The Best James Bond: 12 Behind the Scenes Photos of Goldfinger, a 007 Classic Turning 60 This Year

Goldfinger is perhaps most famous for the demented way that the titular villain kills his aide-de-camp, Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton: He kills her by having her painted gold, which leads to her death by skin suffocation.

Above, Sean Connery ensures that the real Eaton isn’t suffering any skin suffocation despite her gold body paint. She seems fine.

For once, a Bond girl isn’t wearing the most revealing costume. Here’s Connery with Eaton and Bond creator Ian Fleming, who died the month before Goldfinger was released.

Connery and Honor Blackman, who plays, um, Ms. Galore, rehearse an infamous fight scene in the Goldfinger behind the scenes image above.

We’re not sure if we can safely type Ms. Galore’s first name, as our stories are syndicated to lots of different media platforms with lots of understandably sensitive filters. So…

Here’s Honor Blackman posing on a beach in a charming Goldfinger behind the scenes photo, demonstrating that film marketing was very different in 1964 than it is today.

The Bond girls, obviously, are known for for sometimes outrageous double-entendre nicknames that appealed to the lads who loved these movies. Again, it was 1964.

Sean Connery as James Bond with his true love: His iconic Aston Martin, one of the all-time most beautiful movie cars.

A fully restored Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 sold for $6.4 million in 2019. Auction house RM Sotheby’s said at the time that it included such features as “hydraulic over-rider rams on the bumpers, a Browning .30 caliber machine gun in each fender, wheel-hub mounted tire-slashers, a raising rear bullet-proof screen, an in-dash radar tracking scope, oil, caltrop and smoke screen dispensers, revolving license plates, and a passenger-seat ejection system.”

Harold Sakata, who played Oddjob, clowns around on set and shows he’s no bad guy behind the scenes. 

From left to right, actor-stuntman Bob Simmons, who played Bond in the gunbarrel sequence, Connery, and Nadja Regin, who played Bonita.

The gunbarrel sequence, of course, it the opening segment in the film in which Bond, wearing a hat, walks across the screen in profile and suddenly turns to fire his gun toward the audience as the Bond theme plays.

Eaton’s gold paint reportedly took 90 minutes to apply, but it was worth it: Her gold-painted image graced the cover of LIFE magazine as part of the promotional campaign for the film, the third of the 27 Bond movies.

If you’re a collector, her issue of LIFE is the November 6, 1964 issue.

She’s being painted above by makeup artist Paul Rabiger, who also worked on Bond films including Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and From Russia With Love.

Shirley Eaton is all smiles, even covered in gold paint.

Eaton, a British actress also known for the Carry On films, retired from acting in 1969 to devote herself to family, but in 1999 she release her autobiography, perfecly titled Golden Girl.

It was a bestseller, and she went on to release three more books.

Harold Sakata as Oddjob and Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger.

Orson Welles was among those considered to play Goldfinger, a gold tycoon who is obsessed with the soft metal, but he wanted too much money. (Shouldn’t that have made him even more qualified for the role?)

Fröbe, a German actor, was dubbed by actor Michael Collins, continuing something of a Bond tradition: Ursula Andress was similarly subbed in the original Bond film, Dr. No.

Tania Mallet, who played Jill’s sister, Tilly Masterson, poses for an amateur photographer named Sean Connery.

Mallet, and English actress and model who sometimes signed her name with two Ts, had an origin story straight out of a Bond movie: She was a descendent of Russian aristocrats on her mother’s side.

She had auditioned for the role of Tatiana Romanova in the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, but the filmmakers passed because of her British accent.

Ian Fleming, left, didn’t initially think Connery resembled the super-suave elegant James Bond of his novels, who of course resembled Fleming himself.

But he soon saw the appeal of the Scottish actor, and in one of his novels after Connery’s casting, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he even “responded to Connery’s cinematic Bond by putting some Scottish blood into him,” as Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an excerpt of which you can read here.

You’ll probably also love these images from Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, featuring Sean Connery and Ursula Andress.

Main image: Shirley Eaton in a Goldfinger behind the scenes photo released as part of the 1964 film’s promotional campaign.

Editor’s Note: Corrects headline, typos and main image.