Pussy Galore (James Bond)

Pussy Galore is a fictional character from the James Bond film and novel Goldfinger. In the film, she is played by Honor Blackman.

Novel biography
In the novel, Pussy Galore is the only woman in America that runs an organized crime gang. Initially a trapeze artist, her group of women, "Pussy Galore and her Acrobats" were unsuccessful and were later trained as cat burglars. Her group grew into a Harlem lesbian organization known as "The Cement Mixers." In fact, Galore is a lesbian until the end of the novel, at which point she falls in love with Bond. In the novel, her hair is black, and she has the only violet eyes Bond thinks he has ever seen. Her group is enlisted by Goldfinger to aid in "Operation Grand Slam," an operation that would poison the Ft. Knox water supply with nerve gas, and, if successful, would rob the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox of fifteen billion in gold bullion. Goldfinger enlists the Cement Mixers because he needs a group of criminal women to impersonate nurses in the fake emergency medical teams he plans to send into the poison-stricken Fort Knox. After "Grand Slam" fails, Galore is still working to impersonate a nurse, not a pilot. However, as in the film, she escapes with Bond after Bond kills Goldfinger and his henchman Oddjob aboard an airplane.

Film biography
In the movie, Pussy is given a less murderous past, and a more important role as the head of a group of all-female pilots called Pussy Galore's Flying Circus (a nod to the circus-connection of the crime group in the novel). In the novel, the nerve gas is supposed to be delivered to the water supply by other agents, but in the movie, Pussy's group has the job of spraying it from private planes. However, it is clear that Pussy thinks the agent is a sleeping gas, and even calls it "Operation Rock-a-bye Baby." Bond's revelation to her that it is an agent of mass murder is the key to turning her into a CIA asset, and given the name of the operation, it's not entirely a joke when Bond comments later, in answering the question of what made her go to the authorities to help him, that somehow he must've appealed "to her maternal instincts."

Trivia

 * Concerned about censors, the film's producers thought about changing Pussy Galore's name to "Kitty Galore". They kept the original name when British newspapers began to refer to Honor Blackman as "Pussy" in the lead up to production.
 * Pussy and her band of Amazon catwomen are in keeping with a long list of 1950s movies about dangerous bands of cat-woman lesbians. See Cat Women of the Moon for discussion of the genre.