Luciana Paluzzi is remembered for one part, and it deserves the remembering: Fiona Volpe in Thunderball (1965), the assassin who sleeps with Bond and tells him it changed nothing. Nothing she did afterwards is remembered half so well.
Fi1m perspective
Partway through Thunderball (1965), a red-haired woman gets out of James Bond's bed and tells him that it was pleasant and it changes nothing. Every woman in the series before her had gone soft at that point. Luciana Paluzzi's Fiona Volpe does not, and she says so to his face, in the sharpest scene Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins wrote for the film. Connery, who is visibly bored for long stretches of Thunderball, wakes up the moment she walks in and stays awake until she leaves.
We sat up too. It is a supporting part in a padded film, and it is the only part in it we still think about, because of the amusement in her eyes and the way she treats Bond as a job rather than a prize. It was, by her own account, the part she wanted. She read for Domino, was given Fiona instead, and called it 'more fun'. She was right. Claudine Auger got the lead and the film photographs her; Paluzzi got the villain and the film watches her.
The career around that scene is thinner than the scene suggests. She had been working since 1953, in small and uncredited roles in Italian and international films, among them Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), and in British pictures for Terence Young in the late 1950s, with a short-lived Hollywood television contract in 1959. Young brought her back for Thunderball and used her a third time in The Klansman (1974), where the voice you hear is not hers. Three films with one director is the nearest thing she had to a home.
After Fiona she was cast, again and again, as the dangerous woman in spy, action and exploitation films, and the films got smaller. She took the lead in The Green Slime (1968), a science fiction picture shot in Japan; she co-starred in 99 Women (1969), a women-in-prison film for Jess Franco; she appears in The Italian Connection (1972). She felt that the outlandishness of Thunderball meant Italian cinema took her less seriously when she went back to it. She stopped acting around 1978.
We have not reviewed those later films and will not pretend to a view of them. What we can say is that the thing she did in Thunderball, playing a woman who enjoys her work and is not for turning, was a thing the Bond films had not had before, and she did it without a wasted gesture. It is still there, in the middle of a film that runs too long, and it is worth the wait.
Biography
Luciana Paluzzi is an Italian actress, also credited as Luciana Paoluzzi. She was born on 10 June 1937 in Rome and began her career with an uncredited role in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). She studied naval engineering for two years in Milan.
Paluzzi appeared in Italian and international films and television from the 1950s to the 1970s. She is known for her role as Fiona Volpe in Thunderball (1965), as well as parts in The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), The Green Slime (1968), The Italian Connection (1972) and episodes of Bonanza and Hawaii Five-O.
