British postcard by Klasik Kards, London, no. 1593. Photo: Sean Connery and Molly Peters in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965).
Spanish postcard by Postal Oscarcolor, no. 462. Sean Connery, Luciana Paluzzi, Martine Beswick, Claudine Auger and Molly Peters in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965).
James Bond's physiotherapist
Molly or Mollie Peters was born as Vivien Mollie Rudderham in 1939 in Walsham-le-Willows, Suffolk, England. She was baptised Vivien Mollie, and Peter was her brother’s name. She never had a thought of a show business career when she left home and went to London, and after her shop girlfriends said that she should try modelling.
Voluptuous Peters started out as a pin-up and nude model and posed for men's magazines like 'Modern Man', 'Calvalcade', 'Ace', 'Parade' and 'Escapade'. She played a small part in the British historical comedy The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (Terence Young, 1965) starring Kim Novak, Richard Johnson and Angela Lansbury. The film, based on the 1722 novel 'Moll Flanders' by Daniel Defoe, ranked among the 13 most popular films in the UK in 1965. The film's director, Terence Young, spotted her on the set and offered her a screen test for his next film, the Spy film Thunderball.
The Bond producers chose her, and the natural brunette became blonde for the part. Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965) is the fourth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, starring Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. The film follows Bond's mission to find two NATO atomic bombs stolen by SPECTRE, which holds the world ransom to the tune of £100 million in diamonds under threat of destroying an unspecified metropolis. Molly Peters played one of the Bond girls, Patricia Fearing or Pat.
Pat is a physiotherapist who cares for James Bond while he is on holiday at her health clinic. He seduces her. They make love in a steam room, and she is later massaged by Bond while she's wearing nothing but a towel. 23-year-old Peters was the first Bond girl to be seen taking her clothes off on screen in the Bond series, though she was not completely naked. The erotic scene was considered offensive at the time and was toned down at the request of the British Board of Film Classification to avoid an X rating. Peters' voice was dubbed by Barbara Jefford. To promote the film, Peters appeared in Playboy, in the November 1965 issue. Her appearance was as part of a pictorial essay titled 'James Bond's Girls', by Richard Maibaum. Released at the very height of Bondmania, Peters travelled the world promoting Thunderball, most notably in South America.
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times liked the film. He felt that Bond "has a much better sense of humor than he has shown in his previous films. And this is the secret ingredient that makes Thunderball the best of the lot. (...) Thunderball is pretty, too, and it is filled with such underwater action as would delight Capt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau." Thunderball was exceptionally successful: its worldwide box-office receipts of $141.2 million (equivalent to $1,442,600,000 in 2025) exceeded not only those of each of its predecessors but that of every one of the next five Bond films that followed it.
German postcard. Photo: dpa. Sean Connery and Molly Peters in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965).
German postcard. Photo: P.A. Reuter. Sean Connery in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965).
A dispute with her agent
After Thunderball, Molly Peters appeared in films and on television during the 1960s, but her parts were limited. She had a supporting part in the Austrian-German-Italian crime film Das Geheimnis der gelben Mönch / Target for Killing (Manfred R. Köhler, 1966) starring Stewart Granger. It was shot between Maghreb, Yugoslavia and Rome. She had a part as a secretary in the British comedy Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (Jerry Paris, 1968) starring Jerry Lewis and Terry-Thomas in swinging London. The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Even the most diehard Jerry Lewis enthusiasts would be hard put to find anything to please them in this disastrous muddle of a film."
Molly played a barmaid uncredited in the British World War I action–drama Zeppelin (Étienne Périer, 1971) in Panavision and Technicolour. The film stars Michael York, Elke Sommer and Anton Diffring. Zeppelin depicts a fictitious attempt to raid Britain in a German Zeppelin to steal the Magna Carta from its hiding place in one of Scotland's castles or destroy it. Zeppelin was well received by the public, who viewed the Zeppelin airship as the real "star", but the critical reaction was not positive. Evening Standard thought it was "funny but not intentionally."
Molly Peters' final film was the tragi-comedy Nobody Ordered Love (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1972). Ingrid Pitt, in her last starring role, played Alice Allison, the alcoholic star of a new First World War movie entitled The Somme. The film director attempts to replace her with an up-and-coming starlet when a series of tragic events begins to unfold. Director Hartford-Davis had a falling out with Rank over the lack of promotion they were giving Nobody Ordered Love and stormed off with the prints to the States. The film is now considered lost. Unclear is whether and what role Peters played in the film. On television, she only appeared in episodes of the TV shows Armchair Theatre and Baker's Half-Dozen.
What went wrong with the once promising career of Molly Peters? According to the special edition DVD of Thunderball, Peters' short film career was the result of a dispute between her and her agent. The specifics of the disagreement were not revealed, other than according to Peters, her agent at the time of Thunderball held her to her contract agreement of representation because of the mega-successful box-office hit of the fourth James Bond film in 1965. It was only many years later, when the fame, the glamour and the chaos from the release of Thunderball had faded, that her contractual agreement ended; and so had any modelling and/or film prospects.
When she was young, Molly Peters gave birth to a daughter, whom she gave up for adoption. Peters married in 1972 and lived with her husband in Ipswich, Suffolk. She and her husband had a son, Aaron, who tragically died in 2013 whilst serving in the Royal Marines. “That has shattered my life,” she admitted to Matthew Field on the James Bond site MI6. “He used to take the mickey out of me, ‘Oh My Bond,’ he would say. He was in the Royal Marine Commandos. They write letters in case they die in service. He had written one for me in case anything happened to him. In it, he said how proud he was that his mother had been in a Bond film. That brought floods of tears.” In 2011, Molly Peters suffered a mild stroke. She died in 2017, at the age of 78, at Taunton Hospital, Somerset.
French postcard by Danjaq, LLC and United Artists, 2012. Photo: Sean Connery and Molly Peters in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965).
Dutch postcard. Photo: dpa. Sean Connery and Molly Peters in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965).
Sopurces: Matthew Field (MI6), Woody Anders (IMDb), Bosley Crowter (New York Times), Wikipedia (English and German) and IMDb.
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