Nadja Regin
Nadja Regin, born Nadezda Poderegin, was a Serbian actress who began in Yugoslav films in 1949 and then built a second career abroad. By the fifties she was working internationally, and through the sixties she was a familiar face on British television, in Danger Man, Maigret, The Saint and The Benny Hill Show.
She is remembered now for a quirk of scheduling. She appears in two consecutive James Bond films as two entirely different women: as Kerim's mistress in From Russia with Love, and the year after as Bonita in Goldfinger, the dancer in whose eye Bond catches the reflection of the man coming for him. That second scene is over before the title sequence starts and it is one of the images people carry away from the film. Both parts are small, both are the sort of role the early Bond pictures handed to European actresses, and she is very good in them.
Before all that she had appeared in the wartime comedy Don't Panic Chaps in 1959. Her later life went somewhere else entirely: she wrote, and she worked as a publisher, which is a rarer second act than the archive footage of her in The Incredible World of James Bond would ever suggest.
Movies (4)
Where to start with Nadja Regin
Goldfinger is where to start and it takes about two minutes: the pre-title sequence, the reflection in the mirror of her eye, the reason a bit part turned into a piece of series lore.
From Russia with Love is the better film and gives her a little more to do, and the two are worth watching back to back purely to see how fast the franchise recycled a good face. Don't Panic Chaps is the outlier, a modest British comedy that shows what she was doing before the Bond machine found her. The Incredible World of James Bond is a promotional artefact rather than a film, useful only if you want proof of how thoroughly the series was mythologising itself by 1965.