Moving to Hollywood at the age of 20, Lois Maxwell won the actress Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer for her role in the Shirley Temple comedy That Hagen Girl (1947).[3] In 1949, she participated in a Life magazine photo layout, in which she posed with another up-and-coming actress, Marilyn Monroe. It was at this time that she changed her surname from Hooker to Maxwell, a name borrowed from a ballet dancer friend. The rest of her family also took this name. Most of Maxwell’s work consisted of minor roles in B films. Tiring of Hollywood, she moved back to Europe, living in Rome for five years (1950–55). There she made a series of films, and at one point became an amateur racing driver. One of her Italian films was an adaptation of the opera Aida (1953), in which Maxwell played a leading role, lip-synching to another woman’s vocals and appearing in several scenes with a pre-stardom Sophia Loren. While visiting Paris, she met her future husband, the TV executive Peter Marriott; they married in 1957 and moved to London, where both their daughter Melinda and son Christian were born (in 1958 and 1959). She appeared with Patrick McGoohan in the British TV series Danger Man, as his accomplice in the 1959 episode “Position of Trust”. During the 1960s, Maxwell appeared in many TV series and in films outside the Bond series in both the UK and Canada, and was the star of Adventures in Rainbow Country in the 1970s.

Lois Maxwell also guest-starred in episodes of The Saint and The Persuaders!, both of which starred Roger Moore, and provided the voice of Atlanta for the Supermarionation science-fiction children’s series Stingray. She had a minor role as a nurse in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). In 1963, she played a machine gun-firing nurse in the series The Avengers (episode “The Little Wonders”, which was first aired on 11 January 1964). In 1965, Maxwell had a guest appearance in “Something for a Rainy Day”, an episode of the ITC series The Baron, as an insurance investigator. In 1973, Maxwell’s husband died, having never fully recovered from his heart attack in the 1960s. Maxwell subsequently returned to Canada, settling in Fort Erie, Ontario, where she lived on Oakes Drive. She spent her summers at a cottage outside of Espanola, Ontario, where she wrote a column for the Toronto Sun under the pseudonym “Miss Moneypenny” and became a businesswoman working in the textile industry. In 1994, she returned to the UK once again to be nearer to her daughter Daphne, retiring to a cottage in Frome, Somerset. Following surgery for bowel cancer in 2001, Maxwell moved to Perth, Australia, to live with her son Christian’s family. She remained there, working on her autobiography, until her death at Fremantle Hospital on 29 September 2007. Of his friend’s death, Sir Roger Moore said to BBC Radio 5 Live, “It’s rather a shock. She was always fun and she was wonderful to be with and was absolutely perfect casting […] It was a great pity that, after I moved out of Bond, they didn’t take her on to continue in the Timothy Dalton films. I think it was a great disappointment to her that she had not been promoted to play M. She would have been a wonderful M.”