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Honor Blackman, Bond's Pussy Galore, dies at 94

Associated Press

   NEW YORK - Honor Blackman, the potent British actress who took James
   Bond's breath away as Pussy Galore in Goldfingerand who starred as the
   leather-clad, judo-flipping Cathy Gale in The Avengers,has died. She
   was 94.

   Blackman's family said in a statement Monday that she died peacefully
   of natural causes at her home in Lewes, in southeastern England.

   The honey-voiced Blackman first became a household name in the 1960s
   spy TV series The Avengers.She joined the show in the second season as
   Cathy Gale, the leather-wearing anthropologist with martial arts
   skills. Blackman departed the show for Bond before The Avengerswas
   exported to America, but her performance solving cases opposite Patrick
   Macnee caught the eye of Bond producer, Albert R. Broccoli. She and
   Macnee also recorded the hit songKinky Bootstogether.

   But just as The Avengerswas growing in popularity, Blackman departed it
   for the third James Bond film, playing Pussy Galore in 1964's
   Goldfinger.In it, she makes an impression from the start, memorably
   introducing herself to Sean Connery's just awoken James Bond.

   "Who are you?" Bond asks.

   "My name is Pussy Galore."

   "I must be dreaming," he responds, smiling to himself.

   Blackman was 39 and five years older than Connery when she landed the
   role of Bond's love interest, and she long maintained the term of "Bond
   girl" didn't apply to her. In the film, Pussy Galore is the leader of a
   group of women aviators enlisted by the villain Auric Goldfinger. She
   uses judo (a skill carried over from The Avengers) to attack Bond, and
   their foreplay is physical and combative. After they flip each other
   into piles of hay, Bond holds her down to kiss her. Eventually, she
   relents.

   Blackman considered Pussy Galore -- a lesbian in Ian Fleming's book --
   a kind of early feminist, and a different breed than the average Bond
   woman.

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