Pamela Salem, actress who played Miss Moneypenny opposite Sean Connery’s James Bond – obituary

Pamela Salem – Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

Pamela Salem, who has died at her home in Florida aged 80, was a British actress who worked busily on both sides of the Atlantic; in 1983 she played Miss Moneypenny opposite Sean Connery’s ageing James Bond in the “rogue” Bond picture Never Say Never Again.

Connery engineered her casting after they had worked well together in Michael Crichton’s period crime caper The First Great Train Robbery (1979). Pamela Salem found Connery ever genial and thoroughly unvain: she recalled that he would immediately remove his toupee when filming finished.

Never Say Never Again caused a stir as an “unofficial” Bond film, exploiting a copyright loophole to make use of characters owned by Eon Productions, and luring Connery into reprising the role he had retired from a dozen years earlier.

There were reports in the press that Lois Maxwell, who had flirted primly with 007 throughout two decades as Eon’s Moneypenny, had not taken kindly to another actress usurping her billet outside M’s office in a synthetic Bond picture. Pamela Salem rebutted the claims: “It was all absolute nonsense, and Lois Maxwell wrote a very nice letter to me.”

Like other Moneypennys, she found the role frustratingly deskbound: “it seemed everyone else went out to the Bahamas, but I was stuck in London.” But The Sunday Telegraph judged her “a decorous new Moneypenny” and the film received much better reviews than the Eon pictures of the period starring Roger Moore.

In 1988 Pamela Salem went on to a memorable six-month run in EastEnders. She played Joanne Francis, the well-heeled manager of a Walford wine bar that doubled as an illegal gambling den, and was responsible for inducting the popular character “Dirty Den” Watts (Leslie Grantham) into the world of organised crime, thereby precipitating his famous encounter with a lethal bunch of daffodils and departure from the series.

It was a welcome reunion for Pamela Salem, who did much voluntary work in prisons and had met Grantham some years earlier while he was serving time for murder; she had helped him to apply for drama school on his release.

Pamela Salem in 1981 as the evil Belor in the series Into the Labyrinth – United News/Popperfoto

Pamela Fortunee Salem was born on January 22 1944 in Bombay, where her father, who was Jewish, worked as a civil engineer. Her mother’s family came from Sri Lanka. Recalling that “India encourages everything creative”, she “wanted to be an actress from the year dot”.

After schooling in England she studied at Heidelberg University in Germany before going to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where her clipped colonial vowels were softened. Her career began in rep in York and Chesterfield.

In addition to much touring stage work she appeared in numerous television series in the 1970s, including The Onedin Line, Van der Valk, Blake’s 7 – “I played a High Priestess who met rather an unpleasant end with a spear sticking through her” – and The Professionals.

Pamela Salem as Herodias with Thomas Milian as Herod in Claude d’Anna’s 1986 film Salomé

In 1977 she played Toos, an ally of Tom Baker’s Doctor, in the Doctor Who serial “The Robots of Death” – “I had to wear a hat like half a bicycle wheel and a dress that was a definite disadvantage when trying to escape from those robots”. She returned in 1988 as a scientist opposite Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor in “Remembrance of the Daleks”, notable as the first serial in which a Dalek manages to ascend a staircase.

The 1980s saw Pamela Salem established as a villainess for a generation of youngsters in three series of the children’s fantasy Into the Labyrinth, in which she was the evil Belor, antagonist of Ron Moody’s noble sorcerer Rothgo. She was the French neighbour of expats Anton Rodgers and Julia McKenzie in the sitcom French Fields, and made a number of appearances in All Creatures Great and Small as Zoë Bennett, the wife of James Grout’s hard-drinking vet.

In 1983 Pamela Salem married the actor Michael O’Hagan, and they moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s before settling in Florida, where she proved a doughty friend of stray dogs. She appeared in US series such as The West Wing (as the British prime minister), Magnum PI and ER.

Pamela Salem during her time as the shady Joanne Francis in EastEnders – Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

In the cinema she romped in the salacious Joan Collins vehicle The Bitch (1979), and also appeared in Thirteen at Dinner (1985), Gods and Monsters (1998) and Down’s Revenge (2019).

Finding fewer roles in later life, Pamela Salem moved into stage and radio-drama production, and also produced documentary films with her husband. Latterly she reprised her Doctor Who roles in several audio spin-offs made by Big Finish. A great sci-fi enthusiast, in the 1990s she asked to be put on Pan Am’s waiting list for the first commercial flight to the moon, and was sent two tickets.

Pamela Salem’s husband died in 2017.

Pamela Salem, born January 22 1944, died February 21 2024

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