In the early 1960s, her career bogged down in British second features, Lois Maxwell suffered a personal blow when her husband, Peter Marriott, had a serious heart attack. They had two small children and she needed work to support the family. After badgering producers she was offered a part in the first film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

Making her screen bow in Dr No, Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny was the attractive, lovelorn secretary of Bond’s secret service boss, M, and usually the recipient of flowers when Bond called in at M’s office. Almost inevitably she would tick Bond off for being late, while harbouring romantic designs on him that were never reciprocated.

Maxwell played Miss Moneypenny in the first 14 Bond films and was the only cast member to be in all 14, the Bond role having passed from Sean Connery to George Lazenby and Roger Moore. Although the commercial success of the cycle gave Maxwell celebrity, it was estimated that in the films she spoke fewer than 200 words and was on screen a total of one hour.

Nor did Miss Moneypenny make her rich. Maxwell started on £100 a day, modest by film standards, and the fee did not substantially increase. Her final outing as Miss Moneypenny came in 1985 in A View to a Kill. By now the producer Cubby Broccoli had decided that at the age of 59 it was time for Maxwell to give way to a younger actress. She accepted this ageism with good grace.

Maxwell was born Lois Hooker in Ontario, Canada, and grew up in Toronto. Her father was a schoolteacher and her mother a nurse. She danced from the age of ten and in 1942 joined the wartime Army Show. She was 15 and had to lie about her age to join the Canadian Women’s Army Corps to get the part. The show toured Canada before coming to Britain in 1943.

While in London she got in to RADA, where a fellow student was a future James Bond, Roger Moore. She made her film debut in the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death in 1946, only for her part to end up on the cutting room floor. She subsequently appeared on the London stage in a Noël Coward play, Our Betters.

On this scanty evidence she was offered a contract by Warner Brothers and went to Hollywood in 1947 when she was 19. She was featured by Life magazine in a spread on two of Hollywood’s most promising starlets. The other was Marilyn Monroe. Maxwell began at Warners with That Hagen Girl (1947), in which she played Shirley Temple’s schoolteacher.

Maxwell’s time in Hollywood proved to be short and unfruitful. After landing only small parts in B-pictures, she quickly secured release from her Warners contract, but did no better at Columbia and in 1948, frustrated by the standard of work she was being offered, she sailed for Europe.

In Britain she had a small part in Corridor of Mirrors (1948), a melodrama which introduced Maxwell to Terence Young, who was to direct the first three Bond films. She then spent the early 1950s in Rome, where she made a couple of films with Sophia Loren, before returning to the British cinema and marrying Peter Marriott, a studio production executive, in 1957.

On screen she was busy but never a star. A rare leading part came in the low-budget sc-fi picture Satellite in the Sky (1956), and Terence Young directed her again in Kill Me Tomorrow (1957). In the early 1960s she appeared in two more notable films, Stanley Kubrick’s version of Lolita and Robert Wise’s horror picture, The Haunting.

By now she was well into her long stint as Miss Moneypenny, but she occasionally took time out for other films, such as the Agatha Christie thriller Endless Night (1971). In 1979 she returned to Hollywood for the romantic comedy Lost and Found, but after A View to a Kill she virtually retired from the screen.

When her husband died in 1973, she moved to Canada, settling in Toronto where she became a businesswoman, running her own publishing company. For 14 years she wrote a column for the city newspaper, which she signed Moneypenny.

In 1994 she moved back to Britain and appeared regularly at James Bond conventions and dinners. Later that decade she emigrated to Perth, and then Fremantle, in Western Australia, where her son lives.

She is survived by her daughter and son.

Lois Maxwell, actress, was born on February 27, 1927. She died on September 29, 2007, aged 80