The most famous men of the 70s fell under her charm. However, she was married only once and had a son at the age of 44.
Since she emerged from the sea with her mythical white dress in a scene from The Satanic Doctor No (2022 marks the 60th anniversary of the release of this film that began the James Bond saga), Ursula Andress has become one of the most S- women of the cinema. The first "Bond girl," who outshone everyone with her curves, natural blonde hair, and honey-colored eyes, was paid $5,000 for six weeks of shooting. Five years later, she played Vesper Lind in another of the most famous spy films, Casino Royale (1967), and her cachet was $200,000. The 31-year-old had multiplied her salary by forty...and her fame.
Ursula Andress was born in Ostermundigen, a small town in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, on March 10, 1936. Her mother was Italian and her father was German – he was a Nazi German diplomatic corps member and disappeared in World War II. At 16, she abandoned her land, gardening, and the women's school and traveled to Paris to take ballet, drawing, and sculpture courses. It was there that she met French actor Daniel Gélin. She was a minor and he was fifteen years older. Her mother denounced her daughter's escape with her French boyfriend, and Interpol went into action, ordering the search and capture of the lovers, who were already in Rome, sheltering at the home of a friend, the French filmmaker Roger Vadim (who later would discover Brigitte Bardot). Precisely in the capital of Italy Andress filmed her first film. A comedy titled An American to Rome. She was 18 years old and had already made peace with her mother.
She then met Marlon Brando. A friendship with some encounters that lasted for many years. It was he who prompted her to move to Hollywood, where she had a brief affair with Kirk Douglas. But her life had a love story in store for her with one of the stars, James Dean. "I was 19 years old and he was 24. His agent, Dick Clayton, called me to tell me that James wanted to meet me," the actress once confessed. “A few days later he came to see me at my house and we no longer parted ways. He fell in love with me immediately. During the months that our relationship lasted, he was very well-behaved. To him, I represented strength. He said that she was very different from the women she associated with. She couldn't stand Hollywood anymore and she wanted to leave America. Very soon he asked me to marry him. He was someone who suffered”.
She proposed to escape together aboard his Porsche 550 Spyder (the same one in which she was killed in 1955), but she did not accept. "To be honest, she wasn't as in love with Jimmy as he was with me," she admitted. Ursula had already met John Derek, to whom she felt a deep attraction. “When Paramount found out about my relationship with John, it was a scandal. They forbade me to see him again because not only was he married, but I was a minor. She just turned 21, and the actress said "Yes, I do" with Derek. The marriage lasted nine years. Some say that, who was later the husband of Linda Evans and Bo Derek, could not stand being overshadowed by the fame of her wife, while others attribute her breakup to her infidelities. 1963 she shared the lead with Elvis Presley in El ídolo de Acapulco. “They arranged a meeting for me with him and, to my great surprise, I fell prey to his charm. He was very polite, quite the opposite of what he imagined.
I told him that he hated rock and that I only liked gospel. He gave me about twenty unpublished songs that never made it to the market. He loved to cook for me when he went to his house. Elvis gave me a BMW 507 that I had stored in a garage for twenty years and left it for next to nothing to a mechanic who sold it at auction in 1995 for a million dollars. We were friends until the day he died." She worked with Frank Sinatra on Four Guys from Texas and at that time there were rumors of a brief affair between them. The most desired of the moment also bewitched the ugliest and most seductive man on the big screen, Jean-Paul Belmondo.
He was on the set of The Trials of a Chinese in China. A detail, he was still married to Elodie Constantin, the mother of his children. After Belmondo's divorce, they began to show themselves in public. He claimed that she was his soul mate, while the actress confessed to being "madly in love with him." “I am with him day and night, because of his wishes and his follies. We are totally for each other." The relationship was volcanic. They were madly jealous and their fights were famously scandalous.
“We love each other and we fight like crazy, but we also laugh a lot. She was climbing the stairs to see me. One day he caused a flood in a hotel so the firefighters broke the door of my room because I did not want to open it. After eight years, they parted on good terms. Since then, Ursula has prioritized doing short but highly-paid roles. Ryan O'Neal and Marcelo Mastroianni also fell at her feet.
A late Maternity of Ursula Andress
In 1978 she met Harry Hamlin, she was 43 and he was 28. They met together in Clash of the Titans (1981) and it was with him that she had her only child, Dimitri. In 1979 she transcended her meeting with Carlos Monzon when Ursula visited Buenos Aires for the inauguration of Regine's disco (later it was Le Club). The boxer became obsessed with her that night and followed her to where he was staying. And everything would have happened in the elevator. After the birth of her son –May 19, 1980–, the actress practically withdrew from the cinema. In 1982 she separated from Hamlin and a year later she found love again with Lorenzo Rispoli, her permanent partner with whom she lives in an 18th-century Italian country villa. Since 2001 she has been dedicated to promoting research against osteoporosis, a disease that she suffers from and that has plagued her for years. “I would need another hundred years to put an order in my life. I dream of a happy burial. One in the Neapolitan style, with weeping women following my coffin drawn by six black horses”. The wish of an icon of the golden age of cinema who turned 86 on March 19.
