OHMSS James Bond Girl Angela Scoular (1945-2011)

By: Anders Frejdh

Published:
2011-04-12

Angela Scoular On Her Majestys Secret Service

Angela Scoular, the actress who played Agent Buttercup in the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) and Ruby Bartlett in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), has passed ayway.

Ms. Scoular was the second wife of Carry On star Leslie Phillips.

Her qualifications as a Bond girl are obvious in OHMSS when she becomes Bond's (George Lazenby) first conquest, after writing her room number in lipstick on his inner thigh. "I used to hate chicken," she tells 007. "Used to make me break out. It was all over. You'd be surprised where."

She met Leslie Phillips in 1970 on the set of Doctor in Trouble (in which his character chases her character aboard an ocean liner). They met again in 1976 when they were both in the same play. She was pregnant at the time with a son by another actor, while Leslie Phillips's first marriage to Penny Bartley had foundered in the 1960s following his affair with the actress Caroline Mortimer. They began living together, but at first there was no question of marriage. When Penny was crippled by a stroke, Leslie Phillips was "pulled back into the frame" by his children and he and Angela helped to care for her until her death in a house fire in 1981. They married in 1982.

Despite Phillips's on-screen reputation as a lothario, theirs was a happy marriage. Angela Scoular went on to appear in several more films, stage productions and television series, notably as the sex-mad Lady Agatha Shawcross in the television series You Rang, M'Lord? (1988-93). But during her early years as an actress she had struggled with anorexia and later on she suffered from severe clinical depression which, according to her husband, meant that she lost her ability to face an audience. It was "difficult to be a character actress when you were a sex symbol", he observed.

Angela Scoular was born in London on November 8, 1945 and encouraged in her ambitions to be an actress by her aunt, the actress Margaret Johnston.

She began her screen career in the mid-1960s, appearing in the long-running police drama No Hiding Place and taking a bit part in Ian McKellen's adaptation of David Copperfield, before going on to appear in her first feature films, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967, with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren), Casino Royale and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968).

On television she appeared in series such as The Avengers, Penmarric, Coronation Street and As Time Goes By, and was Cathy in a 1967 television adaptation of Wuthering Heights. On stage she starred in Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular, at the Criterion Theatre (1974); appeared in a production of Hamlet at the Cambridge Theatre (1971); in Joseph Caruso's Little Lies at the Wyndham (1983); and in Peter Shaffer's White Liars and Black Comedy at the Lyric Theatre (1968).

She is survived by her husband and son.

Photo above:
Angela Scoular with George Lazenby during filming of the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service © 2011 Rex Features.

Angela Scoular's obituary published in The Telegraph on April 13, 2011:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/8448951/Angela-Scoular.html

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OHMSS James Bond Girl Angela Scoular (1945-2011)

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