Zena Moyra Marshall was born on January 1, 1926, in Nairobi, Kenya into a family of English, Irish and French ancestry, and after her father’s early death and her mother’s remarriage she was raised in Leicestershire, England. She was educated at St. Mary’s School, Ascot, and later trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Her interest in acting matured during her teens when she toured with
the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA)1 during World War II, and after RADA she was taken on by the Rank Organisation, where her “exotic” good looks caused her to be cast often in ethnically-tinged supporting roles rather than as a conventional ingénue. She first appeared on screen in the 1945 film Caesar and Cleopatra in a minor uncredited role.
Movies
- 1945 Caesar and Cleopatra
- 1947 The End of the River
- 1948 So Evil My Love
- 1948 Snowbound
- 1948 Miranda Secretary
- 1948 Good-Time Girl
- 1948 Sleeping Car to Trieste
- 1949 The Bad Lord Byron
- 1949 Marry Me!
- 1949 Helter Skelter
- 1949 The Lost People
- 1949 Meet Simon Cherry
- 1950 Operation Disaster
- 1950 So Long at the Fair
- 1950 Soho Conspiracy
- 1950 Dark Interval
- 1951 Hell Is Sold Out
- 1952 Blind Man’s Bluff
- 1952 The Caretaker’s Daughter
- 1953 Deadly Nightshade
- 1953 Men Against the Sun
- 1954 The Scarlet Web
- 1954 The Embezzler
- 1955 Three Cases of Murder
- 1956 Bermuda Affair
- 1956 My Wife’s Family
- 1957 Let’s Be Happy
- 1960 A Story of David: The Hunted
- 1962 Crosstrapp
- 1962 Dr. No
- 1962 Backfire!
- 1962 The Guilty Party
- 1963 The Switch
- 1964 The Verdict
- 1965 Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
- 1967 The Terrornauts
Over the next two decades she played in a succession of British films and television shows—often in “foreign” character parts—until her most internationally-recognised role as the Eurasian double agent Miss Taro in the first James Bond film Dr. No (1962). Her exotic charm and screen presence led to further roles, including Countess Ponticelli in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965).
TV
- 1950 The Adventures of Sir Percy Howsey (Short)
- 1952 The Inch Man
- 1952 Sunday Night Theatre
- 1953 Your Favorite Story
- 1954 Liebelei (TV Film)
- 1955 Saber of London
- 1956 Colonel March of Scotland Yard
- 1957 O.S.S.
- 1958 African Patrol
- 1958 Dial 999
- 1958 The Invisible Man
- 1960–1965 The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre (2 episodes)
- 1960–1964 Danger Man (3 episodes)
- 1962 Sir Francis Drake
- 1962 Richard the Lionheart
- 1962 Man of the World
- 1962 The Scales of Justice
- 1963 The Human Jungle
- 1963 The Sentimental Agent (2 episodes)
- 1964 Ghost Squad
- 1965 Dixon of Dock Green
- 1965 Public Eye
- 1966 Court Martial
Her final film appearance came in the science-fiction movie The Terrornauts (1967), after which she retired from acting and settled into domestic life. In her personal life she was married three times: first to bandleader Paul Adam from 1946 until their divorce in 1953, then briefly to Alexander “Reggie” Ward, and finally in 1991 to film-producer Ivan Foxwell, who predeceased her in 2002.
She did not receive any major industry awards, but her role as Miss Taro secured her a lasting place in film history as the first femme fatale “Bond girl.” Zena Marshall died of cancer in London on Friday, July 10, 2009, at the age of 83.
She was survived by her husband Ivan Foxwell (until his 2002 death) and it appears she had no publicly known children or other immediate survivors.
Footnotes
- The Entertainments National Service Association, known universally as ENSA, was a British wartime organization founded in 1939 under the aegis of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes to provide morale-boosting entertainment for military personnel at home and across all major theaters of World War II, sending actors, musicians, comedians, dancers and variety performers to barracks, bases, field hospitals, naval stations, and even front-line positions; despite chronic shortages of equipment, dangerous travel conditions, and performances often given in improvised or bomb-damaged venues, ENSA became a cultural lifeline for millions of service members, launching or sustaining the careers of many British entertainers and creating a vast mobile infrastructure of show troupes whose legacy evolved after the war into the Combined Services Entertainment organization that continued the mission in later military conflicts. ↩︎
Further Reading
Sources
- Wikipedia “Zena Marshall” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zena_Marshall
- IMDB “Zena Marshall(1925-2009)” https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0551243/
