Honor Blackman - `most of the Bond girls have been bimbos`
29-Mar-2007 • Bond News
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I have got further with Pussy Galore than James Bond managed. Did he ever share a narrow bed with her in a dressing room at the Lyric Theatre? Maybe in his sexiest dreams. Honor Blackman - who played the gun-wielding, judo-chopping pilot with the bonkers name in Goldfinger - can still talk incessantly about Sean Connery, even though that was four decades ago. "Nobody will ever be as good as Sean," she tells me. Honor, you have to work on your pillow talk.
Not even the steel-pecced Daniel Craig? Blackman's voice goes down an octave: "He's a very good actor. But that film was so terribly violent." I love the way she says "terribly". For her 15th birthday, Blackman's father allowed her to choose between a bicycle or elocution lessons. She didn't choose the bike.
"Sean was a very fortunate gentleman because he was so good at the part," she says. "Everybody thinks he was playing himself, but Bond isn't exactly an Edinburgh milkman. He's a fine figure of a man, sexy beyond belief." Enough about ageing Edinburgh milkmen. We're on this bed (she's at one end, I'm at the other) to discuss the role of Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret, which Blackman is taking over from Sheila Hancock this Monday. She has two weeks to rehearse before she joins the cast. Tough gig.
Few 79-year-olds would take on such a workload: eight shows a week for six months ("Heavens don't remind me!" she elocutes impeccably). "I've resisted being in the West End for 20 years, since I appeared in Nunsense. But I saw Sheila and thought, 'I want to do that.'" Why? "When I put my foot on the stage, I come alive and that's it. It's always a bang. It's thrilling, I think, theatre. Thrilling." But theatre isn't enough. She points at my notebook, urging me to report her appeal for more work: "I'd quite like to do a TV series."
This is a woman who first worked in the West End more than 60 years ago. Her film debut was in Fame is the Spur, where she was killed in a horse-riding accident. Younger readers will remember her in Coronation Street as Rula Romanoff, the man-eater who may or may not have a had a claim to the Russian throne, or as a sexy granny trying to seduce Joe McGann in the 1990s sitcom The Upper Hand. She has been married twice, is currently fancy-free, and her one-woman show, Word of Honor, still captivates theatre-goers. None of this is enough.
Shouldn't she be curled up with a large gin and a plate of sponge fingers watching Noel Edmonds on afternoon TV? "That would be rather boring, wouldn't it?" she says.
The day we meet, Andrew Lloyd Webber announces that he feels responsible for the fact that his 23-year-old protegé Connie Fisher had trouble playing Maria in The Sound of Music, eight shows a week for 98 performances. Isn't she a wimp? "Heavens, no," says Blackman. "That role is a terribly big sing. Fraulein Schneider is a wonderful role for me, but it's not a big sing. Only three or four numbers. She's a woman of great character who's suffered a lot." Does she remind you of you? "A little. She's marvellous for me because I can look like an old bag if I want to. Mostly, I get cast as a glamour puss, you see."
That said, her role does include the showstopping What Would You Do? It's the song of an ageing Berlin landlady who loves the Jewish Herr Schultz. Blackman will sing, in her husky voice: "With the clock running down,/ What would you do?/ The young always have the cure:/ Being brave, being sure and free./ But imagine if you were me. Alone like me ... " It rarely leaves a dry eye in the house. Least of all Blackman's.
"It's a killer, that number, because it's so relevant," she says. "Bloody war every-where. It's terribly upsetting. The musical is fun, but the message all the way through is look what these bloody governments do to us. It must have been terrible to live in Berlin in the 30s ... and now we're causing thousands of people weekly to die in Iraq because we want oil."
Blackman is that rare thing, a thinking, Lib Dem-supporting former Bond girl. "Most of the Bond girls have been bimbos. I," she says imperiously, "have never been a bimbo." She turned down a CBE in 2002. "I don't know how that story got out, but it did. I never told anyone about it." Why didn't you accept? "Because I'd have been a hypocrite." She's a member of Republic, The Campaign for an Elected Head of State. Why? "We're supposed to be a democracy and we, quite shamefully, are not. Princess Anne is worth a lot of money, though, because she's serious and witty." What about the Queen? "I don't think she's moved with the times."
Blackman, though, has. She even stooped to perform in reality TV. I saw her last November, in the public gallery of Kingston crown court: she was below in the jury box, along with Jeffrey Archer, Stan Collymore, Michael Portillo, Chris Tarrant's wronged wife Ingrid and others whose names I forget. They were serving on a celebrity jury on BBC2 show The Verdict. Screened last month, it dramatised a fictional rape trial and required the celebs to decide whether two men were guilty as charged. Did she enjoy herself? "Not exactly. When we announced our not guilty verdict, the girl playing the alleged rape victim cried out - and it went right through me. It just showed why there are too few convictions for rape."
But there was something about The Verdict that made her laugh. One of the defence briefs reminded her of Mr Teddy Bear. As you'll no doubt recall, Mr Teddy Bear was a ruthless assassin who appeared in an episode of The Avengers, the 1960s adventure series. "He lured me to his place and was going to kill me!" recalls Blackman. This was the same evening we met Blackman for the first time as Mrs Cathy Gale - the widowed, catsuit-clad anthropologist who practises judo with the bowler-wearing sleuth John Steed. When Steed tries to sneak a kiss, she flattens him. What's not to like? You can keep your Diana Riggs and Joanna Lumleys.
Blackman gave all this up for the chance to play Goldfinger's pilot in the 1964 Bond film: "I walked away at the wrong moment. They were just going from black and white to colour, they were starting to get real film money."
How did you get to be Pussy Galore? "I was very, very hot at the time." Oh Honor, you still are! "Thank you. I looked all right. I could do the judo." What's more, she and Macnee even had a hit single, entitled Kinky Boots. Bond producer Cubby Broccoli wanted her to play Pussy after seeing her in The Avengers, imagining her as the ballsy babe Bond would love to break. "Do you want to play it easy, or the hard way?" she says pointing a gun at Bond, as he emerges from the airplane lavatory. Pussy came to be Blackman's career-defining role.
Any regrets about your career trajectory? "One. Peter Brook asked me to play Juliet at Stratford, but I had just signed a contract for a film which was rubbish. My agent should have known. After that, I got contracted for two years to Rank as a film actress and that meant I was never going to be taken seriously as a classical actress. I'd love to have played those roles."
But this is no time for regrets. The show must go on! Time for one more story before Blackman gets fitted for her costume. "Remember Irene Handl?" Of course - the late, great English TV and film actor. "She was doing TV and a young excitable director decided to explain a new way of filming he'd devised. She let him carry on for a while and then said, 'Excuse me, I think you've mistaken me for someone who gives a fuck.'" Blackman cackles. And then she leaves me alone on the bed. You wouldn't want to mess with her.
Cabaret is at the Lyric Theatre, London. Box office: 0870 890 1107.
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