Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise is a British comic strip featuring a fictional character of the same name, created by author Peter O'Donnell and illustrator Jim Holdaway in 1963. The strip follows Modesty Blaise, an exceptional young woman with many talents and a criminal past, and her trusty sidekick Willie Garvin. It was adapted into films in 1966, 1982, and 2003, and from 1965 onwards eleven novels and two short story collections were written.

The characters

In 1945, a nameless girl escapes from a displaced person (DP) camp in Kalyros, Greece. She remembers nothing from her short past and wanders through post-World War II Mediterranean, the Middle East, and regions of North Africa, where she learns to survive the hard way. She befriends Lob, another wandering refugee who is a Jewish Hungarian scholar from Budapest. He gives her an education and a first name: Modesty. Sometime later Modesty creates her last name, Blaise, after Merlin's tutor from the Arthurian legends. When Lob dies is unclear, other than it being prior to her going to Tangier. In 'The Xanadu Tailisman' it is mentioned that Modesty has left Lob at a village to recover from a wound; she goes alone to sell a car tyre. In 1953 she takes control of a criminal gang in Tangier from Henri Louche and expands it into an international organization called the Network.

Modesty Blaise (disambiguation)

Modesty Blaise is a comic strip character created by Peter O'Donnell.

Modesty Blaise may also refer to:

See also

Modesty Blaise (1982 film)

Modesty Blaise was a 1982 American-produced one-hour television pilot produced for the ABC Network and based upon the 1963-2001 comic strip Modesty Blaise, created by Peter O'Donnell.

This was the second attempt at adapting the comic strip as a live-action production, following a 1966 film of the same title. It was written by Stephen Zito, directed by Reza Badigi, with Barney Rosenzweig as executive producer. The plot has a few elements taken from O'Donnell's first Modesty Blaise novel (which in turn had been a novelization of a practically unused screenplay that Peter O'Donnell had written for the first Modesty Blaise film) but is largely original. Whereas Modesty in the comic strip and novels was said to be of uncertain Eastern European ancestry (but adopted England as her homeland), and her companion Willie Garvin was a Cockney, the telefilm makes both characters American.

Cast

The program featured Ann Turkel as Modesty Blaise, Lewis Van Bergen as Willie Garvin, Keene Curtis as Gerald Tarrant, Sab Shimono as Weng and Douglas Dirkson as Jack Fraser, with Carolyn Seymour as villainess Debbie DeFarge. It ran 50 minutes. The planned TV series was never made, however the pilot was televised by the ABC network.