Black Cat (Linda Turner)

Personal details

Linda Turner gained access to movies with bit parts in her parents' films as a child. Her father was silent film western actor Tim Turner and her unnamed mother was a stunt woman, having appeared at least once in a jungle girl picture or serial, probably in the early thirties. By her late teens, Linda became a professional stunt woman and won some acclaim for her work. Her natural beauty gained her a screen test and her innate acting ability led to acting jobs, eventually to starring roles. Her acting roles have ranged from period dramas and romantic melodramas to action heroines, where her history as a stunt woman allows her to do some of her own stunts. That same history as a stunt woman, plus life on her father's ranch outside of Los Angeles, gave Linda the physical skills to perform her work as The Black Cat. Linda, to her admission, became the Black Cat out of boredom and a desire to counterbalance her life of glamor and stardom. Fittingly, she has a very witty and chatty personality when in combat and in dealing with unfamiliar situations. Linda is adept at riding a horse and a motorcycle, as well as performing stunts on the vehicle. She is proficient with a lasso and rope, and possesses a black belt in judo. Her stunt training also allows her to make impressive leaps from buildings or moving vehicles safely.

Backstory

Linda Turner is the daughter of silent film Western actor Tim Turner, and a former Hollywood stunt woman. In 1941, Linda successfully made the transition from stunt woman to lead actress. During the filming of an unnamed picture, Linda suspected the film's director, Garboil, of being a Nazi spy or at the very least an American Bund member. In order to follow him and gain corroborating evidence, she disguised herself in a backless blue blouse, red shorts, blue flared gloves, red buccaneer boots and a blue opera mask and called herself the Black Cat. While following Garboil, the Black Cat met Rick Horne, a reporter for the Los Angeles Globe who has been assigned to investigate rumors of a Nazi spy ring in LA. Initially disdainful of each other, the pair were forced to work together and discovered that Garboil was planting secret information in his motion pictures. Using her knowledge of the studio, Black Cat snuck into the editing room and changed the edit of the picture to render the information useless. When they were discovered, Rick and Cat physically overpowered the gang and turned them in. Garboil escaped and Linda decides to maintain her Black Cat identity in order to keep watch over his activities. Cat and Rick had a brief romance together after reconciling their differences. This relationship was short-lived when Rick was drafted into the armed forces upon the United States' entry into World War II; he later perished on D-Day in 1944. After the war ended, Linda continued fighting crime as the Black Cat in Los Angeles. In 1948, the Black Cat came upon a plot by a rogue sect of disgruntled Manhattan Project scientists who, appalled by aftermath of the nuclear strikes on Japan, sought to use technology stolen from Roswell, New Mexico to go back in time and prevent the creation of the atomic bomb. When Cat attempted to interfere, the time machine they'd built malfunctioned, and the Black Cat was flung decades into the future, ending up in the year 2011.