James Bond though he must be dreaming, but this was no ordinary Bond girl, and nor is she an ordinary actress. Honor Blackman tells Nick Morrison why she's still an outsider.

IT'S a frustrating time for Honor Blackman. It's not that there's any shortage of work for the woman who donned a leather catsuit in The Avengers and proved a match for James Bond in Goldfinger - it's more that she can't walk around in the buff anymore.

"I live somewhere where I can walk about without anything on and nobody can see me, unless they have binoculars, but the whole house is being decorated and now I can't do it," she says, in that distinctive husky purr, adding: "I'm getting frustrated because it's been six weeks. It's times like this when you find you do walk about unclothed, to a certain extent."

Blackman, now 77, has been a sex symbol for generations, ever since she played judo expert Cathy Gale in The Avengers, in the early 1960s. Her prowess at unarmed combat won her the juicy role of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, a Bond girl who wasn't about to tumble meekly into bed with 007, which only strengthened her image as a feisty girl who could handle herself.

Since then, there's been a fairly steady diet of theatre work, films and TV, including the long-running sitcoms Never the Twain and The Upper Hand, where she played a man-hungry mother.

Her latest project is a one woman show, Wayward Women, where she portrays a series of women who have refused to conform, from Elizabeth I to Marlene Dietrich. It includes a segment about her own experiences as a young actress in the 1950s, when her social inexperience and lower middle class background put her at something of a disadvantage in her new theatrical milieu.

"My social manners were somewhat lacking. I had only ever coped with one knife, fork and spoon, and they were never laid out in any particular order, and then I was faced with all these different shaped instruments I had never seen before.

"I don't remember anyone being so rude as to point it out and make me feel uncomfortable, I just remember feeling uncomfortable," she says.

She lodged for a time with the actor Denholm Elliott and his mother, and still shudders when she remembers the weekend she spent with some relatives of his.

"They were the sort who dressed for dinner and I arrived with my little attach case with my clothes in and to my horror I found my knickers and things had all been unpacked by the maid. I think that is the most exposing thing in the world," she recalls.

Wayward Women is her third one woman show, and although the responsibility to entertain is all on her, and she says that "absolutely anybody could have my stomach on the first night", which I presume means she's nervous, the success of her previous ventures has given her enough confidence to know it will work.

"I don't want to do a play with eight performances a week any more, because it ruins your life, so this is a perfect way of being in the theatre but not having the drudgery.

"I have done so much of the eight performances a week and touring, and I'm at a stage of life where I like to do things more for pleasure than just earning money," she says.

Like most actors, she's had her periods out of work, but she acknowledges that perhaps she's been luckier than most, and much of that is down to those two early roles. She was cast as Cathy Gale after a series of small film roles, reportedly by a casting director who felt she needed a break after a string of bad luck.

"The Avengers is a tremendous cult and it goes on forever, and Goldfinger was probably the best Bond, and I was lucky enough to do The Upper Hand, which, for an older woman, was a great part," she says.

Of course, it's as Pussy Galore that she made the most impact, and she says many of the fans who write to her ask her to put "From Pussy Galore" on the photographs. It must get a bit wearing to be constantly asked about a role she played 40 years ago, but she acknowledges it's better than the alternative.

"I have learned to be quite gracious about it, in as much as if I had got to the stage where nobody remembers anything I had done, it would be a bit depressing," she says. "It is nice that people have enjoyed it, and one gets fan mail from all sorts of places.

"It is extraordinary. The damned film goes on marching, it doesn't go out of fashion. It is like a disease going around the world."

But although it may dog her every move, she's fiercely protective of the role, and dislikes Pussy being lumped in with the other Bond girls.

"I hate being a Bond girl, because Pussy Galore was a character you would like to play in anything. She was not one of those who fall on their backs straight-away.

"But it was just a part I played, and that is all it was, and it queers your pitch in lots of ways, because people think of you as some sort of femme fatale, they don't see you as a Shakespearean actress."

Before Pussy, there had been The Avengers, and she says there was perhaps more of her in Cathy Gale than in many other or her roles.

"When we started, I was the first woman who had ever dared to be equal to a man, intellectually and physically, and the guys who wrote the script were used to writing about women waiting by the kitchen sink or wicked women in black satin.

"I couldn't help but be aware of the impact it was having from the fan mail, because women loved it - at last a woman was standing there doing it all herself - and men loved it from quite a different point of view."

She says it was enormous fun making The Avengers, although it was also hard work. A day's work would be followed by judo classes, then choreographing the fights, as well as four-hour clothes fittings, presumably into different catsuits.

But while she modestly says she is not as bright as Gale, she admits to being a little feisty, and also to having the same strong sense of right and wrong, in contrast with Patrick Macnee's John Steed, who was never averse to playing dirty. She says she has always been capable of looking after herself physically, right from the days when she knocked out two boys who were bullying her brother when she was nine or ten. "They got a right uppercut," she recalls proudly.

"I hate bullies. I have stopped my car before and got out and stopped people before. I can't bear it when I see somebody big knocking about some small person. It is so unfair," she says.

This strong sense of justice, and her willingness to fight her corner, perhaps makes Wayward Women an appropriate vehicle for Blackman. Although "wayward" itself is hard to pin down, she does have something in common with the other subjects of her new show.

"I kind of think it's about women who took paths that were totally unexpected, and certainly my life took the most unexpected turn," she says.

"I had never been to the theatre, and it was not until I started elocution lessons that I discovered anything about poetry or plays. The reason I took elocution lessons is that my father thought it was the path to great success in life, and he was quite right."

She says her father came from "the most awful" East End background, but although she has lived in theatre world for the best part of 60 years, she says she still feels a little uncomfortable in it.

"I still feel quite outside the world, to a certain extent. When I'm with theatre people I never feel I'm one of them, although I surely must be by this stage. If I'm in a group of theatrical people, I will disappear. I'm a sensitive sort, I guess."

Honor Blackman's Wayward Women is at the Theatre Royal, Richmond, on Saturday, July 3. Box office: (01748) 825252.