Shirley Eaton (born January 13 1937) is a British actress who appeared in many British black and white comedies in the 1950s and onwards.

She was born in London and raised in the suburb of Harrow Weald. Throughout her career, she appeared with many of the top British male comedy stars from the period including Jimmy Edwards, Max Bygraves, Bob Monkhouse and Arthur Askey. Her female co-stars included Peggy Mount, Thora Hird and Dora Bryan among others.

Early roles include Three Men In A Boat (1956) and Date with Disaster (1957), starring with American Tom Drake. She also worked with The Crazy Gang in Life Is a Circus (1958) and with Mickey Spillane in The Girl Hunters (1963) in which Spillane played his own literary creation Mike Hammer. Later she starred in an entertaining version of Ten Little Indians (1965), co-starring American singer and actor Fabian. She also appeared in several early Carry On films, but did little TV work (she did appear in three episodes of The Saint opposite Roger Moore).

In 1957 Eaton participated in the British heat of the Eurovision Song Contest.

However, undoubtedly Eaton's most famous role was that of Jill Masterson in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger. Her character's death, being painted head to toe in gold paint and suffering "skin suffocation", became an iconic image of the film and inadvertently led to the creation of a popular belief concerning both the method of death and the actress's own fate. Eaton, very much alive, later appeared in a 2003 episode of the TV documentary series MythBusters to help debunk the belief. However, it should be said that Margaret Nolan, not Eaton, was actually the golden girl who appeared in the film's well known advertising campaign and title sequence; she, however, is also still alive.

In any case, the movie made Eaton a star; she even appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in her gold-painted persona. After Goldfinger, Eaton made a few more films including the notorious The Million Eyes of Su-Muru, before she retired from acting to raise her family.

Eaton expressed no regrets in giving up show business while at the height of her fame. In a 1999 interview with Steve Swires of Starlog Magazine, Eaton said: "A career is a career, but you're a mother until you die."

Luscious British stunner Shirley Eaton found gold-plated stardom in the mid-1960s, yet she was not considered an "overnight success". For nearly a decade she had been out and about as a seductive fixture in slapstick farce. While her sudden stardom elevated her into the Hollywood maelstrom of film offers, her profile as a quality actress did not continue to grow as anticipated. In fact, the dark-browed blonde bombshell quickly grew disillusioned and eventually decided to let it all go. Long before Beatrice Arthur and company came to TV, Hollywood had its original "Golden Girl"...literally! The London-born actress began on stage as a youth, making her debut at age 12 in "Set to Partners" (1949) and following it up the next year with Benjamin Britten's "Let's Make an Opera". First on TV in 1951, the pretty teen soon started appearing fleetingly in films as sexy window dressing (harem girls, etc.). Under contract to Alexander Korda in her early career, she found an encouraging break with minor parts in such comedies as Doctor in the House (1954) and Love Match, The (1955). She quickly rose to co-star status in equally the droll features Sailor Beware (1956), Three Men in a Boat (1956), Naked Truth, The (1957) and Doctor at Large (1957) opposite top talents Peter Sellers and Dirk Bogarde. Upon Korda's death in 1956, Shirley joined (for about two years) the Rank Organization. The down side of it all was that her physical attributes were overshadowing her acting talent. Every once in awhile she would relish playing a villainess in a drama, such as in Girl Hunters, The (1963), but, for the most part, she was the spectacularly beautiful foil playing it straight amidst the madcap antics of a "Carry On" movie. Trained also in ballet and singing, she was afforded a single chance to sing and dance on film in Life Is a Circus (1960) and managed to also grace the BBC in a few of their musical formats of the 1950s. In cinema, Shirley finally broke out internationally (and quite unexpectedly) when she played Jill Masterson, one of a bevy of scantily-clad beauties linked to titular archvillain Gert Fröbe in the "007" film Goldfinger (1964). And like many Bondian girls before and since, her character dearly paid for her furtive romantic clinches with hero Sean Connery. While Shirley had precious little time on screen, her memorable 24 karat gold death scene (she was painted head to toe in gold paint and "died" of skin suffocation) became the eye-catching draw for the movie. She was splattered everywhere -- on movie posters, in press junkets and in publicity campaigns. Despite the formidable attention the movie received in the form of Honor Blackman's high-kicking "Pussy Galore" character and Shirley Bassey's famous rendition of the title song playing the airwaves, it was Eaton's gilded visuals that became THE iconic image of not only the movie but the whole "007" phenomena. Shirley immediately capitalized on her sudden burst of fame by seeking work in Hollywood. Finally away from the constrictions of British farce, she earned a number of female leads in crime drama and rugged adventures. The results, however, were exactly the same. When not being swallowed up by the mesmerizing Ivan Tors scenery in such movies as Rhino! (1964) and Around the World Under the Sea (1966), she was being upstaged by the derring-do of a hirsutely handsome he-man ('Hugh OBrien in the classic whodunnit Ten Little Indians (1965)); the antics of a huge comedy star (Bob Hope (I) in Eight on the Lam (1967)) or the hammy delivery of a horror icon (Christopher Lee (I) in Blood of Fu Manchu, The (1968)). Shirley's film career ended on an unspectacular note with her participation as Sumuru, the ambitious leader of an all-woman's society called Femina, in both Million Eyes of Sumuru, The (1967) and Seven Secrets of Sumuru, The (1969). Underdone by its tame script, at the very least she was THE star. Disappointed by the predictable direction her career had taken, she ended her Hollywood stay by the time 1970 rolled by. Thereafter, she dedicated herself to her family and developed a writing style. The widow of writer Colin Lenton-Rome, she has two children. In 1999 she published her autobiography entitled Golden Girl and in 2006 marketed an "intimate diary" of poems. These days Shirley can still be glimpsed from time to time at film festivals that appreciate her cult celebrity.