Over the weekend we heard the sad news of the death of Eunice Gayson, who played Sylvia Trench in the first two James Bond films. Appearing right at the start of Dr No (1962), she helped introduce Sean Connery as 007 and in doing so became the first ever Bond girl, as shown in the video above.
Born in Surrey on 17th March 1928, Gayson trained as an opera singer and for a number of years she played the part of Frau Schrader (The Baroness) in the London production of The Sound of Music at the Palace Theatre. Gayson was originally to have been a regular in the Bond film series, but her character was dropped after From Russia With Love. In her two Bond appearances Nikki van der Zyl overdubbed her voice.
In Dr No, her character introduces herself as “Trench, Sylvia Trench”, allowing Connery to reply in kind, which would become a Bond trademark. Gayson also played a major role in the Hammer horror film The Revenge of Frankenstein and was seen on TV in series such as The Saint and The Avengers.
She died last Friday, 8th June 2018.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under Creative Commons License.
