Ursula

In her first starring role, as Honeychile Rider—the child-of-nature heroine of Dr. No—Swiss screen siren Ursula Andress emerged from the sea like a latter-day Venus, thus serving advance notice, to connoisseurs of comeliness, of her impending reign as the queen of contemporary cinema sex goddesses. Coming up quickly through the ranks of filmdom's celestial bodies, she received subsequent star billing opposite Frank Sinatra (Four for Texas) and Peter O'Toole (What's New, Pussycat?,) then secured her status as the screen's high priestess of pulchritude in the title role of She. Today, just three years from the date of her initial cinematic conquest as a Bonded beauty, Ursula is the acknowledged sex star ne plus ultra and a current able-bodied screenmate of such leading Lotharios as Marcello Mastroianni (The Tenth Victim), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Up to His Ears) and George Peppard (The Blue Max). Already the subject of the longest Playboy pictorial feature ever devoted to any one fair lady (She is Ursula Andress, June 1965), she makes a resplendent return this month in an up-to-date photographic report on her rapid ascent to the summit of international box-office acclaim. Even in her off-camera moments—such as the above between-scenes shots of the bikinied bombshell gamboling with first co-star Sean Connery and going it alone—Ursula gave early evidence of her future claim to a cinema queen's crown. Later likenesses of the unadorned Ursula—including the life-sized painting of her below, by artist Ben Stahl, which provided the Four for Texas sets with a most provocative prop—prompted one film producer to refer to her stellar anatomy as the "greatest example of Swiss architecture since the Alps."

Between takes for her forthcoming film, Up to His Ears, Ursula basked on a secluded palm-fringed beach on Malaya's Langkawi Island, while enjoying the pleasure of co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo's company. The latest in a laugh-laden line of Belmondo's screen adventure farces, Up to His Ears finds the man from Rio and the sensuous Ursula playing a pair of romantic cutups who hop all over the Orient trying to flee a troupe of hired assassins. The two cinema sex symbols start out on their trans-Asiatic safari—all the way from Hong Kong to the Himalayas and back again—as little more than friendly fellow targets, but by picture's end, they have heeded the call to each other's arms.

In an early-reel scene from Up to His Ears, Ursula serves a stintas a strip teuse in a Hong Kong night club (left), and while dutifully doffing her duds for the boys at stage-side, she understandably imbues the doomed and despairing Belmondo with a new zest for life—and liberties. Part of the same shooting that supplied Playboy with its June 1965 pictorial uncoverage of the previously hidden Andress assets, the above photo was taken by actor-director John Derek while on location in the Philippines for the filming of his forthcoming Once Before I Die—a Seven Arts production depicting the Japanese invasion of the islands—in which Ursula has a specially written-in starring role. Although she refused to do the nude scenes called for in the original scenario for She on the ground that "it's often sexier to keep your clothes on," the blonde beauty reversed her position in our pages soon after with the explanation that she was "not against nudity when it is used for a purpose and is done with a maximum of taste, style and class." Although cinemaphiles have since been granted increased exposure of Ursula's fetching frame, Playboy remains the only medium in which the screen's reigning sex queen has offered proofs positive of her regal charms.

As the comeliest of comic reliefers in Woody Allen's What's New, Pussycat?, Ursula parachuted onto the screen and subsequently brought out the best in Peter O'Toole's bedside manner (above)—no mean feat in view of the fact that he was already being pursued by such other sensualistes as Capucine, Paula Prentiss and Romy Schneider. With Latin lover Marcello Mastroianni in The Tenth Victim, however, it was strictly a case of kiss and kill when Ursula used her seductive wiles (below) to size upa new victim for a futuristic society that bestowed honors on ten-time winners in a coeducational game of major-league murder.

At the time these two previously unpublished photos (left and above) from her original Playboy shooting were taken, Ursula was somewhat ambivalent about her future in films. She told us then, "After She, I may neve make another picture; and then again, I may." Now a confirmed and dedicated movie actress, Ursula is currently starring in 20th Century's The Blue Max—a tale about the derring-do of World War One's air aces—in which cinematic candor is the order of the day as she and George Peppar (below) become the best of bunkmates.

Back from a hard day of dogfighting, aviator George Peppard (an amateur pilot, he did all of his own flying for the airborne sequences in The Blue Max) makes the most of being grounded with his glamorous leading lady. In what 20th Century moguls rate as "the most sensational love scene ever screened," unclad and uninhibited Ursula takes her high-and-mighty hero on one of filmdom's wildest flings, proving that war isn't all hell.