HIGH ON NOONE

While working up my theory of relateeveety about three characters played by Honor Blackman on TV (Sorry - no Pussy Galore!), I grabbed this picture of Cathy Gale from a music video for "Kinky Boots". That song was a minor hit back in the sixties for Patrick Macnee and Ms. Blackman; and the video keyed it nicely to their scenes in 'The Avengers'.

When I saw how she looked, frozen at this moment, I knew there was the perfect actress out there to play Cathy Gale's daughter: Sonya Walger.

Of the three hypothetical triplets, only Cathy Gale had the best chance to have become a mother off-screen in Toobworld, since the last time we saw her was in the mid-1960's. Because Cathy Gale was born in 1932, she would have been only about 32 when she parted ways with John Steed - plenty of time for her to have children.

And if we make the suggestion that one of Sonya Walger's characters is the daughter of Dr. Gale, her acting resume neatly provides us with the perfect candidate:

Nicole Noone in "The Librarian: The Quest For The Spear".

(Sorry, my fellow Lostaways... I would have liked to have named Penelope Widmore as "The Candidate," especially with the fact that we never learned the name of Charles Widmore's off-Island lover who gave birth to Penny. But Penny comes with far too much baggage to make the connection Zonk-free.)

Here's the Wikipedia description of her character:

Nicole Noone is an adventurer who works for the library, and usually serves as the brawn to the Librarian's brains. She is the youngest of three siblings and the only girl. Her mother is English, and her father is South American (Argentine), but she never bothered to learn Spanish. She never had any pets, and her favorite stone is jade. She is fearless, loves adventure, and is an excellent fighter. [See above] She developed feelings for the previous Librarian, Edward Wilde, and felt an overwhelming sense of guilt when he was apparently killed. (Head librarian) Judson told Flynn to "trust no one", a pun of Nicole's surname Noone. Cathy Gale was an adventurous soul as well, having even fought for Castro's revolution in Cuba, apparently. (I'll have to check with Win Scott Eckert if that was based on TV information or is a Wold Newton addition.) And she was the curator of the British Museum before Steed came along and made her a talented amateur in service to the Crown. So that lifestyle would be second nature to Nicole growing up. And having an English mother makes it an even better fit.

Like mother, like daughter:
Ready for action!

It's hard to believe Nicole never learned to speak Spanish, though... especially since her mother knew the language well:



It's probably what helped her in the early stages of courtship with Nicole's father.....

With Nicole's father described as being Argentine, then we can ignore the suggestion made in a tie-in novel for 'The Avengers' that Cathy Gale's romantic involvement with another former partner of Steed's, Dr. David Keel, might have led somewhere. Which is okay - they're separate but equal universes based on Mankind's creative output. And there are plenty of discrepancies between TV shows and the novels based on them - we've seen that a couple of times with 'Doctor Who' adaptations of novels and short stories.

But "Noone" doesn't make for a very Argentinian name. Therefore, it's the Toobworld suggestion that Nicole was once married, probably at a young age and before she fell in love with the previous Librarian, Edward Wilde.

One reason we need Cathy Gale to have had children in Toobworld is to support another tangent in the theory of relateeveety, first proposed in that original post about the Fitzharris Triplets - that another Honor Blackman character, who will die nearly 1000 years into the future, was part of the same family tree. (Professor Sarah Lasky in 'Doctor Who') And as such, we don't even have to lay that burden on Nicole Noone; after all, according to her thumbnail bio, she has two older brothers.
As to who those two siblings might be, I don't know if I'll catch lightning in a bottle again in finding any male TV characters of the appropriate age who look as though they might have had Honor Blackman as their mother. But then they might have taken after their father in the tele-genetics department. All we'd need would be two TV characters from Argentina with the same last name and with some mystery about who their mother was. Surely there must be a tele-novela out there who could supply two such brothers!

I could have run this post any time since Wednesday, but I decided to save it for today, Sunday June 6. That's because Sonya Walger, like me, was born on this date.

Happy birthday, Ms. Walger, from all of me at Toobworld Central! BCnU!