Tessa Prendergast

Tessa Prendergast (1928 - 2001), also known as Tessa Welborn, was a Jamaican actress, fashion designer, businesswoman, and socialite. A renowned beauty and movie starlet in the 1950s, she is best-remembered today as the designer of the taboo-breaking white bikini worn by Ursula Andress in the 1962 film Dr. No.

Marie Therese Prendergast was born in Kingston, Jamaica on October 17, 1928. Her father, Louis Prendergast, was a wealthy plantation owner who died while Tessa was in her infancy. Her mother later married Noel Nethersole, an Oxford-educated economist and star cricketer who, along with future Prime Minister Norman Manley, established the People's National Party. Her step-father served as Jamaica's minister of finance from 1955 to 1959, and founded the Bank of Jamaica. Several years after his death in 1959, his image appeared on the Jamaican $20 banknote.

Prendergast was raised in London, England. Although she would spend most of her life in Britain, she regularly visited Jamaica, and at times lived and worked there.

With her stunning looks and figure, Prendergast gained notice while singing and dancing at London's Pigalle nightclub. She began doing bit parts in British films, mostly in "exotic" roles, such as performing the Dance of the Seven Veils in the film Song of Paris. She caught the attention of Warner Brothers, with whom she signed in the early 1950s. She appeared as a Polynesian girl in His Majesty O'Keefe, starring Burt Lancaster, and then in a larger role in Manfish, an adventure film shot in her native Jamaica. She became best known, however, for her glamor photos in magazines and her "scandalous affairs", such as a widely publicized 1955 incident in Rome, in which King Farouk of Egypt and an unnamed Italian prince allegedly came nearly to blows in vying for her affection. Although known for her imperious temper and connections with European royalty, these stories were almost certainly exaggerated. In 1953 she had married American cinematographer Scotty Welbourne, with whom she had a child.

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