Never giving up the fight

“I was in the queue at the post office and a woman jumped right in front of us,”

she says. “Nobody said anything! All the men stood there like lemons.”

Not her, of course; she stepped in and confronted the offender who, as it turned out, was actually there legitimately.

Thank goodness she didn’t break out the judo moves then. Lest we forget, this is a granny who’s penned a self-defence book, who was scrapping with bullies before she had even left school.

In her famous role as The Avengers’ Cathy Gale, Blackman was kicking ass before the phrase had even been invented. “Oh, I used to have a very good right uppercut,”

she remarks, that kittenish purr suddenly sounding more like a growl.

Fortunately she’s in a more sanguine mood today as she prepares to make her Brighton Fringe debut. In the past, visits to Brighton usually meant the Theatre Royal; today it’s Komedia, where she’ll be in conversation about her remarkable life with her old friend and theatre director, Richard Digby Jones.

I enquire about her rider, imagining at the very least a few bunches of orchids and some chilled champagne. But Blackman is far too sensible.

“I should think I’ll be lucky to have my own dressing room! I hear the Fringe is very crowded.”

The actress has never written an autobiography and claims she never will. For one, it’s far too much work but moreover, there are things she would prefer not to commit to print and “one must be honest in an autobiography”.

She promises the show will be frank, however, covering the adoption of her two children, Barnaby and Lottie, her two marriages and more besides.

“I don’t want to say too much,” she says, rather frustratingly. “But there is a lot in the show I’ve never spoken openly about before.”

Born to a domineering father and a “gentle, gregarious”

mother in London’s East End (elocution lessons saw off the accent), Blackman has been acting since she was a teenager, when she won a place studying part-time at London’s Guildhall.

“I couldn’t study full-time – we didn’t have the lolly.”

Hers was a family who knew “absolutely nothing”

about the theatre – they couldn’t even afford a Christmas trip to the panto – and Blackman describes the realisation one could make money from acting as a “glorious discovery”.

Her father, whose own ambition had been sharply curtailed by the trenches of the First World War, encouraged his daughter’s talent.

“I think he regretted that he hadn’t gone on to fulfil his own dreams and I think that’s why he tried to push my brother and I into what would turn out to be our dreams.”

But she claims he never put pressure on her. “No one had to persuade me to act – I loved it from the beginning.”

The education that had been disrupted by the Second World War when she was evacuated from London was never completed, something Blackman regrets. “Still, it doesn’t seem to have held me up,” she says.

Success came quickly to her but it was her Avengers role, followed by her part as Pussy Galore in Bond classic Goldfinger, that cemented her reputation.

The part of the strong, smart, martial arts-trained Cathy Gale seemed made for Blackman and coincided with her own development as a feminist.

“I can’t think there’s a woman who doesn’t think of herself as a feminist!” she exclaims. I point out there are a few. “What does that mean then? That they’re happy for men to rule their lives? That women aren’t equal?”

Blackman’s attitude was strongly shaped by her early life, when she would watch her mother, cowed by her father, blossom when alone with a friend or her sister. “She was an entirely different person away from him. She could have had such a lovely, warm and loving life because she was such a good, hardworking person.”

It certainly influenced her own feelings towards marriage.

Although she feels she “succumbed”

to the demands of her first husband, Bill Sankey, who she married aged 20, she later divorced him and went on to divorce her second husband, Maurice Kaufmann, too. She has been happily single for more than 25 years.

Blackman was 37 when she won the role of Pussy Galore – famously the oldest Bond girl in history. What does she make of the new wave, I wonder? But she “doesn’t follow” the films these days, or at least not really. “I think Dan [Craig] is a terrific actor and I’ve seen his films but I’m inclined to think that we who did the original, early films had the best bite of the cherry.

They were the best stories and the way they were shot then meant you had time to get to love or hate the characters.

Everything is so fast and rushed these days that it’s hard to feel anything about any character.”

She seems rather weary of screen work, describing a recent appearance in Casualty as “probably the last thing I’ll do on screen”.

For one thing, the directors are so young these days, she says, “and so convinced they’re right about everything they don’t listen to anyone old enough to know best”.

Uh-oh. One can only imagine the bust-ups on set. “But you don’t want to crumble their confidence,” she sighs. “You can’t help thinking, ‘That could be my son’.” She laughs. “Not that anyone could crumble his confidence!”

But it’s a very different industry from the one she started out in and while Blackman has never suffered from a lack of work, she’s not had much to write home about recently, with roles in the swiftly forgotten Cockneys Vs Zombies and Reuniting The Rubins.

“I can’t say I enjoy filming. I haven’t done any big films lately – if there still are big films – and it’s not likely I will at this stage but they’re the only sort of films worth doing.”

It seems a shame, I say, if we’ve really seen the last of her on screen. “Oh, you know,” she says, clear-eyed to the last, “I think people will manage.”

*Honor Blackman stars in Honor Blackman As Herself at Komedia, Gardner Street, Brighton, 3.15pm, as part of Brighton Fringe. For tickets, call 01273 917272.