Episode # 21 Guest Star: Luciana Paluzzi

- April 10, 2018

Luciana Paluzzi (born 10 June 1937, Rome, Italy) is an Italian American actress. She is best known for playing SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe in the fourth James Bond film, Thunderball. Paluzzi's very first film was an uncredited walk-on part in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). She went on to appear in many movies, most of which were made in her native Italy. In her early films, she is credited as Luciana Paoluzzi. She also played Rafaella, the wife of Brett Halsey's character, Ted Carter, in 1961's Return to Peyton Place

Paluzzi is best known as the villainess, Fiona Volpe, in Thunderball (1965). She had auditioned for the part of the lead Bond girl, Dominetta "Domino" Petacchi, but producers cast Claudine Auger, changing the Domino character from an Italian to a Frenchwoman and renaming her Dominique Derval. Initially crestfallen when informed she did not get the part, Paluzzi rejoiced when told her consolatory prize was the part of Volpe, which she said was "more fun to play". Paluzzi later claimed being a Bond girl was a double-edged sword. In the documentary Bond Girls Are Forever, Paluzzi expressed amazement at the level of fame, publicity, and recognition she received from Thunderball; but as a result of being in such an outlandish film, she felt she was taken less seriously as an actress when returning to the Italian film industry.

Paluzzi appeared in such films as Muscle Beach Party (1964) and Chuka (1967). She co-starred in the 1969 women in prison film 99 Women; and as a southern belle in the 1974 Hollywood drama The Klansman (with her voice dubbed by American actress Joanna Moore). In 1959–60, Paluzzi appeared with David Hedison in the short-lived espionage television series, Five Fingers. In 1962 she played a murderous wife in an episode of Thriller titled "Flowers of Evil". In 1964 she played the villainess in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as the seductive THRUSH agent Angela in the first-season episode "The Four Steps Affair" and in the movie version of the show's pilot episode, To Trap a Spy.

In 1980, Luciana Paluzzi married her current husband, American media mogul Michael Jay Solomon, a former president of Warner Bros International Television. The two resided at an exclusive clifftop estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Jalisco, Mexico, known as "Casa Dos Estrellas". The couple sold that estate in about 2005 to live in New York and Rome, to be close to family.

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