Actress; Born November 12, 1943; Died April 29, 2008. Julie Ege, who has died aged 64, was a major star of the British film industry in the 1970s. She presented an image of exotic sexuality and helped pioneer the fashion for nudity in the comedies of the time.
After serving as a Bond girl in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), the tall, Norwegian former beauty queen was able to draw on personal experience to play an au pair in the Marty Feldman comedy Every Home Should Have One (1970). In the first half of the 1970s she was ubiquitous in British big-screen comedies, such as Up Pompeii (1971), The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins (1971), Rentadick (1972), Not Now Darling (1973), Percy's Progress (1974) and The Amorous Milkman (1975) and The Alf Garnett Saga (1972).
Born Julie Dzuli in the coastal town of Sandnes, in 1943, Ege began modelling in her teens. After a brief, early marriage to a farmer, she moved to Oslo, won the Miss Norway contest, worked as an au pair in England, returned to modelling in Oslo and made her film debut with a small role in a Norwegian film in 1967. Her second husband encouraged her to pose naked for Penthouse magazine, which apparently helped secure her a part in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
But it was Every Home Should Have One that really catapulted her to stardom in Britain.
Hammer hoped a role as a sexy cavewoman in Creatures the World Forgot (1971) would do for Ege what One Million Years BC (1966) had done for Raquel Welch, turning her into a screen icon, but the film flopped.
Ege continued in comedies and also in occasional horror films for several more years, before giving up acting and returning to Norway. The comedies fared badly with reviewers at the time, but have been reassessed to some extent by younger critics.
However, the horror films have an even more passionate following. They include Craze, The Mutations and Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (all 1974).
By the mid-1970s her screen career was virtually over.
She returned to her native Norway, appearing in The Rocky Horror Show, and then quit acting to become a nurse.
She is survived by two children.
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