Margaret Nolan, a stage and display actress whose gold-painted physique was used as a canvas to mission the opening credit of the James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” and who was additionally briefly seen within the Beatles film “A Arduous Day’s Evening,” died on Oct. 5 at her house in Belsize Park, London. She was 76.
The trigger was most cancers, her son Oscar Deeks mentioned.
In a profession that was predominantly within the 1960s and ’70s, Ms. Nolan appeared in quite a few BBC tv productions and in movies together with “No Intercourse Please, We’re British” (1973) and “Carry On Women” (1973).
In “A Arduous Day’s Evening” (1964), she had an uncredited however memorable position because the elegant younger lady seated subsequent to Paul McCartney’s grandfather at a on line casino.
Nevertheless it was the opening title sequence of “Goldfinger” (1964), which was projected onto Ms. Nolan’s physique as if it have been a display, that introduced her fame.
“Squeezed right into a gold leather-based bikini, her pores and skin painted the identical shimmering hue, the statuesque starlet Margaret Nolan (41-23-37) stood nonetheless whereas scenes from the just-finished James Bond film ‘Goldfinger’ have been projected onto her curves,” The New York Times reported in 2005 about the film shoot, which it additionally described as “lengthy and meticulous.”
The film’s title sequence went on to be a featured exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012-13.
In an archived model of her official website, Ms. Nolan described how she was “fairly unexpectedly shot into the limelight” by the film when she was solely 20.
The filmmakers needed her to be the physique for the title sequence, however she agreed to do it provided that she got a task within the film. She ended up enjoying a masseuse named Dink who seems briefly with James Bond, performed by Sean Connery.
Ms. Nolan’s character in “Goldfinger” was to not be confused with the character who’s completely painted in gold and dies of “pores and skin suffocation.” That character, Jill Masterson, was performed by Shirley Eaton. (That scene additionally prompted false accounts that the actress had died through the filming on account of the paint.)
Ms. Nolan turned down a two-year contract to publicize the movie as a result of she mentioned she would discover it troublesome to dwell down such consideration and needed to be taken significantly as an actress.
“Because it transpired, I couldn’t ‘dwell it down’ anyway and to at the present time get common fan mail from Bond followers!” she wrote.
Margaret Ann Nolan was born within the Hampstead space of London on Oct. 29, 1943. Her father, Jack Nolan, was a clerk within the Military, and her mom, Molly, was a psychiatric nurse. Her mom relocated the household to Waterford, Eire, throughout World Battle II.
The household returned to Hampstead in 1946 and Ms. Nolan was coaching to be a trainer when she met her first husband, Tom Kempinski, who was then an actor with the Nationwide Theater.
“He satisfied me that I might be an actress,” she wrote on her web site.
She gave up appearing within the late 1980s to give attention to homemaking and caring for her two sons. Within the early ’90s she moved to Andalusia, Spain, the place she took up drawing and portray.
Her marriage to Mr. Kempinski led to divorce, as did a second marriage, to Mike O’Sullivan. Along with her son, Ms. Nolan is survived by her companion, Colin Deeks; one other son, Luke O’Sullivan; and a sister, Geraldine Ross.
She started making photomontages from a few of her earlier portraits and had her work featured in exhibitions. She additionally turned politically energetic within the Employees Revolutionary Celebration, a British Trotskyist group, her son Mr. Deeks mentioned.
She developed a passion for permaculture, a motion that started within the mid-1970s whose identify is a portmanteau of “everlasting agriculture” and “everlasting tradition.” At her farmhouse in Spain, Mr. Deeks mentioned, she lived off the grid and relied on photo voltaic vitality.
The director Edgar Wright mentioned on Twitter that Ms. Nolan performed a small position in his upcoming film “Last Night in Soho.” He described her as being in the course of a Venn diagram of “the whole lot cool within the ’60s,” having appeared with the Beatles and in a James Bond movie.
She returned to the display for “The Energy of Three” (2011), a low-budget impartial movie that she described as a feel-good comedy that reinvented the parable of center age.
In a 2012 interview with the site Playerist, she was requested if she needed to flee glamour or to embrace and use it.
“I completely embraced it after I was in a position to, after I was glamorous,” she mentioned. “You don’t go on embracing it — that’s pathetic. It was simply a part of being younger and delightful.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed analysis.
