Auric Goldfinger’s personal jet pilot and co-conspirator in Operation Grand Slam, portrayed by athletic British actress Honor Blackman in Goldfinger. Pussy is also the leader of a group of acrobatic aerial pilots: Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus. The circus, composed of five voluptuous blondes flying Piper Cherokee monoplances, will spray the deadly Delta-9 nerve gas into the atmosphere over Fort Knox, taking out forty-one thousand US Army troops that guard the gold repository.

In Ian Fleming’s original novel, Pussy is a lesbian gang leader. That’s not the case in the Richard Maibaum / Paul Dehn screenplay, but she is a resourceful woman who prefers the company of her fellow pilot-acrobats. I don’t blame her.

Pussy was the first in a long line of James Bond females with blatantly sexual names. Her introduction on Goldfinger’s jet does generate one of the biggest and best laughs in the series. Bond: “Who are you?” Pussy: “My name is Pussy Galore.” Bond: “I must be dreaming.”

The producers of Goldfinger were prepared to change her name to Kitty Galore if the censors objected. But Eon Productions’ publicity man, Tom Carlile, defused that possibility by granting an exclusive to a London newspaper if their photographer would snap a picture of Honor Blackman and Prince Philip at a charity ball and give it the caption “Pussy and the Prince.” When the photo and caption appeared the next day and no one objected, the producers were emboldened to use the name in the final cut of the film.