Jill St. John

Jill Arlyn Oppenheim entered university at fourteen. She had an IQ of 162, and her mother decided to change the family surname so Hollywood would not typecast her because of her Jewish roots. In 1949 she already appeared in the first television production of A Christmas Carol.

Her contract with Universal in 1956 guaranteed her a starting salary of 200 dollars a week. But her public image never matched her intellect. She spent much of the sixties playing naive women or romantic interests in lightweight comedies.

Tiffany Case's IQ

In 1963 she shot Come Blow Your Horn alongside Frank Sinatra. That role earned her a Golden Globe nomination and set her apart from the crowd of hopefuls. But her real commercial breakthrough came in 1971.

She was the first American to play a Bond girl. In Diamonds Are Forever, she played Tiffany Case (a red-haired diamond smuggler who ends up in a bikini aboard a cruise ship). Critics at the time were not kind to her performance.

The public thought otherwise.

During the filming of that movie, she earned 210,000 dollars. Much of that money went into real estate investments and her training as a chef. At that time, Jill St. John already knew that fame was a product with an expiration date.

And the bet on her financial independence paid off.

From the Sets to an Aspen Kitchen

Her personal life made more headlines than her films from the mid-1970s onward. She married heir Lance Reventlow and later singer Jack Jones. But her most stable relationship began with Robert Wagner in 1982.

They didn't marry until 1990. By then, she had stopped searching for the role of a lifetime. They moved to Aspen, and Jill focused on food, since she preferred the control of a recipe to the chaos of a film set.

In 1987, she published The Jill St. John Cookbook. It was not the typical cookbook from a bored celebrity. The recipes were complex and proved that her intelligence was still intact far from the spotlight of the big studios.

The industry forgot her, but she never complained.

In 2002 she accepted a small role in the film The Calling. It was one of her rare on-screen appearances after years of voluntary retirement. She took on the project for the interest of the script, not out of financial need, which she had been covered for decades.

Her last significant collaboration was in 2014 for the TV movie Northpole. She played Mrs. Claus opposite her husband, Robert Wagner. The shoot took place in various locations across Canada under the direction of Douglas Barr.