Born Blanca Rosa Welter, her father was an executive with an important oil company and the future Linda Christian followed him from country to country: South Africa, Romania, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Palestine. This was beneficial in that the little girl - a very good pupil at school - was eventually able to speak seven different foreign languages...

Linda Christian, a 1940s Hollywood actress nicknamed "anatomic bomb" by Life magazine for her stunning looks and famous for her marriage to actor Tyrone Power, has died aged 87, her daughter said here Saturday.

Romina Power told journalists in Rome that her mother, who had been suffering from colon cancer, died in Palm Springs on Friday.

Born in 1923 in Mexico, Christian — whose real name was Blanca Rosa Henrietta Stella Welter Vorhauer — was known for playing Mara in the last Tarzan film starring Johnny Weissmuller in 1948.

She was also the first James Bond girl in the 1954 television adaption of "Casino Royale".

But she was perhaps most famous for her seven-year marriage to 20th Century Fox star Tyrone Power, with whom she had two children.