Claudine Auger, Sean Connery’s co-star in “Thunderball” and the first French actress to play James Bond’s love interest, died on Wednesday in Paris. She was 78.

Her death was confirmed by the Parisian agency Time Art, which represented her.

Ms. Auger (pronounced oh-JHAY) was 24 when “Thunderball,” the fourth film in the long-running Bond franchise, was released in 1965. Her character, Domino, is the mistress of an evil mastermind who has stolen two nuclear warheads — and killed her brother. Domino does not hold back when exacting revenge on her former lover. (A harpoon gun is involved.)

Because she spoke English with a heavy accent, Ms. Auger’s voice was dubbed by another actress. But because she was an excellent swimmer, she did her own underwater scenes in the film, which was shot largely in the Bahamas.

Over the next three decades she made more than 50 feature films — many of them French, Italian or Spanish productions — and more than a dozen television movies and mini-series, including the 1994 British mini-series “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.”