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Ursula Andress: John Derek
built 633 days ago
The original Bond girl, Ursula Andress embodies everything sterotypical about an 007 counterpart. The same year, the Swiss actress appeared with Elvis Presley in 1963's "Fun in Acapulco" and with Frank Sinatra in "4 For Texas." Andress' affair with French New Wave actor Jean-Paul Belmondo ended her marriage to director John Derek. In 1981, Andress starred alongside Sir Laurence Olivier in "Clash of the Titans" and dated co-star Harry Hamlin, with whom she has a son. In 1997, she appeared in artist Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 5," part of his famous "Cremaster Cycle."
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Soon after, Ursula met John Derek, an actor ten years her senior. She stopped any professional activity after their marriage in 1957, buying out her Columbia contract, even if she hadn't shot any picture for the studio. To this day, it's still astonishing to admire Derek's taste in women, as his two future wives (Linda Evans and Bo Derek) looked almost exactly like his first one, by their figures and features. He was considered as a "Tony Curtis/Cornel Wilde" type, an handsome actor that never became a major star. But he was one of the first actor to became a director, mostly working out of mainstream projects.
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John Derek was one of the most handsome leading men of the Fifties but never became a major star, perhaps because he was always in the shadow of his first wife, Ursula Andress. But in the early 1980s, as a director and producer, he made a star of his third.
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In April 1965 "Playboy" published some photographs of Ursula taken by John Derek. The pictures were very stylish but they removed the mystery from the magnificent body which, in a white bikini, had so startled the world in "Dr. No". Now, instead of being this magical creature of unbelievable beauty, Ursula Andress was just another girl who had paraded her wares in "Playboy".
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Under the direction of then-Photo Director Vince Tajiri, Derek photographed Ursula exclusively for PLAYBOY on location for one of her films being shot in the Philippines. The couple divorced a year after this pictorial was published. Derek went on to wed Linda Evans and Bo Derek, who he ... photographed for the magazine. (It might be of passing interest that Derek's last three wives look remarkably alike.)
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