Daniela Bianchi

The first time we see Tatiana Romanova she is wearing a ribbon and very little else, and Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb is walking round her as if buying a horse. Daniela Bianchi has to stand there and be assessed, by Klebb and by us, and she does it without a flicker of embarrassment or appeal. It is not much of a scene to be given, but she holds it. Eight years of ballet show in how she stands: the weight placed, the neck long, nothing wasted. Then she opens her mouth and Barbara Jefford's voice comes out, because Bianchi's English in 1963 was not yet good enough, and from that moment we are watching a performance assembled from two women.

That is more or less the whole of her cinema as most of us know it. She had been an uncredited extra since Love Is My Profession (1958); Terence Young picked her for Tatiana, she has said, because "avevo una 'faccia molto russa'", a very Russian face. After From Russia with Love (1963) came a three-episode arc on American television in Dr. Kildare (1964), a run of French and Italian spy and adventure films, two of them for Alberto De Martino, and the Bond spoof Operation Kid Brother (1967) with Neil Connery and several of her old castmates, in which she was dubbed again. She stopped acting in 1970. There is no late phase, no reinvention, nothing for a critic to trace.

So the question is what she does in the one film that matters, and the honest answer is that she watches. Tatiana is written as bait and stays bait; the script's notion of her inner life is that she likes Bond's mouth. Bianchi plays that for exactly what it is, a girl told to seduce a man and finding she does not mind, and in the hotel and train scenes with Connery she is easy and unfussed where a lesser actress would have worked at being alluring. We were more unsettled by the dubbing than we expected to be. Her face is doing one thing and the voice another, slightly posher and slightly older, and the effect is of a woman who has been put together by somebody else, which is Tatiana's situation precisely and which nobody involved seems to have intended.

The usual charge against her is a short career of glamorous parts in European genre pictures, and it is fair as far as it goes. But nobody offered her anything else to be short and glamorous in, and on the evidence of Istanbul and the Orient Express she could hold a frame without help, which is more than Richard Maibaum's script ever asked her to do. Whether she could have done more is a question the films never put to her.