Domino Vitali

Background

In the novel she is born Dominetta Petacchi in Bolzano, schooled at Cheltenham Ladies' College and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art until her parents' death in a train wreck sends her home to Italy, where she acts under the stage name Vitali and becomes the mistress of Emilio Largo, whom she calls her guardian. Bond meets her in Nassau, where she stays on Largo's yacht Disco Volante and believes he is on a treasure hunt. At first she snubs Bond, but later confides that she is trapped like a bird in a gilded cage. When Bond proves that Largo had her brother Giuseppe killed after he hijacked a bomber for SPECTRE, she agrees to spy on the yacht with a geiger counter, is caught and tortured with a cigar and ice cubes, then escapes and shoots Largo through the neck with a spear gun as he is about to kill the weakened Bond.

In the 1965 film her surname became Derval to reflect Auger's nationality. Bond frees her foot from coral while swimming off Nassau, they lunch on the beach, and later make love in the water before he tells her that Largo killed her brother François, a French pilot assigned to NATO, to steal a Vulcan bomber and its two bombs. She spies for Bond, is captured and tortured, escapes, kills Largo with a harpoon in the back, and jumps clear with Bond before the yacht explodes; a CIA B-17 lifts them away on a sky hook.

Never Say Never Again makes her Domino Petachi, openly Largo's lover, whom Bond meets posing as a masseur at a Monte Carlo spa. Largo auctions her off as a slave after catching her with Bond; rescued with Felix Leiter's help, she spears Largo underwater, and the film ends with Bond intending to retire with her. Robert Caplen counts Auger's Domino among the submissive heroines of the early films, and Basinger went on to a decade as filmdom's foremost sex symbol.