She was sitting next to her wartime sweetheart on a bus when he turned to her and insisted she’d have to give up her stage career once they married.
Honor Blackman may have barely been in her twenties, and the dashing merchant seaman may have been her first love, but she knew her mind. She wasn’t having one bit of it.
She promptly got off the bus, and never saw him again.
Later, the deliciously gravelly voiced icon would make her name as martial arts queen Cathy Gale in The Avengers – a glamorous blonde bombshell who could hold her own next to Patrick Macnee ’s John Steed. (She refused to carry her gun in her handbag for a start...)
But long before that breakthrough role in 1962, Honor was karate kicking conventions aside.
Reflecting on his dear friend of 41 years following her death aged 94 this week, theatre director Richard Digby Day recalls the talented actress as a fiercely intelligent force of nature.
A woman who never wanted her iconic status purely reduced to a black leather catsuit or the throaty purr of Goldfinger’s fabulous Bond girl, Pussy Galore.
He says: “It was absolutely important to her not to be seen as a bimbo. The images of her are never actually bimbo-ish, they are powerful. Her beauty was very powerful.”
Recalling the tale of her first boyfriend, who she met when her family evacuated to Bournemouth from London during the war, he says it summed up her strong will. Then, she was only a part-time student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but she was set on a career.
“At the end of the war it seemed inevitable she and this boy would get married,” he explains. “But the young man couldn’t understand how important theatre had become to Honor.
They were on a bus one day and he said, ‘When we’re married you’ll have to give up all this theatre nonsense’. And Honor said she literally got off the bus and never saw him again.
“She knew the theatre was something she couldn’t give up. She was always strong-willed and knew her own mind.”
The actress learnt to stand up for herself early. Born in London’s East End, in 1925, one of four siblings, her father, Frederick, was a civil servant, but the family didn’t have much money, sharing two bedrooms and an outside loo.
Her father’s draconian temper could have extinguished her spirit.
Honor always refused to write an autobiography but Richard, 79, directed her many times and posed the questions in Honor’s one-woman shows that shared her life story late in her career.
He describes her recollections of a tyrannical upbringing, saying: “There was a kind of Victorian discipline in the household. Her father was plainly a disciplinarian. He had been in the trenches, but I think he almost never talked about it.
“[The beatings] were hinted at and talked about briefly, but never, ever discussed. I think his approval mattered a great deal.”
Although a private person, Honor once suggested her “subservient” mother should have left. She said: “I think if my husband had beaten my children like my father beat us on a couple of occasions… well, you say you would have left him, but in those days one didn’t.”
The impact on her personality was to develop a sense of nothing ever being good enough.
Plus a tremendous work ethic, which was behind her acting well into her later years, taking TV roles in sitcom The Upper Hand in the nineties, and later Coronation Street.
“I suppose that’s part of one’s upbringing. If you always feel, ‘That’s not good enough,’ you turn into Little Miss Perfectionist,” she said.
Richard agrees “she was hard on herself quite often”. He says: “She was never absolutely certain, was this
good enough?, she always wanted it to be better.”
Yet Honor’s father’s demanding nature helped her, too. For her 15th birthday he offered her the choice of a bike, or elocution lessons. She knew there wasn’t really a choice.
The lessons opened her eyes to acting, leading to her studying part-time during the war, while working as a dispatch rider for the Home Office. Move over, Cathy Gale.
“The roar of the motorbike engine used to drown out the sound of the doodlebugs so we never heard them coming,” she said.
After the war she won an acting job as an understudy at the West End’s Criterion theatre, and in 1947 achieved her first movie role, in Fame Is The Spur.
A year later, she married businessman Bill Sankey, but it wasn’t a happy union and they divorced. In fact, Honor’s father saw it wouldn’t work and tried to warn her.
“On the way to the ceremony her father said, ‘It’s not too late to change your mind,’” says Richard.
Later, aged 37, she married actor Maurice Kaufmann. The pair struggled to have children and adopted a boy and a girl, Barnaby and Lottie.
Not having their own children “had been a disappointment”, says Richard. But adopting changed Honor’s world. “She said it just made her life richer,” he says.
Yet family couldn’t save the marriage, and they divorced in 1975, although remained friends.
Much later, she said: “I love men – but I don’t ever want to live with one again. I like having them around. But I like to do what I like to do, when I like to do it.”
Performing meant everything. The Avengers had catapulted her into the stratosphere – although it wasn’t easy being a woman in a man’s movie world.
Richard describes the set-up Honor encountered when she went for judo lessons. “I remember her telling me there was nowhere for her to change,” he says.
“The only place was a terrible, grungy corner with a curtain in which there was a lot of men’s jockstraps!”
The on-screen chemistry was instant with co-star Macnee, and they fast became friends.
“She always thought Patrick was such a gentleman,” says Richard.
In 1964, when she played Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery, the chemistry sizzled too. “There was no doubt she thought Sean was sexy!” says Richard.
But if she had any, she remained tight-lipped about love affairs. Gossip wasn’t really Honor’s thing. Instead, politics got her going. A staunch Republican, and a Liberal Democrat furiously anti-Brexit, even in their final meeting, just before Christmas, Richard says she was ranting about our exit from Europe.
“She could be pretty sharp!” he laughs.
Although it is her glamorous image that will live on, Honor was always more concerned with what she was thinking.
Nevertheless, her beauty, although “fading like a beautiful flower”, describes Richard, softly, was present until the last.
“Her voice was always there, even at the end, and her smile, and her rather wonderful eyes,” he says.
“But a lot of it is to do with an inner attitude. One of the things that made her so beautiful was her sense of herself.”
