(22 August 1925 - 6 April 2020)
The English actress Honor Blackman, who has died aged 94 of natural causes, was a strong-willed and often outspoken woman who became a very popular actress in the theatre and on film and television. She will be best-remembered for her role as judo expert Cathy Gale in The Avengers TV series and for Pussy Galore in the third James Bond film, Goldfinger (1964). Born, one of four children, in Plaistow, East London, to a civil servant statistician and his wife, Honor first became a civil servant and then a courier during World War II. Before that her father had offered her either a bicycle or elocution lessons on her fifteenth birthday. She chose the latter and gained a place at the Guildhall School of Speech & Drama. Her diction became her strong point in that she always spoke clearly, commandingly and had perfect enunciation. She made her professional debut in the West End in the mid-1940s before being cast (uncredited) in her first film, Fame Is the Spur (1947), the Boulting Brothers picture with Michael Redgrave. A contract with the Rank Organisation followed and she appeared in Daughter of Darkness with Maxwell Reed, A Boy, a Girl and a Bike with John McCallum, The Alien Corn segment of the Somerset Maugham portmanteau film Quartet with Dirk Bogarde, So Long at the Fair, also with Bogarde, and Green Grow the Rushes with Richard Burton. A trip to Hollywood saw her in MGM’s Conspirator with Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor.
Blackman was kept busy during the 1950s in a mixture of films and television including Basil Dearden’s The Rainbow Jacket, Roy Baker’s Titanic film A Night to Remember with Kenneth More, The Square Peg with Norman Wisdom and quite a few B-pictures, too. On TV she was in Danger Man, The Saint and, of course, forty-three episodes of The Avengers. Then came Goldfinger opposite Sean Connery, after which she was in more A-pictures such as The Secret of My Success, Jason and the Argonauts, Life at the Top, Moment to Moment, A Twist of Sand and Shalako, a British ‘Western’ with Connery and Brigitte Bardot, which she counted as the worst experience of her career.
Of her later films, The Virgin and the Gypsy with Franco Nero, Something Big with Dean Martin, To Walk With Lions with Richard Harris, Bridget Jones’s Diary with Renḗe Zellweger, Reuniting the Rubins with Timothy Spall, and I, Anna with Charlotte Rampling were probably the most interesting.
She made a single record of ‘Kinky Boots’ with her Avengers co-star Patrick Macnee and an album of love songs called Everything I’ve Got. After leaving The Avengers in 1964 she wrote Honor Blackman’s Book of Self-Defence, and in her last years toured her one-woman shows on famous women, both wayward and dishonourable. Blackman herself was a wayward, no-nonsense woman with a strong personality – she thought that Margaret Thatcher as a role-model politician should have employed more women in her cabinet. She was married first to the businessman Bill Sankey and then to the actor Maurice Kaufmann. Both marriages ended in divorce and Kaufmann died in 1997. With Kaufmann she adopted a daughter, Lottie, and a son, Barnaby. Honor Blackman refused the offer of a CBE in 2002, claiming she was a Republican.
MICHAEL DARVELL
