Honor Blackman, ‘danger-woman’ of the Sixties as leather-clad Avengers star and Bond girl – obituary

Honor Blackman, the actress, 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 had taken small parts in films before she joined the cast of the cult television spy-fi caper in 1962. The show had begun a year earlier with Patrick Macnee – as the debonair secret agent John Steed – playing a supporting role to Ian Hendry.

But when Hendry left and Macnee was promoted to the lead, producers took the decision – radical for the time – of pairing him 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 the first danger-woman to appear on the nation’s television screens and it was the actress herself who shaped the character. 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 father-in-law, Tony Booth, who, she recalled, was so “stroppy” in rehearsals she taught him a lesson by knocking him out cold.

The role made Honor Blackman a star, profiled under headlines such as “Sex Kitten in Black Boots”, and described as “blowing out picture tubes all over England”.

It gave her such physical confidence that she published a tie-in instruction manual, Honor Blackman’s Book of Self Defence (1965), while the leather look gave rise to the term “kinky boots”, inspiring her and her co-star Macnee to make a recording of that name that briefly reached the top five 26 years after its 1964 original release.

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 Honor Blackman in the public imagination. In his Goldfinger novel, Ian Fleming described the character as having “pale, Rupert Brooke good looks with high cheek-bones and a beautiful jawline. She had the only violet eyes Bond had ever seen.”

In the film, Honor Blackman was unusual that in the course of being “cured” of her sapphism she got 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 Honor Blackman received a large post-bag 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 particular, was not only the first British television action heroine, but the first in the world, treading a path that would be followed by Cagney & Lacey and numerous others.

One critic described her character Cathy 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, Honor Blackman was born in Plaistow, east London, on August 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. In the Blackman home, she recalled, “praise was rarely meted out and my father was the kind of person who whacked me round the face when I first put on lipstick.”

When she was still young the family moved to west London and Honor attended Ealing High School. Briefly evacuated early in the war, she was sent to live with a family where 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 at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama 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, and briefly considered becoming a games teacher. 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’s critic WA Darlington praising 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 (1948), 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 on £100 a week. The same year she married Walter Sankey, an electrical engineer.

She appeared in Fame is the Spur (1947), A Boy, a Girl and a Bike (1949) and Diamond City (1949), but her career stalled briefly following a nervous breakdown which coincided with the break up of her marriage in 1956. In 1958 she had roles in Square Peg (with Norman Wisdom) and A Night to Remember (with Kenneth More). 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!”

Back in Britain she appeared in Life at the Top (1965), Shalako (1968), A Twist of Sand (also 1968), The Last Grenade (1970), The Virgin and the Gypsy (also 1970), Something Big (1971) and The Cat and the Canary (1978). But as she admitted: “Mostly, when one gets a notice to say a film is going out on TV one thinks, ‘My God, why didn’t they drop it into the sea?’”

Her best films include Jason and the Argonauts (1963, with effects by Ray Harryhausen), in which she played the goddess Hera, and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), in which she played a family friend.

Honor Blackman returned to the West End in 1966 as Susy Henderson in Wait Until Dark at the Strand Theatre and later roles included Margaret in The Exorcism, Elsa (The Countess) in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music, Mrs Millamant in Congreve’s Way of the World, Ariadne in Shaw’s Heartbreak House and Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie . In later life she went on tour with a series of one-woman shows.

On television Honor 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 Lib-Dem supporter and a staunch republican, Honor 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 which she lost when the fund went bust in 2000. Afterwards she was prominent in the campaign for its members to be given compensation.

Honor 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.

Honor Blackman, born August 22 1926, death announced April 6 2020