Honor Blackman, who played Bond’s Pussy Galore, dies

NEW YORK » Honor Blackman, the potent British actress who took James Bond’s breath away as Pussy Galore in “Goldfinger” and who starred as the leatherclad, judo-flipping Cathy Gale in “The Avengers,” has died. She was 94.

Blackman’s family said in a statement Monday that she died peacefully of natural causes at her home in Lewes, in southeastern England.

The honey-voiced Blackman first became a household name in the 1960s spy TV series “The Avengers.” She joined the show in the second season as Cathy Gale, the leather-wearing anthropologist with martial arts skills. Blackman departed the show for Bond before “The Avengers” was exported to America, but her performance solving cases opposite Patrick Macnee caught the eye of Bond producer, Albert R. Broccoli. She and Macnee also recorded the hit song, “Kinky Boots,” together.

But just as “The Avengers” was growing in popularity, Blackman departed it for the third James Bond film, playing Pussy Galore in 1964 s “Goldfinger.” In it, she makes an impression from the start, memorably introducing herself to Sean Connery’s just awoken James Bond.

“Who are you?” Bond asks.

“My name is Pussy Galore.”

“I must be dreaming,” he responds, smiling to himself.

Blackman was 39 and five years older than Connery when she landed the role of Bond’s love interest, and she long maintained the term of “Bond girl” didn’t apply to her. In the film, Pussy Galore is the leader of a group of women aviators enlisted by the villain Auric Goldfinger.

She uses judo (a skill carried over from “The Avengers”) to attack Bond and their foreplay is physical and combative. After they each flip one another into piles of hay, Bond holds her down to kiss her. Eventually, she relents.

Blackman considered Pussy Galore — a lesbian in Ian Fleming’s book — a kind of early feminist, and a different breed than the average Bond woman.

“In so many of the films, the girls just looked at James and fell flat on their backs,” Blackman told the magazine TV Times in 2014. “Yet Pussy Galore was a career woman — a pilot who had her own air force, which was very impressive. She was never a bimbo.”