low titillation about an artist who tries his hand at painting and sculpting, before getting a camera and discovering a talent for photographing nude women. It brought her to the attention of Terence Young, who had directed the first two Bond films, Dr No and From Russia with Love. He invited her for a screen test.
She recalled being introduced to Connery on the set at Pinewood Studios. “I was very nervous,” she said. “In another corner of the studio I saw a very tall and handsome man and I remember Terence Young said to me, ‘Darling, of course you know Sean, don’t you?’ Well, I’d never met Sean in my life, so I was quite overawed.”
In her first scene Bond forcibly grabs and kisses her while she’s giving him a check-up. She primly resists his advances and sets him up on a motorised traction machine, quipping: “First time I’ve felt safe all day.”
When she leaves him alone for a few moments, Count Lippe, an enemy agent, attempts to kill 007 by turning up the power on the traction table. Nurse Fearing’s return saves the day and, being a gentleman, Bond agrees not to tell her boss about the incident if she sleeps with him. They then repair to the steam room and disrobe. When 007 checks out of the clinic, Fearing is eager to arrange a further assignation — but it was the end of the affair and curtains on her film career.
Molly Peters, actress, was born on March 15, 1942. She died of an undisclosed illness on May 30, 2017, aged 75