Yvonne Monlaur

Yvonne Monlaur was a French actress who worked in films of the late 1950s and 1960s and was best known for her Hammer horror roles. Born in Pau, France, she studied ballet as a child and worked as a fashion model as a teenager before moving into acting. She starred in the Italian film Three Strangers in Rome in 1958, and in 1960 appeared in Circus of Horrors (1960) with Anton Diffring and Donald Pleasence and in the Hammer production The Brides of Dracula (1960) alongside Peter Cushing and Freda Jackson. She also starred in The Terror of the Tongs (1961) with Christopher Lee, and did a screen test for the part of Domino Derval in Thunderball, which went to Claudine Auger. After a number of German and Italian films, she left the industry and returned to Paris, later attending film conventions held in tribute to her Hammer work. She died in 2017.