Claudine Auger was handed Domino in Thunderball and given almost nothing to play. The career that followed, in French and Italian thrillers for directors who kept asking her back, was longer, steadier and far less seen.
Fi1m perspective
In Thunderball (1965) Claudine Auger is on screen a great deal and does very little, and neither of those was her decision. Terence Young's camera finds her on a beach, on a boat, under the water, and then goes back to Connery. When she speaks, the voice is not hers; she was dubbed because of her accent. She did do her own underwater scenes, which is more than can be said for most of what happens in that film's last half hour. Watching it again we found ourselves irritated on her behalf, because the film plainly wanted a French woman in a bikini and had not thought about what she might say once it had one. As we put it when we reviewed it, Domino is photographed rather than directed, and given very little to do until late.
She had come to it from modelling and the Miss France title of 1958, with drama-school training and a run of small parts from that year on, one of them uncredited in Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus (1960), and three films with the writer-director Pierre Gaspard-Huit, including Le Masque de fer (1962). She was spotted on holiday in the Bahamas, auditioned, and Domino was rewritten as French to fit her.
Bond did not lead to Hollywood. It led back to Europe. Young used her again the next year in Triple Cross (1966), a wartime spy film. Mario Bava cast her in A Bay of Blood (1971), and the same year she appeared in The Black Belly of the Tarantula, two of the Italian thrillers that filled her seventies. Jacques Deray directed her four times, including Flic Story (1975) opposite Alain Delon, and she went on working in French and Italian film and television into the 1990s. We have reviewed none of these and will not pretend to weigh them. What we can say is that the shape is plain: glamorous supporting parts in thrillers, the lover or the woman not to be trusted, for a small group of directors who liked what she did.
She told the press in 1965: "I may be wearing a bikini, but if I don’t know enough about acting to register the proper emotion, the audience will hoot me off the screen." Nobody hooted. Nobody was given the chance to find out either, since Thunderball handles her emotions mostly by cutting to Connery's face.
See Thunderball for Ken Adam's sets, John Barry's brass and Luciana Paluzzi's assassin, as we said. Watch Auger in the underwater scenes, where at least the body moving through the water is her own, and consider that this was the part the world chose to remember her for.
Biography
Claudine Auger was a French actress. Born Claudine Oger in Paris on 26 April 1941, she died in Paris on 18 December 2019. She trained at the Conservatoire de Paris and made her film debut while still at school, appearing in small roles including an uncredited part in Testament of Orpheus (1960). In 1958 she was Miss France Monde and first runner-up in the Miss World contest.
Auger is best known for playing Dominique 'Domino' Derval in Thunderball (1965). She was spotted on holiday in Nassau by writer-producer Kevin McClory, who recommended her for the role; the part was rewritten for a French character. Her voice was dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl. She appeared in numerous European films, including A Bay of Blood (1971), Flic Story (1975) and Exploits of a Young Don Juan (1986), and in the television series Sherlock Holmes (1984).
She was married to writer-director Pierre Gaspard-Huit, who cast her in several of his films.
