National Post (National Edition)
Judo-kicker was early inspiration to women
Actress Honor Blackman, who has died aged 94, was once described as “the permissive society’s first sex goddess” for her television performance as the leather-clad, judo-kicking Cathy Gale in The Avengers, and as Pussy Galore (also leather-clad) in the 1964 Bond film Goldfinger.
She starred in the cult TV spy-fi caper from 1962 to 1965. The producers took the decision — radical for the time — of pairing James Steed (Patrick Macnee) with a female partner who was more than a match for him and the villains with whom they did battle every week.
Cathy Gale was shaped by the actress herself. She wore black leather, according to Macnee, because her trousers kept splitting when she inflicted her judo kicks on the baddies, and she took up judo, she recalled, “because the script just got so boring. It always said, ‘Cathy reaches into her handbag for a gun’.”
On the whole the actors she assaulted took their punishment in good part, one exception being Tony Blair’s fatherin-law, Tony Booth, who, she recalled, was so bad tempered in rehearsals she taught him a lesson by knocking him out cold.
The role made Blackman a star, profiled under headlines such as Sex Kitten in Black Boots, and described as “blowing out picture tubes all over.” It gave her such physical confidence that she published a tie-in instruction manual, Honor Blackman’s Book of Self Defence (1965).
But it was her role as Pussy Galore — the bisexual flying ace holding her own in a sexually charged battle of wits with Sean Connery — that defined Blackman in the public imagination. In his Goldfinger novel, Ian Fleming described the character as having “pale, Rupert Brooke good looks with high cheekbones and a beautiful jawline. She had the only violet eyes Bond had ever seen.”
In the film, Blackman was unusual that in the course of being “cured” of her sapphism she went to bed with the secret agent not once but twice, and she stood out from the normal run of simpering bikini birds in representing something of a challenge to 007.
Although Blackman received many letters from male admirers, she received more fan mail from women inspired by her portrayal of strong female characters who use their sexual allure to exercise power over men. Cathy Gale, in fact, trod a path that would be followed by Cagney & Lacey and numerous others. One critic described Gale as a “safety valve for the rage felt by thousands of women at the fraud that appoints them the weaker sex.”
One of four children, Blackman was born in London on Aug. 22, 1925 and in later life admitted that she might have acquired some of her natural aggression from her father, a First World War veteran and Civil Service statistician.
Briefly evacuated early in the war, she was sent to live with a family where, unlike at home, demonstrated affection was the norm, recalling that “it was such a revelation to be appreciated when for my own father nothing I did was ever good enough.” Later she volunteered as a motorcycle dispatch rider, taking secret packages across town during air raids.
To please her father she chose elocution lessons over a bicycle for her 16th birthday to “smooth away” her Cockney accent, but the following year she left home, after their quarrels became intolerable.
She got a job as a Civil Service clerk, but after winning the Poetry Society Gold Award in a recitation contest in 1945, she decided instead on a stage career.
She made her West End debut in 1946 as Monica Cartwright in The Gleam at the Globe Theatre, The Daily Telegraph praised her “delightfully fresh and natural” performance.
But her career took a decisive turn in 1947 when she turned down an invitation from Peter Brook to play Ophelia at Stratford, because she had already signed up for a role in Daughter of Darkness, an obscure film melodrama about a murderous Irish maid. Her refusal effectively brought an end to her early stage career, and by 1948 she was under contract to Rank. The same year she married Walter Sankey, an electrical engineer.
Her career stalled briefly following a nervous breakdown, which coincided with the breakup of her marriage in 1956.
In 1958 she had roles in Square Peg and A Night to Remember. But in 1959, she moved to television in a supporting role in the series Four Just Men. Three years later she successfully auditioned for Cathy Gale.
Goldfinger marked the high point of her screen career. A post-Bond stint in Hollywood to make the thriller Moment to Moment (“Her loneliness, his hunger … so vulnerable, so violent it could only be lived moment to moment!”) proved fleeting. “It didn’t turn out to be a very good film,” she recalled, “which is a pity because I was terrific in it!”
Her best films include Jason and the Argonauts (1963), in which she played the goddess Hera, and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), in which she played a family friend.
Blackman returned to the West End in 1966. In later life she went on tour with a series of one-woman shows.
On television, Blackman was rarely out of work, appearing in such series as The Pursuers, The Saint, Armchair Theatre, Colombo, Dr. Who, The Upper Hand and Midsomer Murders, although it was not until 1990 that she found another signature role, playing Laura, the glamorous, man-eating granny in the ITV sitcom The Upper Hand, which clocked up 95 episodes during its seven-year run.
A staunch republican, Blackman declined a CBE and disapproved “strongly” of Sean Connery for accepting a knighthood, saying that she felt it was wrong to accept a title from a country “and then pay absolutely no tax towards it.”
Still beautiful in old age, in 1997 she published a self-help manual, How to Look & Feel Half Your Age for the Rest of Your Life, though she continued to work into her late 80s partly because she had to. She had a pension with Equitable Life that she lost when the fund went bust in 2000. Afterwards she was prominent in the campaign for its members to be given compensation.
Blackman’s second marriage, to the Crossroads actor Maurice Kaufman, was dissolved. She is survived by their two adopted children, a son and a daughter.
ONE CRITIC DESCRIBED (THE HONOR BLACKMAN-PORTRAYED CATHY)
GALE AS A ‘SAFETY VALVE FOR THE RAGE FELT BY THOUSANDS OF
WOMEN AT THE FRAUD THAT APPOINTS THEM THE WEAKER SEX.’
— ON BLACKMAN’S BOLD ROLE IN THE TV SPY-FI SERIES THE AVENGERS