Helga Brandt, played by Karin Dor, is a minor villain and a henchman of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. She is Number 11 in the SPECTRE hierarchy and poses as a secretary to Mr Osato, a SPECTRE operative posing as an industrialist.

Karin Dor as Helga Brandt.

Bond first meets Brandt (whose first name is never mentioned in the film) when he comes to meet Osato. She and Osato arrive via helicopter. After being introduced to Bond, she offers him a glass of champagne, which he politely turns down.

When Bond leaves, Osato orders Brandt to kill ‘Mr Fisher’. Later at the Kobe docks, Bond is captured and taken to see her on board the freighter Ning-Po. Knowing that she will be killing Bond later, she allows herself to be seduced by him, pretending to defect to his side. During the “interrogation”, 007 lies saying that he is an industrial spy and offers Helga $150,000 to help him escape back to Tokyo. He intends obtaining this kind of money from the value of Osato’s recipe for creating monosodium glutamate, which is worth twice this amount.

The next day, while travelling in a Meyers 200, however, she parachutes out after dropping a magnesium flare (disguised as a tube of lipstick) onto the floor, leaving Bond to try and control the diving plane, narrowly escaping before the plane blows up after an emergency landing. Later at Blofeld’s volcano lair, the villain calls Brandt and Osato to his quarters. At first, Blofeld accuses Osato of failing to kill Bond but, displeased with Number 11’s failures, Blofeld feeds her to his school of piranhas while she walks onto the trapdoor bridge suspended over the pool leading to Blofeld’s quarters.

According to Karin Dor, who is a natural brunette, the producers wanted a “blonde German girl (to play Helga Brandt) but they ended up with me”. As a compromise, they dyed Dor’s hair red for the film, turning Brandt into something of a Fiona Volpe clone.

Even though there was no Helga Brandt in the novels, Brandt was the name of Emilio Largo’s mechanic in the novel Thunderball.

See also:

• Bond girls
• Bond henchmen