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Maggie,left, in Carry On Girls, 1974 |
Carry On radical – a woman of her time
Maggie Nolan tells Dan Carrier of her journey as an actress from Bond beauty to political theatre
HER body was painted gold and graced a million posters around the world.
Maggie Nolan was promoting 007. An up-and-coming actress, and her role as Dink in the smash hit 1964 Bond flick Goldfinger made her a household name, led her to posing for Playboy, and then further outings in the Carry On franchise.
But despite good work as a screen siren, Maggie knew she was more than a pretty face and wanted to prove it. It led to her becoming a political radical, a Bond Girl turned feminist.
Now, 40 years on, she is set to make a return: Maggie appears in a cameo role in a new film, Three To Tango, which is about three women who live in Belsize Park. “I’m a Dame in it,” she says. “I have been told that if I’d kept on acting I could have become one, like Judy Dench. Maybe it is not too late...”
The film has yet to gain a distribution contract, but has been shown at the Belsize Park Everyman. Starring Toyah Wilcox, it considers how women are portrayed on screen – an issue close to Maggie’s heart.
She never set out to be an actress, and recalls it all started when she was working in a coffee shop in Belsize Village, the Witches Cauldron.
Playwright Tom Kempinski would come in to play chess and they fell for each other. “Tom said to me – you shouldn’t be a teacher, you should be an actress,” she recalls. She took him at his word. “He introduced me to agents and I started doing some modelling,” she says.
But as was the way with young women acting in that era, she had little say over what she was doing. She was offered parts and her agent said yes or no.
“They never directly spoke to me. I was so passive – we all were in those days,” she says. “I simply did what I was told to do,”
Maggie was born in Hampstead. Her Irish, working-class parents moved to London from Waterford before the war. “I grew up in an environment where people entertained each other,” she recalls. “I was always being asked to do a song and dance routine.” And although Maggie had done well at La Sainte Union school in Dartmouth Park, she was not encouraged to go to university. Instead she decided to become a teacher, and was working at the Cauldron temporarily before starting her course.
Her first TV appearance was opposite Roger Moore in the 1960s TV series The Saint. She also met Tony Curtis, who became enamoured with her. “He was so keen on me, he rang up my mum and asked if I could go to Italy with him to be in another film,” she remembers. “I couldn’t go – Italian Equity wanted an Italian woman.”
Roles came thick and fast: after just a year of work, Maggie was cast in Marcel Carne’s Three Rooms in Manhattan opposite Maurice Ronet. Carne, renowned for his wartime film Les Enfants du Paradis, spotted Maggie’s acting ability, and she continued to land West End roles and appear in TV series.
Then came Goldfinger. At first, producer Cubby Broccoli, who had asked her along to his headquarters behind the Curzon cinema in Mayfair, said he simply wanted to use her as a gold-painted lady for the opening title scene. But although Maggie was used to doing what she was told, and agreed to the two-week photo shoot, she also asked for a role in the film. Aged just 19, she was cast as Bond girl Dink, and filmed with Sean Connery in Miami.
A role in A Hard Days Night with The Beatles followed, and then it was the Carry On films. She soon was a vital member of the Carry On gang, but it wasn’t always easy.
“I faced a lot of animosity,” she remembers. “I grew up simply not being liked by other women. I really struggled to get close to other women, especially in show business. Frankly, I was just so tall and attractive. I’d walk in and all the women there would raise their eyebrows and then ignore me.
This did not apply to Barbara Windsor. “Babs was all right – she was down to earth, an East End girl,” says Maggie.
But the Carry On experience left a sour taste in the mouth, not just from the degrading, misogynistic nature of the films. It was the awful pay. “I got £100 a week,” she remembers. “None of us ever got any royalties. There is a Carry On film being screened once a minute, every minute around the world, and the producer and director became extremely rich from its success. But none of the actors got anything at all.”
Maggie’s career began to change in 1968. Her husband had been in France and watched the Republic come within a whisker of being overthrown by students. She began to become politicised, helped by attending weekly discussions with other actors, artists and writers in the Socialist Labour League. It set her off on a new route. The League established toured Working Men’s Clubs with cabaret shows, and produced a pageant of working-class history at the 10,000-seater Empire Hall at Wembley.
She was no longer interested in being a model or actress who was told what to do by men. She quit the big screen, and after spending time renovating a farmhouse in Spain, she found another artistic vocation. She has created collages due to be displayed this month at the Brick Lane Gallery.
“I was going through all my old ‘stuff’, and I came across many portraits taken of me during the 1960s and 1970s,” she explains. “I didn’t want to throw them away. I began creating photomontages, recycling into artistic representations of myself as a young woman. It was an emotional experience as I was both mourning myself as I was and the career I had. The images only came together as I was assembling them – they seemed to take a life of their own. I realised they said more about the period and being a woman at that time.”
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