In memoriam: Margaret Lee (Telegraph 03/05/24)

Margaret Lee, who has died aged 80, was a West Midlands-born actress who won fame overseas as a knowing, Monroe-like blonde in a series of European genre movies cranked out in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the UK, however, Lee remained largely uncelebrated – although her story could have played out very differently had a pivotal early-career audition gone in her favour.

Aged barely twenty, a fresh-faced graduate of the Italia Conti theatre school, Lee found herself in the running to play Tatiana Romanova, the KGB agent who seduces (and subsequently falls for) James Bond in From Russia with Love (1963). She lost out to the Italian newcomer Daniela Bianchi – which made it only more ironic when Lee eclipsed Bianchi to become one of Italy’s biggest female stars, chiefly by playing the love interest in 007 knockoffs and parodies.

In a series of popular comedies featuring the Italian duo Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia – including Two Jokers at the Moulin Rouge (1964) and General Custer’s Two Sergeants (1965) – Lee served as Dorothy Lamour had done in Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road movies, cutting through the boys’ bluff badinage with flashes of leg and wit. “It was not the career in theatre I had dreamed of,” Lee told one interviewer. “But it was acting.” 

She became a major Italian cover girl thanks to the rash of slapdash spy pastiches occasioned by the opportunistic producer Harry Alan Towers, positioning himself as a cut-price Cubby Broccoli. Our Man in Marrakesh (1966) paired Lee with Tony Randall, Herbert Lom and Wilfrid Hyde-White; in Five Golden Dragons (1967), which spliced espionage capers with the newly voguish kung fu, Lee gave a breathy rendition of the John Barry-aping theme song.

She had a dancer’s pep, appearing in twelve films in 1965 alone: “I adored it. I felt so at home on the movie set that I often would stay behind to watch filming even when I had finished for the day. We often worked very long hours but it seemed to actually give me energy rather than tire me.” Even so, she later confessed to a measure of Marilynesque regret as to how those energies had been applied: “I imagined myself in more dramatic roles, but I guess that is not how others saw me.”

Lee was born Margaret Gwendolyn Box on August 4, 1943 to a mother who’d been relocated to Wolverhampton during the Blitz. At the end of the war the family returned to London, where the young Margaret studied at Greenwich’s Roan School for Girls. (According to one contemporary, the pair spent their teenage years chasing a pre-fame Mick Jagger around the South London rail network.)

After graduating from Italia Conte, Lee successfully answered an advert in The Stage seeking dancers for the Moulin Rouge; once installed on the continent, she won a role opposite Elizabeth Taylor in the Cinecitta-shot Cleopatra (1963), but her scenes were cut from the finished film. Instead, she made her screen debut in lowlier circumstances, appearing alongside 1957’s Mr. Universe Reg Lewis in Fire Monsters Against the Son of Hercules (1962), a routine sword-and-sandals programmer.

Her sensuality was a gift for a newly permissive cinema: in Casanova 70 (1965), she was manhandled by Marcello Mastroianni, whom she described as “sweet”. Yet – like many – she endured a fraught working relationship with Klaus Kinski, the emergent wild man of European cinema, with whom Lee made a total of eleven increasingly lurid thrillers between 1966 and 1971.

Lee felt obliged to correct the record of Kinski’s characteristically unreliable, self-glorifying 1975 memoir All I Need is Love, in which the actor claimed he enjoyed threesomes with his co-star and fellow actress Maria Rohm: “This is totally untrue, and I am sorry he abased himself this way. Klaus and I were chums and he was a close friend of my husband Gino, too; there was never any sexual side to our friendship… ever. I was angry for a while, but now I forgive him.”

Returning home upon the birth of her second child in 1973, Lee booked one episode of the Gerry Anderson-produced ITV caper The Protectors (1972-74), but saw her visibility dwindle due to industry indifference: “I guess because I was known in Italy and to some extent France, but not in England. I did not think seriously of trying to work there.” Her final screen credit, at the age of forty, came with the crime comedy Neapolitan Sting (1983) opposite Treat Williams.

Lee moved decisively to Northern California in the mid-1980s, studying Stanislavski in San Francisco and working thereafter in local theatre: “I mostly thought of myself as an Italian movie actress and had never aspired to be known internationally… In retrospect, this might have been a limitation and a mistake.”

She married three times, to the producer Gino Malerba, Patrick Anderson and Walter Creighton. She is survived by two sons: the production manager Damian Anderson and Roberto Malerba, a producer on the Bond film SPECTRE (2015).

Margaret Lee, born August 4, 1943, died April 24, 2024.