Eunice Gayson

Eunice Gayson was an English actress known as the first Bond girl. Born in Croydon and trained in operatic singing, she built a career on the London stage and in British film and television. She had a major part in the Hammer horror The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and took television roles in The Saint and The Avengers. In 1962 she was Baroness Elsa Schraeder in the London stage version of The Sound of Music, and meanwhile she shot scenes for Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963) as Sylvia Trench, the woman Bond pursues in London. That part, which gave rise to the line Bond, James Bond, was meant to recur, but the character was retired after the second film. Gayson was a fixture in London theater, including the comedy The Grass Is Greener (1971), and in the early 1990s she played the grandmother in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods. She died in 2018.