20 Things You Didn't Know About From Russia With Love (1963)
14. “I Haven’t Seen You For 6 Months.”
Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson) was introduced in Dr. No to help familiarise audiences with Sean Connery's James Bond.
When a sequel was greenlit, Terence Young and screenwriter, Richard Maibaum brought her back to the fold, showing her enjoying a romantic lunch in the countryside with Double-0 Seven before he is suddenly assigned to a mission in Istanbul.
Young and Maibaum envisioned this as a running joke in the series: Sylvia Trench would be shown romancing James Bond at the outset of each mission, only to lose him to the demands of Queen and country. Moreover, at the time, the Bond series was regarded as a finite franchise that would end once there were no more novels left to film and Double-0 Seven would then have left the British Secret Service and married Sylvia Trench.
However, Terence Young initially left the franchise when Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli declined to make him their producing partner and, when Guy Hamilton came aboard to direct Goldfinger, the idea of Sylvia’s return was discarded.
Although Young later directed Thunderball (1965), Sylvia Trench remained absent. By that time, Ian Fleming’s 1963 novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had set up Bond’s marriage for the filmmakers, but Sylvia's return was still on the cards for years to come, as Teri Hatcher's role in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) was originally meant to be that of Sylvia Trench.