Caroline Munro descends the staircase of the Great Victoria Hotel in Bradford and it is a shame that there’s only the receptionist, the cleaner and me to see it, because she looks sensational, with all the style and glamour befitting a Bond Girl and Hammer horror legend.
If she had a late night at the St George’s Hall next door, hosting the Q The Music show, a celebration of the music of the James Bond movies, it does not show.
Caroline, who played murderous, helicopter-flying Naomi opposite Roger Moore’s 007 in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me, is now 73, but looks, quite frankly, fabulous.
So what’s her secret?
She laughs, telling me: “Coffee, stress and chocolate. And Nivea. And I do a lot of walking, which does help.”
She is remarkably upbeat given what she has been through in the last few years, dealing with cancer and then the loss of her husband.
She says: “In January 2018, I got the breast cancer diagnosis. It was a bit of a shock. Quite surreal, actually.”
Caroline had lumpectomy surgery and is now clear of cancer. It’s a warm June morning, and she cools herself with a fan, saying: “I’m still on chemo tablets now, hence this, as I do get very overheated. Although it was a huge shock I got the best treatment and I’m still getting it.”
She was involved in two fan conventions which together raised more than £25,000 for the cancer charity Maggie’s. She says: “It was so important to me to give something back to Maggie’s, as they helped me so much during the worst times and they are still helping me now.”
In early 2020, she lost her husband of 30 years, film director George Dugdale, father of her daughters Georgina and Iona. She says: “I was really broken. It was so difficult for me and so difficult for my girls. But Georgina and Iona have been amazing, they are my pillars, unbelievably strong. We’re the Three Musketeers.
“I get really good days, especially when I’m working and my mind is occupied, and then I get really bad days. At the end of the day, we have to try to stay positive.”
She is following her own advice. Just this weekend she flew to Pittsburgh, in the US, for Monster Bash, a horror and sci-fi film convention where she was guest of honour.
It is 50 years since she made her Hammer debut in Dracula A.D. 1972, starring Christopher Lee as the undead Count and Peter Cushing as his nemesis Abraham Van Helsing.
She followed that with Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, and a slew of fantasy, horror and sci-fi movies, including At The Earth’s Core, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
Caroline grew up in Richmond, South West London, and then moved with her parents to Rottingdean, a pretty village in Sussex, where her gran lived. She says: “Rottingdean was an idyllic place to grow up, and I would go across the fields each morning to get to school. Not in a great hurry, mind. I didn’t like school and school didn’t like me.”
The reason was that Caroline is dyslexic, which wasn’t diagnosed. Instead, the school branded her “slow”.
She says: “I remember that word, it’s stuck with me, because it was on my written reports, and I thought, well, I don’t think I’m slow.”
She left school with two O-Levels in French and Art. She says: “That wasn’t going to get me very far, so I started going to classes at Brighton College of Art.”
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While she was there, an older student asked if he could take some photos of her. Her mum agreed, and she posed at Preston Manor, just outside of Brighton, for portraits. The photographer entered them into a newspaper competition, judged by David Bailey.
She says: “The next thing I heard was my portrait had won the contest. And suddenly, I was the ‘Face of 1966’.”
From there, things moved quickly. She enrolled in the famous Lucie Clayton modelling school. She says: “They taught us how to walk and how to get in and out of cars while wearing miniskirts”.
Then a session with photographer Brian Duffy resulted in a fashion shoot for American Vogue. Her first movie role followed, playing a Mexican-American girl in a Spanish spaghetti western, A Talent for Loving, starring Richard Widmark and Cesar Romero. And then came the job that changed her life.
As Caroline recalls: “I was approached to do the Lamb’s Navy Rum ad campaign.” Suddenly, she was on billboards all over London, in a wetsuit zipped low, brandishing a knife.
She says: “I looked very tough. It was quite an empowering image. It was a bit of a shock for my dad, though. He worked in the City as a solicitor and he got off the train at Waterloo one morning to see this massive poster. I imagine there was a bit of office banter about that.”
Among the millions who saw that poster were James Carreras, chairman of Hammer Films, and Cubby Broccoli, the 007 film franchise legend.
She was cast in Dracula A.D. 1972 and later starred in The Spy Who Loved Me with Roger Moore and Barbara Bach, springboarding her to a career that has really never stopped.
She shot her most recent film, the low-budget horror The Haunting of Margam Castle, in 2020.
She says: “I never had ambitions to be an actress. I never even had ambitions to be a model. I think my mum thought a nice career for me would have been a window dresser in a shop.”
Caroline, who was a hostess on game show 3-2-1 with Ted Rogers and Lynda Lee Lewis in the 1980s, also appears every Friday night on Talking Pictures TV, introducing old horror movies, and in July will appear at Christchurch, Dorset, as part of a weekend of Talking Pictures-organised events. Although she loves visiting the US, she was never tempted to live there. She says: “I had the chance to go, and Cubby thought I would do very well in America. But I had my parents here, I had my life here and doing a lot of work in Europe. I had to follow my heart and I said no. Hollywood wasn’t for me.”
- Caroline Munro is at A Weekend By The Sea with Talking Pictures TV in Christchurch, Dorset, July 16-17. renownfilms.co.uk. Her next Q The Music show is at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, on October 23. Go to qthemusicshow.com/seetheshow
