CommemorationAlumna and actress Pamela Salem died
The colorful international community of Heidelberg alumni is one prominent member poorer: British actress and alumna Pamela Salem, who played “Miss Moneypenny” in Sean Connery's last James Bond film “Never Say Never Again” (1983), died on 21 February 2024. She had studied in Heidelberg in the 1960s before transferring to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Born in Bombay, India, in 1944, the British actress died one month after her 80th birthday in Florida in the USA, where she had lived since the 1990s with her husband and fellow actor Michael O'Hagan, who died in 2017. After a short period of study at Heidelberg University, Pamela Salem trained as an actress in London and went on to appear in more than 65 film and television productions in the UK and the USA, including "All Creatures Great and Small", "The Tripods", "EastEnders" and "Emergency Room".
In 1983, she took on the one-off role of secretary Miss Moneypenny, who appears in almost all James Bond films and whose flirtations with the secret agent are a staple of the film series – even if her desire for a rendezvous always remains unfulfilled. According to media reports, Pamela Salem said in an interview that Sean Connery, with whom she had already played in the 1979 film "The First Great Train Robbery", had recommended her to the producers of "Never Say Never Again". The remake of the James Bond film "Thunderball" (1965), which was preceded by legal disputes and in which Sean Connery took on the role of the secret agent again twelve years after his last assignment, was not produced by the production company of the official Bond series, so that not only the musical James Bond theme and the 007 pistol logo could not be used, but also the characters Moneypenny, M and Q were cast with different actors than usual. And so the hour of Pamela Salem struck.
