Honor Blackman

Honor Blackman: Judo, Leather and Equal Footing

When the producers of *The Avengers* needed a way for a woman to hold her own in a fight scene, it was the actress herself who supplied the answer: judo. Honor Blackman was thirty-seven, a decade past the age at which British leading ladies were supposed to have peaked, and she went to the Budokwai in London to learn how to throw grown men onto a studio floor. She earned a brown belt. Within two years she was throwing Sean Connery.

Plaistow, a Boxing Father, and a Dispatch Rider's Motorcycle

She was born on 22 August 1925 in the East End — Canning Town by some accounts, neighbouring Plaistow by others — to Edith Eliza Stokes and Frederick Blackman, a civil service statistician and a strict disciplinarian who taught his daughter to box. The lesson took in more ways than he intended. At seventeen, after he hit her for wearing makeup, she hit him back and left home. Her brother Ken died of a brain haemorrhage in his early thirties.

She was educated at Ealing County Grammar School for Girls and entered the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz. The war gave her a job that suited the temperament better than the training did: she rode a motorcycle as a dispatch rider for the Home Office. Her first professional theatre work was as an understudy in *The Guinea Pig* at the Criterion.

Rank Starlet, Wet Parts

Her film debut came in 1947, a non-speaking role in *Fame Is the Spur*. She was a Rank starlet, though not — as is often repeated — a product of the Rank Charm School, and the studio system found little for her beyond what one obituarist bluntly called the "wet" parts: decorative, compliant, forgettable. She appeared opposite Dirk Bogarde in *Quartet* (1948) and in the Titanic drama *A Night to Remember* (1958). For fifteen years the British screen could not work out what to do with an intelligent woman who looked like that.

The private cost was heavy. She had married a businessman, Bill Sankey, at twenty — a man, she later said, much like her father — and the marriage collapsed after an illegal abortion nearly killed her. At twenty-nine she suffered a nervous breakdown, spent four weeks in hospital and five years in therapy.

Cathy Gale, and the Cobwebs Kicked Away

Dr Cathy Gale, whom Blackman played on *The Avengers* from 1962 to 1964 across fifty-two episodes opposite Patrick Macnee, was an anthropologist, a widow, and a fighter — and the fighting was the point. Television heroines to that date had been rescued. Gale was not. Clad in tight leather, she competed with men on an equal footing and won, and the writing let her be dry rather than shrill. The *Sight and Sound* obituary credited her with kicking away "the cobwebs of British screen femininity," bringing "natural intelligence and wry humour" to a line of strong-willed, indomitable women.

She left when the scripts began to repeat themselves. She was, at that point, one of the most popular actresses on British television and had become a star in her late thirties, which almost never happened.

Pussy Galore at Thirty-Eight

Albert R. Broccoli cast her in *Goldfinger* (1964) precisely because of Gale. His reasoning was commercial and correct: "The Brits would love her because they knew her as Mrs Gale; the Yanks would like her because she was so good." She was thirty-eight, older than her leading man's usual co-stars by a wide margin, and she took flying lessons at Biggin Hill to make the pilot credible. The judo throw she lands on Bond in the barn remains one of the most charged moments in the series — a fight scene doing the work of a seduction scene.

The same year, she and Macnee recorded "Kinky Boots," a deadpan novelty single that sank without trace and then, absurdly, became a hit in 1990. A 1960s headline had already labelled her "the permissive society's first sex goddess," a phrase she spent the next fifty years politely dismantling.

Refusing to Be a Bond Girl

The rest was a long, busy, unglamorous professional life of the kind British character actresses earn rather than inherit. She played Laura West, a glamorous and predatory grandmother, in the ITV comedy *The Upper Hand* from 1990 to 1996, and turned up in *Doctor Who*, *Coronation Street*, *Casualty*, *Bridget Jones's Diary* and *Hotel Babylon*. On stage she did Anouilh's *Mademoiselle Colombe* at seventy-four, a six-month West End run as Fräulein Schneider in *Cabaret* at eighty-one, and Tennessee Williams; she toured a one-woman show, *Dishonourable Ladies*, built around history's femmes fatales. She published a book in 1996 with the frank title *How To Look And Feel Half Your Age For The Rest Of Your Life*.

She married the actor Maurice Kaufmann in 1961; unable to have children, they adopted Barnaby and Lottie, and divorced in 1975 as her career rose and his fell. She stayed single afterwards by preference. A committed Liberal Democrat and a republican, she refused a CBE in 2002 on principle and publicly criticised Sean Connery for his tax exile. At ninety she attacked the "ridiculous obsession" with the ages of women in Bond films and asked that actresses stop being filed under "Bond girls" and be called women and actresses instead. Her regret, stated plainly, was that "everyone thought of me as a glamour puss. And I wasn't offered classic roles or Shakespeare, which I'd like to have done."

Why Honor Is Called a Genius

The word does not fit her cleanly, and she would have been the first to say so. Blackman was not a technical virtuoso of the Method or a stage classicist — she never got the Shakespeare she wanted, and she knew the industry had typed her early and permanently. What she had instead was an unusually sharp instinct for what a role needed and the nerve to supply it herself. Judo as Cathy Gale's weapon was her idea, not a writer's; the flying lessons for Pussy Galore were her initiative. That is craft judgement rather than intellect, and it consists of something specific: an ability to locate the single physical fact that would make a character believable to an audience who had never been shown a woman like her, and then to acquire the skill in earnest rather than fake it.

The claim on her, honestly stated, is historical rather than artistic. She made a durable change in what a woman could do on screen and did it at thirty-seven, in an industry that discarded women at thirty, after fifteen years of parts a critic could only call "wet." The comic timing was genuinely fine — the wry, unhurried delivery in *The Avengers* is harder to do than it sounds, and *The Upper Hand* proved it lasted — but nobody has seriously argued she reinvented acting. She reinvented one thing, decisively, and then worked for another five decades.

Legacy

Every armed, competent, unrescued woman on British television descends in some measure from Cathy Gale, and the line runs directly from Blackman through Emma Peel to everything after. She had survived a violent father, a near-fatal abortion, a breakdown, a broken marriage and breast cancer in her seventies, and she was still doing six months of *Cabaret* eight nights a week at eighty-one. She died at home in Lewes, East Sussex, on 5 April 2020, of natural causes, aged ninety-four — having declined the state's honour, kept her own politics, and refused to the end to be anyone's girl.

Achievements

• Educated at Guildhall School of Music and Drama
• Worked as actor, singer and film actor