Honor Blackman played women who could put a man on the floor and then explain, without raising her voice, why he had deserved it. On television she was ahead of nearly everyone; in films she was too often asked to do less.
Fi1m perspective
The habit is the throw. Somebody in a Cathy Gale episode of The Avengers reaches for her, and a moment later he is on the floor and she is straightening her jacket. Blackman played it without triumph. The judo and the leather got the attention, but what made the character work was the face above them: level, faintly amused, not remotely interested in being liked. Our review of the series calls it firmness, the quality that stops Patrick Macnee's Steed from getting too comfortable, and that is exactly it. Steed is charm; Gale is the person not buying it, and the scenes are better for having one of each.
She had been working for fifteen years before the part arrived. Stage understudy work and film supporting roles from 1947, after elocution lessons and training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama; a supporting turn as Mrs Lucas in A Night to Remember (1958). Then The Avengers took her on in 1962 and she stayed until 1964, and in the same stretch she was Hera on Olympus in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Pussy Galore, pilot and adversary, opposite Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964). Nearly everything she is remembered for happened in those three years.
What works is that she never softens. Gale is an anthropologist who happens to be able to hurt people, and Blackman treats the second fact as no more remarkable than the first. She brought the same wit and the same spine to Galore, and she disliked the shorthand the role attracted: "I have never been a bimbo. Pussy Galore was quite a character. It was a feminist role." What does not work is what the industry did with her afterwards. Having twice played the woman who is not to be trifled with, she was asked to play her again in smaller rooms, and many of the film parts that followed were minor or routine. Television was kinder, with The Upper Hand running from 1990 to 1996, and there was a cameo as Penny Husbands-Bosworth in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), which is a long way from Olympus.
Watching the Gale episodes again, we found we had misremembered them as camp, and they are not. What struck us was how rarely she smiles at Steed and how much that does: every joke of his has to get past her first, and Macnee is funnier for the obstacle. The series later did the same thing with more polish, and Diana Rigg had the benefit of ground Blackman had already cleared. If you know only Peel, go back to Gale. It is the plainer version of the idea, and it is the one the others were built on.
Biography
Honor Blackman was an English actress and singer. She trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and began her career with stage and screen roles in the 1940s.
She played Dr Cathy Gale in the television series The Avengers from 1962 to 1964. Blackman appeared as Pussy Galore in the film Goldfinger (1964) and as Hera in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Other credits include A Night to Remember (1958), The Saint (1962), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and Cockneys vs Zombies (2012). She recorded the single “Kinky Boots” with Patrick Macnee. Blackman died on 5 April 2020.
