Pamela Salem, Miss Moneypenny in ‘Never Say Never Again,’ Dies at 80
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Pamela Salem, who portrayed Miss Moneypenny in Never Say Never Again opposite Sean Connery in his final turn as James Bond, has died. She was 80.
Salem died Wednesday in Surfside, Florida, according to Big Finish Productions, for whom she participated in several audio productions.
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“Whenever there was a Big Finish recording for her, she’d fly in from Miami on her own steam, without fuss or fanfare, and appear at the studio armed with the warmest smiles, the biggest hugs and often presents,” producer David Richardson said in a statement.
For the BBC’s Doctor Who, Salem played the sandminer pilot Lish Toos on 1977’s “The Robots of Death” and Professor Rachel Jensen on 1988’s “Remembrance of the Daleks.” She reprised both roles for Big Finish in the audio drama series The Robots and radio spinoff series Counter Measures.
Salem also portrayed the evil sorceress Belor on the 1981-82 ITV kids series Into the Labyrinth and the organized crime family member Joanne Francis on the BBC soap Eastenders for two seasons (1988-89). And in Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998), she was the mother of Frankenstein director James Whale (played by Ian McKellen).
Salem had made her big-screen debut opposite Connery in The Great Train Robbery (1978), and she said he recommended her to 007 producers for the iconic part of Moneypenny, the secretary to M, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6, in Never Say Never Again (1983).
“I had seen Moneypenny before, of course, in the earlier films played by Lois Maxwell,” she said in a 1984 interview with Double-O-Seven magazine. “At first [the media] tried to stir things up between us — it was all absolute nonsense, and Lois Maxwell wrote a very nice letter to me, and I contacted her, and they had to drop it eventually because they realized we were friends.
“I owe the part to Lois in fact because she established the role so beautifully in everyone’s minds. As soon as you mention the name Moneypenny, people automatically think of Lois.”
Irvin Kershner’s Never Say Never Again, from Warner Bros., was one of two “unofficial” Bond films not to be made by Eon Productions.
Pamela Fortunee Salem was born on Jan. 22, 1944, in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. She attended Heidelberg University in Germany and the Central School of Speech in London and did repertory theater in Chesterfield and York.
She started showing up on British TV on such series as Out of the Unknown, The Onedin Line, Man at the Top and Gene Barry’s The Adventurer before playing Emily Trent in The Great Train Robbery.
Her first work for Doctor Who was as a voice of Xoanon in 1977’s “The Face of Evil.”
Salem’s résumé also included work on the British shows Blake’s 7, The Tripods, All Creatures Great and Small and French Fields and on such U.S. shows as Magnum, P.I., ER, The West Wing — as fictional U.K. Prime Minister Maureen Graty — Party of Five and Big Love.
Salem, who moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s and then to the Miami area, was married to Irish actor Michael O’Hagan from 1983 until his death in November 2017.
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