Margaret Lee

Margaret Lee (born Margaret Gwendolyn Box; 4 August 1943) is a British actress who was a popular leading lady in Italian films in the 1960s and 1970s. She is the mother of production manager/producer Roberto Malerba (from her marriage to Gino Malerba) and production manager/producer Damian Anderson. Early career Born in Wolverhampton, England, but raised in London, she was educated at the Italia Conti Theatre School in London, graduating in 1960. She moved to Rome shortly afterwards to pursue a career in films. Her film debut came in the sword and sandal adventure Fire Monsters Against the Son of Hercules (1962), where she played the female lead alongside Reg Lewis, but it was a string of popular comedies that initially made Lee a star in Italy. With a blonde, fluffy look modelled after Marilyn Monroe, Lee spent the first half of the 1960s appearing in numerous Italian comedies and parodies – several of which starred the popular comedic duo Franco and Ciccio. Few of these films received much, if any, distribution in English-speaking territories but they were highly successful in Italy, and made Lee a well-known film actress. Eurospy films Around the mid 1960s, Lee moved away from comedies and started appearing in a long line of Eurospy films, where she was frequently cast as sexy femme fatales. Her appearance also changed as she dropped the blonde Marilyn Monroe-inspired look and became a brunette instead. Some of the most famous Eurospy films Lee starred in were Our Agent Tiger (1965) by Claude Chabrol, Agent 077: From the Orient with Fury (1965) by Sergio Grieco and Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (1966) by Henry Levin. International career Lee's beauty and talent also caught the eye of international film producer Harry Alan Towers, who gave Lee wider international recognition by casting her in prominent roles in several of his all-star cast productions; starting with the British thriller Circus of Fear (1966), directed by John Llewellyn Moxey. Towers also cast Lee in the spy-comedy Our Man in Marrakesh (1966), directed by Don Sharp; the action film Five Golden Dragons (1967), directed by Jeremy Summers; the thrillers Venus in Furs (1969) and The Bloody Judge (1970), both directed by Jesús Franco; and finally in Dorian Gray (1970), directed by Massimo Dallamano.