Honor Blackman talks more about her role as Pussy Galore, `they would not let me be a lesbian in the film`

Honor Blackman has talked more about her role as Pussy Galore to the Sunday Herald.

"I sometimes do resent being called a Bond girl, because Pussy Galore was a character I would like to have played in anything. Most Bond’s women fall on the floor in front of him. Pussy Galore never did.”

In Ian Fleming’s original novel, of course, the character was written as a woman’s woman, won over by Bond’s rough brand of heterosexuality.

“Oh yes,” she says. “But they wouldn’t let me be a lez in the film. The only little nod they gave to lesbianism was allowing me to call my [all-female] crew Joe, and Biff, and names like that.”

Blackman never took the film very seriously, or the trouble caused by the character’s overtly “metaphorical” name – many journalists were too embarrassed to even say it out loud, and some accused her of shamelessness because she didn’t feel the same way. And she admits she lost interest in the Bond movies when Connery gave up.

“I wish you wouldn’t ask about that, but I’ve only seen a couple of the others. I can’t help thinking that Sean was perfection, so once it changed I wasn’t very interested. He had the right wicked twinkle. You could believe he would leave the bodies by the wayside and not worry. The word you would never attach to Sean would be ‘nice’.”

Unlike Connery, though, Blackman was never given room to reshape her image after Bond.

“I do get shot at for saying this, but if you establish a glamorous persona, lots of other things go out the window. And so I haven’t done a lot of the work I would like to do. I can say I’ve been lucky in the work I did get, mostly because of the way I looked, but I wasn’t the first choice for any classics, that’s for sure.”

Blackman didn’t always want to be an actress. Even after her father bought her elocution lessons for her 15th birthday – thinking she might go further in life without her natural-born Cockney accent – and after her voice coach encouraged her to go on to drama school, she still found it hard to believe that “people actually acted for a living, and raised families on those earnings”. While she studied the craft for fun, she also worked as a filing clerk for the Home Office, and fully expected to follow her father into the civil service.

“I was the best clerk in the place, because I was accustomed to memorising lines. All the men would come and ask Ms Blackman for their files. And not just because of my efficiency, I suspect, ha ha.”

In the dark days of the second world war she volunteered as a motorcycle dispatch rider, and freewheeled around London through the blitz. “I was christened Top Gear Tessie, I had a whale of a time. You could hear the air raid sirens, but you had to get somewhere, so you just went for it. Too young, too stupid.”

When the world settled down a bit, Blackman found she could make a living on the stage, rising from understudy to leading parts, and on to pretty-girl roles in cheap movies like Daughter Of Darkness. Back then, casting directors were unapologetic about putting faces before talents. Blackman, a little nostalgic, can’t completely disapprove.

“I know how this sounds,” she says, “but nowadays you can have any kind of atrocious accent, and look like the back of a bus, and still get employed. It’s good that looks aren’t as important as they used to be, but this job was much more glamorous once. We used to get the stage door johnnies armed with flowers and champagne and boxes of cigarettes. Now everyone is trying to be the boy or girl next door, and it’s utterly boring.”

Blackman, by contrast, became the girl with the black leather outfits and lethal judo skills. Her role as Cathy Gale in the first two series of The Avengers established a new kind of female creature for the 1960s – “she was pure, she was bright, and she could defend herself”. The show was big enough for the producers to cash in with the goofy novelty single Kinky Boots, sung by Blackman and a tuneless Patrick McNee (“That awful song,” she says. “My poor children couldn’t raise their heads on the way to school.”) Blackman threw herself so hard into the martial arts that she once knocked out guest star and professional wrestler Jackie Pallo. By the time she got the part in Goldfinger, flinging Connery around the barn in their fight scene was “easy-peasy lemon-squeezy”.

Between Cathy Gale and Pussy Galore, Blackman is still celebrated on fan websites as a definitive swingin’ 1960s chick, but that’s not how she remembers it herself. She didn’t even remember meeting The Rolling Stones until her daughter recently produced an old photograph.

“People always talk about the 1960s,” she sighs, “but I was so busy a lot of it passed me by.”

After that, like Blackman says, she wasn’t offered any classics. She appeared with Connery again in the woeful western Shalako, and turned up in scrappy British horror movies like To The Devil A Daughter, in which her character is stabbed through the head with a steel comb by a naked Satanic nun.

“Oh good God,” she says, having forgotten that film until just now. “All I can say is, I had to feed my children.”

And more recently, her poise and variety have been effectively wasted in everything outside her own one-woman show – a frisky grandma role in lamentable ITV sitcom The Upper Hand, twinkling cameos in Bridget Jones’s Diary and the forthcoming Colour Me Kubrick. But there’s still time for someone to recognise how rare she is, and exploit her again to full effect.

“I know I should be a little old lady,” says Blackman, “yet I just can’t manage to become one. There aren’t many parts for somebody of my years who isn’t a little old lady. So obviously, someone should write one.”

Thanks to `` for the alert.

Discuss this news here...