A child in period costume who grew into a face the 1980s used for glamour, Fiona Fullerton was better served by the first job than the second. Two films fourteen years apart, one about the Romanovs and one about James Bond, show both sides of it.
Fi1m perspective
The scene we keep is a table. In the second half of Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), once the coronations are over and the family have been moved into ordinary rooms, the four Romanov daughters sit and pass plates to one another, and Fiona Fullerton, playing Anastasia, is one of the four. We could not tell you which of the girls did what. That is the point of the scene, and it is why it moved us more than the two hours of ceremony before it: they had stopped being a row of hats and turned into a family, and she is part of that turn.
She had come to it young. Ballet school first, then a film debut in Run Wild, Run Free (1969), then the Romanovs, then the title role in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972) at fifteen, which is the part people of a certain age remember her for. After that the work moved to television, with one of the leads in the BBC hospital series Angels (1975), and to the stage, where she played Guinevere to Richard Harris's Arthur in Camelot (1982). Between the mid-1970s and 1985 the screen career went quiet, and nobody has ever pretended otherwise.
What brought it back was Pola Ivanova, the KGB agent in A View to a Kill (1985). It is Roger Moore's last Bond and not a good one, and the part she is given is a hot tub and a joke, played as though the film had been made in 1973. She does what is asked. It is not her fault that what is asked is so little, but a supporting role in a Bond film is what most viewers now attach to her name, and it tells them almost nothing about what she could do. Shaka Zulu (1986) and more television followed, and by the mid-1990s she had largely stopped acting for property and writing.
So the career divides cleanly. The child and adolescent in period and fantasy dress, where an unforced quality carried her; then the grown woman used for glamour, where the material rarely gave her anything to play. If you want to see her, start with the Romanovs and stay for the second half. Of the business itself she has said that it is "a bit like watching paint dry, it's very slow and very very tedious", which is not the verdict of someone who missed it much, and on the evidence of the parts she was offered we can see why.
Biography
Fiona Elizabeth Fullerton is a British actress and singer. She was born on 10 October 1956 in Kaduna, Nigeria, and trained at Elmhurst Ballet School in Surrey. She made her film debut in Run Wild, Run Free (1969) and appeared as Anastasia in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and in the title role of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972).
Fullerton is known for her role as KGB agent Pola Ivanova in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985). She also appeared as Elizabeth Farewell in the television series Shaka Zulu (1986) and had earlier television work in Angels (1975). On stage she played Guinevere in a London revival of Camelot.
