The Shimmering Shirley Eaton

January 12 is the birthday of British singer and actress Shirley Eaton (b. 1937).

Eaton was a student at the Aida Foster Theater School who was already performing professionally on stage and on television by her teenage years. She performed in Royal Variety Shows and on Val Parnell tv specials, and was signed by Alexander Korda and J. Arthur Rank in succession. Early in her career she provided sex appeal in many silly comedies with eye-winking titles like You Know What Sailors Are (1954), Panic in the Parlor (1956), and Your Past is Showing (1957), as well as several of the Carry On films, and Life is a Circus (1960) with the Crazy Gang (Nervo and Knox, Charlie Naughton, and Jimmy Gold), as well as Flanagan and Allen, Lionel Jeffries, and others. One of the last of this period was the horror-comedy What a Carve Up! (1961), a loose remake of The Ghoul, later the inspiration for a 1994 Jonathan Coe novel.

Eaton ascended a rung or two in the decade, beginning with a role in the 1962 West End production of Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn (1962), followed by a role in the very first episode of The Saint with Roger Moore. She next appeared opposite the actual Mickey Spillane in the 1963 Mike Hammer picture The Girl Hunters, and Harry Guardino and Robert Culp in Rhino! (1964)

Also in 1964 Eaton got her splashiest and ultimately her best remembered role, as Jill Masterson, the chick who gets murdered by being dipped in liquid gold in the James Bond film Goldfinger.Yes, that movie has both Shirley Eaton, and Shirley Bassey, and that’s not the only Eaton-related confusion to result from the film, but we’ll return to that.

Eight films remained in her brief career: The Naked Brigade (1965), a starring vehicle set in World War Two; the 1965 remake of Agatha Christie’sTen Little Indians; Around the World Under the Sea (1966) with Lloyd Bridges; Eight on the Lam (1967) with Bob Hope; The Scorpio Letters (1967) with Laurence Naismith; and three Harry Alan Towers produced adaptations of Sax Rohmer novels: The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967, as the title character); The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968); and The Girl from Rio (1969).

At this stage, at the top of her game, Eaton quit the biz to spend more time with her family. She had children and couldn’t bear being separated from them. Hard to fault her for that! But it seems pretty clear that had she not done so her career would have likely continued to progress through the ensuing decades.

Eaton’s abrupt departure (coupled with the fact that her later films were less remembered) had the unintended consequence of spawning an urban myth. For years many people were under the misapprehension that Eaton herself had died from the gold paint in Goldfinger. (The truth was, plenty of precautions were taken to ensure her safety).

In 1999 Eaton’s autobiography Golden Girl was published. She returned to the public eye from that point, mostly as a guest on tv talk shows and a talking head in various documentaries about the films she has appeared in.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.