Karin Dor (1938-2017)

Karin Dor

By Steve Green: German actress Karin Dor died November 6, aged 79. She starred in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice and the Alfred Hitchcock movie Topaz.  Genre roles include The Invisible Dr Mabuse (1962), The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle (1963), The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), Die Nibelungen (two-part movie, 1966/67), The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism (1967), The Monsters of Terror (1970).

6 thoughts on “Karin Dor (1938-2017)

  1. Gosh she was indeed in THE FACE OF FU MANCHU (Don Sharp:1965 filmed in Ireland) . I was in that film –as a little boy on a bike– for all of TWO seconds (48 frames) as an extra! In the section where Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee) arranges to have the Essex (fictional) coastal town of Fleetwick (my home town in Ireland actually) bombed from the air -with poison gas derived from the Tibetan black poppy (only lethal if below 0 degrees C). The weather the day Fu M arranged it showed (as in the script) the “Essex marshes as being below freezing point”. Filming took all day and Lee was not in any of my scenes (tho Nigel Green– on the big screen then in ZULU!– was). He advised he had just then finished another film with Michael Caine –coming out the following year– called THE IPCRESS FILE! best wishes.

  2. Glad to see the late Karin Dor mentioned here. Most international obituaries focus mainly on her turn as a Bond girl in You Only Live Twice (with horribly bleached hair – normally Karin Dor was brunette) and maybe on Topaz, but here in Germany she was so much more. She was the doe-eyed damsel in distress in several Edgar Wallace movies (many of which are at least borderline genre) and unmasked as the killer (to everybody’s surprise) in one of them. She damseled in distress some more in The Invisible Dr. Mabuse and The Face of Fu Manchu (pretty good, if you like politically incorrect mid 1960s horror). She was also in a German adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum. And of course, she was Ellen Patterson and Ribanna in the Winnetou movies of the 1960s. Later in life, she did a lot of TV and theatre work.

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