Martine Beswick

Early years

Beswick was born on 26 September 1941 in Port Antonio, Jamaica to a British father and a Portuguese mother.

Beswick, her sister Lorelei and her mother May (1912-2017) moved to London in 1954. In 1955, she left high school to work to help support her family.

Film

Beswick is best known for her two appearances in the James Bond film series. Although she auditioned for the first Bond film Dr. No, she was cast in the second film From Russia with Love as the fiery gypsy girl, Zora. She engaged in the famous "catfight" scene with her rival Vida (played by former Miss Israel Aliza Gur). She was incorrectly billed as "Martin Beswick" in the title sequence. Beswick then appeared as the ill-fated Paula Caplan in Thunderball. She had been away from the Caribbean so long that she was required to sunbathe constantly for two weeks before filming, to look like a local.

Martine went on to appear in One Million Years B.C. opposite Raquel Welch, with whom she also engaged in a catfight. She then appeared in various Hammer Studio low-budget films, most notably Prehistoric Women and the gender-bending Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, in which she played the titular villainess. She played Adelita in the well-regarded Spaghetti Western, A Bullet for the General (1967) opposite Klaus Kinski and Gian Maria Volontè. She starred as the Queen of Evil in Oliver Stone's 1974 directorial debut Seizure, or Queen of Evil. In the 1970s, Beswick moved to Hollywood and regularly appeared on both the big and small screens. She made numerous guest appearances on television series, including Sledge Hammer!, Fantasy Island, The Fall Guy, Mannix, The Six Million Dollar Man and Falcon Crest. In 1980, she played the lead role in the comedy film The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.

Beswick's career was active well into the 1990s. In recent years, she has mainly participated in film documentaries, providing commentary and relating her experiences on the many films in which she has appeared. She owned a removals business in London, but is now semiretired except for her guest appearances at international Bond conventions.

In April 2013, she was one of 12 Bond Girl celebrity guests in an episode of the BBC's Masterchef.

Beginning with Melvin and Howard (1980), she changed the spelling of her last name to "Beswicke", but reverted to her original name in the mid-1990s; her last credit with the longer spelling is Wide Sargasso Sea (1993).