Honor Blackman ✝

Honor Blackman (22 August 1925 – 5 April 2020) was an English actress, known for the roles of Cathy Gale in The Avengers (1962–1964), Bond girl Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964), Julia Daggett in Shalako (1968), and Hera in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). She is also known for her role as Laura West in the ITV sitcom The Upper Hand (1990–1996). Honor Blackman was born on 22 August 1925 in Plaistow, the daughter of Edith Eliza (Stokes) and Frederick Blackman, a civil service statistician. She attended North Ealing Primary School and Ealing County Grammar School for Girls. For her 15th birthday, her parents gave her acting lessons and began her training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1940. While attending the Guildhall School, Blackman worked as a clerical assistant for the Home Office. Following graduation, she was an understudy in the West End play The Guinea Pig. In 1947 she appeared in the Patrick Hastings play The Blind Goddess at the Apollo Theatre. Blackman's film debut was a nonspeaking part in Fame Is the Spur (1947). Her other films include Quartet (1948), based on short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, starring Dirk Bogarde; Diamond City (1949), So Long at the Fair (1950), in which she again appeared with Dirk Bogarde; Green Grow the Rushes (1951), alongside Roger Livesey and Richard Burton; A Night to Remember (1958), an account of the Titanic disaster; the comedy The Square Peg (1958); Life at the Top (1965) with Laurence Harvey; The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), and the Western films Shalako (1968) with Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot, and Something Big (1971) with Dean Martin.