Interview: Honor Blackman

Honor mission

Smart, sophisticated, & sexy – Honor Blackman is an actress with a career that far exceeds Bond & The Avengers. Andrew Kay talks to her about her life & her live show

Many people are only interested in a couple of things that you’ve done, but you’ve had an amazing stage career as well as a film career that goes well beyond two things…
“It’s funny, I asked the person who does my website who directed a film that I made and he said: ‘Well, just go to your website and you will see what you’ve done’, and I was astonished at all the work, and I realised that was without any kind of theatre, and the theatre is the thing I love best, of course.”

Do you still get the same buzz out of appearing in front of a live audience?
“Yes, it’s much more interesting, you have immediately to interest them and to entertain them, whereas in front of a camera you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. I mean, with any luck you do know what the hell you’re doing, but you don’t feel the reaction. You always know with audiences. It’s nice if you get laughs and you can feel if you’ve moved them. It’s an interaction between lots of people and oneself, that’s what theatre is all about.”

You’ve played a varied number of roles, from the obvious sexy ladies through to incredibly good comedy, and your comic timing is fantastic. Did you find that natural?
“Yes, very early on in my career my eldest sister said when they were putting me in all these glamourous dolly parts: ‘Oh, can’t you get into some comedy? That’s where you belong’, and it’s taken me a long time to get to anything like that apart from in the theatre when I did Move Over Mrs Markham, the first farcical play I’d ever done.

But as far as television is concerned, The Upper Hand was the only chance I’ve had. I have to say it’s sometimes a distinct disadvantage to be good looking [laughs]. I mean, it isn’t any more, thank heavens, you can have all sorts of beautiful actresses now who are accepted as good actresses, but when I came up that simply wasn’t the case. If you were lovely and‚ if you put it on the line, if you’ve had a bosom – and you can’t help that – then they just slammed you into the glamourous roles. Looking back now I was such an innocent, knew nothing whatsoever about the theatre, but I think if I’d had a really good agent who, instead of just caring about money, had cared about my future as an actress, I think my life might have been very different.”

Despite being known as a glamorous young woman you’ve had the most fantastic career…
“I have, I know, I feel awfully mean when I grumble but I would have liked to have played classics. I’ve only ever done one Shakespearean play, one Shaw, and the serious theatre has passed me by. Anyway, I’m not going to moan anymore.”
The show you’re doing now is a conversation about your life?

“Yes, and it isn’t just my career. It’s my childhood and my family, all the sorts of things I’ve never talked about before, because I do have a life beside my career. There’s a lot about my getting into the profession, which is what lots of people don’t know. They know what films I’ve been in and what theatre, but they don’t know how one arrived at that particular point.”

You have strong views about the monarchy…
“I do. Well, people misread it, I have nothing much against what is the monarchy now, they do their best. I just think they shouldn’t be there and in time I don’t think they will be. I think we’ll be like France. An overthrow. We call ourselves a democracy and there we are, answering to over privileged people who have done absolutely nothing. I do think they work hard but there’s no good reason for them to be there.”

So strong, but you’re not a radical?
“No, I’m not. I don’t think so, no [laughs].”

Do you still go out and look for work?
“Oh, I don’t look for anything. I’m perfectly happy to do my one-person show, you cannot work in the theatre unless its 12 weeks minimum – and I won’t do that anymore.”

Touring must be exhausting…
“It is exhausting. I had to do it when I was young and I enjoyed it very much, though sometimes it did take me away from the children. It takes up so much of your life, the theatre. Doing a one-person show allows me to be in the theatre which I love but yet it doesn’t take my life away.”

You’ve always sung and you’ve had hit records. Are you going to sing in the show?
“Yes, I’m going to sing a couple of songs.”

But not ‘Kinky Boots’ I assume?
“Oh my god! [laughs] The making of ‘Kinky Boots’ is just such a memory. I mean, I can laugh about it now, it was terrible at the time. Decca approached me first and said would Patrick and I like to do a record and I said oh yes, I would ask him, but I was sure he would. When I asked him he said ‘I can’t sing in tune and I have no sense of rhythm’. And because naturally I can, I couldn’t believe there was such a person. So I persuaded him and at five o’clock on the Saturday afternoon when we’d just finished rehearsal we went off to the studio to do it, and Patrick proved that he was absolutely right. Oh, it was a nightmare.

We tried a few times and then we went across to the pub and had a brandy. When we came back Marcel Stellman, the producer, hit Patrick on the shoulder every time to cue him in and Patrick spoke it. It wasn’t the happiest of recordings but anyway, it’s quite funny.”

Do you still enjoy making films?
“I always watch what I say because I’ve had two young and very inexperienced directors in the last pictures I’ve done, and I wouldn’t say they were wild successes. If you have young directors that don’t wish to listen to anyone else and working with what might be termed old sorts you would think that they would have the wisdom to think that we know one or two things after all this time. It doesn’t mean to say they’re brilliant actors but they may know one or two things. They say come and meet the director before you start, and you think ‘he’s only 14’. For me particularly, it’s bound to happen, everybody seems like a child.”

A lot of actors that followed you in the Bond role were called girls, but when you played that iconic role, you were a lady…
“You mean I was thirty? Or thirty something?”

Yes, thirty something when you did the Bond…
“I don’t know what I was. People are always kind enough to point it out.”

What I was meant to say was that as Pussy Galore, you were sophisticated – not what we expect now from that kind of role in a Bond film. You brought intelligence to it, smart and sassy…
“Yes, that was a feminist role, let’s face it.”

Since then, most of them have just been dollies…
“Barbara Broccoli has admitted fairly recently, not the last couple of films I think, that the women, well girls, in Bond films have been window dressing.”

But you actually brought two things: intelligence and window dressing…
“Yes, and I’m all for it. I can’t think that I was ever a type of dolly bird actress anyway.”

You had sophistication right from the start…
“I dressed as somebody I was, I wasn’t a non-thinker. When I started, you were blonde and you were an idiot and that was that. Nowadays it’s entirely different to when I started.”

Honor Blackman as Herself, Komedia Studio
Saturday 11 May, 3.15pm £15/£14,
Box Office: 01273 917272
www.boxoffice.brightonfringe.org