Karin Dor, Bond Girl in 'You Only Live Twice,' Dies at 79

The German starlet also appeared in Hitchcock's 'Topaz' and in films with Christopher Lee and Lex Barker.

Karin Dor, who played the red-haired villainess Helga Brandt in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, died Monday in a nursing home in Munich, her son told the Bild newspaper. She was 79.

The German beauty also had a key role as a revolutionary in the Alfred Hitchcock Cuban missile crisis thriller Topaz (1969) and appeared opposite Christopher Lee in The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962), one of more than a dozen films she made with her then-husband, Austrian director Harald Reinl.

In her most famous role, Dor worked for the evil Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) as SPECTRE agent No. 11. Her character can't resist the advances of 007 (Sean Connery), then gets dropped into a pool of piranhas, paying the ultimate price for failing to dispose of the British spy.

Dor regularly appeared with Tarzan actor Lex Barker in several German films adapted from the Karl May novels about the American Wild West, including The Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962), Winnetou: The Red Gentleman (1964), Winnetou: The Last Shot (1965) and The Valley of Death (1968).

She played a murderess in Room 13 (1964), and her film résumé also included Lee's The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967) — another picture with Barker and Reinl — Warhead (1977), starring David Janssen, and I Am the Other Woman (2006).

American TV audiences also could spot her in episodes of It Takes a Thief, Ironside and The F.B.I. She more recently worked in the German theater.