Honor Blackman, an actress who achieved fame as a beautiful pilot with Judo skills and a highly suggestive name in the 1964 James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” then went on to a long screen Career in her native England and abroad, has died at her home in Lews, in southeastern England. She was 94.
Her family announced her death in a statement released to the Guardian in London on Monday. She was a breast cancer survivor, having undergone a lumpectomy in 2003.
Ms. Blackman may have been unknown to American audiences when she played pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery as the dashing secret agent James Bond, but she had already become a star in Britain on television.
She joined the spy series “The Avengers” for its second season in 1962, replacing Ian Hendry as the co-star of Patrick Macnee who played John Steed, an almost painfully cultured British intelligence agent. Her character, Mrs. Cathy Gale, was an anthropologist who enjoyed martial arts and dressing head to toe in leather while saving the World from increasingly bizarre plots and conspiracies.
Honor Blackman was born on Aug 22, 1925, in London, the third of four children of Frederick Blackman, a civil-service statistician, and the former Edith Eliza Stokes. Her father was a crucial influence on her decision to pursue an acting career, she recalled. When she was a teenager, he gave her a choice of a bicycle or elocution lessons (he felt his own East London accent had held him back in life); she chose the lessons.
Ms. Blackman continued her screen acting career well into her 80s, including taking a small part as a glamorous party guest in “Bridget Jone’s Diary” (2001) and a recurring role on the classic British soap opera “Coronation Street” in 2004.
Her final movie was the 2012 horror-comedy “Cockneys vs. Zombies,” in which bank robbers unwittingly unleash an army of the living dead in East London. Her last screen role was in a 2015 episode of the British sitcom “You, Me & Them.”
