Pussy Galore is the American gang leader in Ian Fleming’s seventh James Bond novel, Goldfinger (1959). She runs the Cement Mixers, a gang of lesbian cat burglars from Harlem, and Auric Goldfinger hires her for his raid on Fort Knox. The 1964 film changed her job. On screen she is Goldfinger’s personal pilot, played by Honor Blackman, and her decision to change sides is what defeats him. Most people know the film version, which differs from the book in looks, occupation and how much she affects the plot.

She enters late, in the third part of the book. Goldfinger calls a meeting of American gang leaders in New York to recruit them for Operation Grand Slam, his plan to rob the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. The Mafia and the Spangled Mob send men. Pussy Galore is the only woman at the table, and Goldfinger tells Bond she is the only woman running a gang in America.

Goldfinger explains her history. She started with a trapeze act called Pussy Galore and her Abrocats. The act failed, so she trained the women as cat burglars, and the group grew into the Cement Mixers. Goldfinger wants them because he needs women who can pass as nurses. His plan is to poison the Fort Knox water supply with the nerve agent GB, then send in fake medical teams as cover for the robbery.

Tilly Masterton, who is also a lesbian, is drawn to her and hopes for her protection. Oddjob kills Tilly during the fighting at Fort Knox. The raid fails because Bond hid a message in the toilet of Goldfinger’s plane, and Felix Leiter found it and acted on it. Pussy Galore has no part in that.

After the raid Goldfinger murders the other gang leaders but keeps her alive. He hijacks a BOAC airliner with Bond aboard as a prisoner, and she is on the flight posing as a stewardess. She lets Bond know she is on his side. Bond breaks a window, Oddjob is blown out, and Bond strangles Goldfinger. The plane ditches in the North Atlantic. Bond and Pussy Galore are the only two who get into the life raft, and a weather ship picks them up.

The book ends with the two of them together. She asks whether he will write to her in Sing Sing, which suggests she expects prison. She tells Bond she never met a man before him.

Role in the film

The film introduces her earlier and gives her more to do. Bond wakes on Goldfinger’s private jet after being tranquilised, sees her leaning over him and asks who she is. She gives her name and he answers, “I must be dreaming.” She flies him to Goldfinger’s stud farm in Kentucky.

She leads Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, a team of women pilots whose job is to spray nerve gas over Fort Knox. She catches Bond listening in on Goldfinger’s briefing, throws him with judo and hands him back. Early on she tells Bond to turn off the charm because she is immune. That line is the only trace of the novel’s lesbian character left in the script.

The turn comes in a barn. Bond and she trade judo throws, then he pins her and kisses her while she resists, and she gives in. The scene is now often criticised as coercion. Afterwards she contacts the CIA and helps replace Goldfinger’s Delta 9 nerve gas with a harmless substance. The soldiers at Fort Knox fake their collapse and then counterattack.

At the end Goldfinger hijacks the President’s plane and forces her to fly it. Bond shoots out a window and Goldfinger is sucked out. Bond and Pussy Galore parachute from the falling aircraft. In the book her change of heart comes after the plot has already failed. In the film it is the reason the plot fails.

Trigger Mortis

Horowitz picks up two weeks after the novel, in 1957. She has come to London with Bond to avoid American investigators and is staying in his flat in Chelsea. The relationship is already going wrong. Two Americans kidnap her, tie her up at a stone monument in the countryside and cover her in gold paint, copying Jill Masterton’s death. Bond and his driving instructor, Logan Fairfax, get to her in time.

Once she has recovered she leaves Bond and goes back to the United States with Logan. Horowitz treats her attraction to women as unchanged, which reverses the ending Fleming wrote.

Era, country and agency

• Era: The late 1950s. Fleming did not date his stories, but Henry Chancellor and John Griswold both place the events of Goldfinger in 1957, and Griswold narrows it to late April through early June. The film is set at the time it was made, 1964.
• Country: United States. In the novel she works out of Harlem and the action involving her runs through New York and Kentucky. In the film she is seen in the air, at Goldfinger’s stud farm in Kentucky and over Fort Knox.
• Agency: She is a professional criminal, not an intelligence officer. In the novel she works with the American underworld. In the film she is Goldfinger’s employee until she tips off the CIA.
• Organisation: The Cement Mixers in the novel. Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus in the film.

Physical appearance

Fleming describes her in some detail. She has black hair cut short in an untidy urchin style, pale skin, high cheekbones and a strong jawline. Her eyes are violet, the only violet eyes Bond has ever seen. Fleming compares her looks to the poet Rupert Brooke. Her voice is low. At the gang meeting she wears a black suit of masculine cut with a high, coffee-coloured lace jabot.

The film changed her appearance. Honor Blackman was blonde, and she wears trousers, waistcoats and a flying suit for most of her scenes. The film gives no description in dialogue beyond Bond’s reaction to her.

Background and private life

In the novel she was born poor in the rural American South and got into trouble with the law when she was young. She joined a circus to go straight and became an acrobat. Near the end of the book she tells Bond an uncle sexually abused her when she was twelve, and she gives that as the reason she turned away from men. Fleming gives her no husband, children or named family.

The film gives her no backstory at all. Nothing is said about where she comes from or how she came to work for Goldfinger.

Language, gender, age and nationality

• Languages: Neither the novel nor the film shows her speaking another language.
• Gender:
• Approximate age: In her thirties in the novel. Fleming gives no birth date. Honor Blackman was born on 22 August 1925, so she was 38 during filming in 1964.
• Nationality: The novel says she comes from the South. The film never states her nationality, and Blackman plays her in her own English accent.

Real-life models

Fleming used Blanche Blackwell as the model for the character. Blackwell was his neighbour in Jamaica and later his lover. Henry Chancellor traces the first name to Mrs “Pussy” Deakin, formerly Livia Stela, who had been an agent of the Special Operations Executive and was a friend of Fleming’s wife, Ann.

Critical reception

Fleming’s biographer Andrew Lycett writes that Fleming introduced a lesbian character so that Bond could seduce her and prove his masculinity. The historian Jeremy Black calls the result a crude end to the book. Stephen Heath notes that the novel explains her lesbianism as hostility to men after the abuse, and that she is converted because, as she says, she had never met a man before.

Elisabeth Ladenson, in an essay on the character, calls her perhaps the most memorable figure in the Bond periphery. Ladenson argues that she matters to the story in a way most of Bond’s women do not, because her change of heart decides the outcome.

Screen and audio portrayals

Honor Blackman (1925 to 2020) played her in the 1964 film. Blackman was already known in Britain as Cathy Gale in the television series The Avengers, which she left to make the film. She trained in judo at the Budokwai club in London, and the producer Albert R. Broccoli cast her because of the Avengers role. She was five years older than Sean Connery.

Rosamund Pike voiced the character in the 2010 BBC Radio 4 drama. Pike had played Miranda Frost in the Bond film Die Another Day (2002) alongside Toby Stephens, who is Bond in the radio version.

The name caused trouble in the United States, where censors came close to cutting it from the film. In a 2007 Entertainment Weekly poll of favourite Bond girls she came second, behind Honey Ryder from Dr. No.