Joan Sims, actress

BORN: 9 May, 1930, in Essex DIED: 27 June, 2001, in hospital in London, aged 71

JOAN Sims was best known as an ebullient, effervescent leading light of 24 Carry On movies. She played roles that ranged from Belle ("My intimate friends call me Ding Dong") in Carry On Cowboy to Lady Ruff Diamond (as the roof falls in, she splutters: "I am a little plastered") in Carry On Up the Khyber.

Joan Sims also had a successful career as a revue artist and in TV drama. No more so than last year in Alan Plater’s The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, in which she played the pianist in an all-ladies wartime band. Along with a starry cast, led by Dame Judi Dench, she demonstrated just what a fine actress she was.

Joan Sims was brought up in Essex and went on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, getting her first job in repertory theatres in the early Fifties. One of those was a pantomime at the Glasgow Citizens’ in 1951, in which a long and shapely legged Sims played principal girl in The Happy Ha’penny. The Dame was another young actor called Stanley Baxter, and they sang an emotional duet based on a Hebridean love lilt.

Joan Sims’s bright and breezy personality made her ideal for the theatrical fashion of the decade: the late-night revue. Her sense of comedy, ability to time a laugh, her jaunty singing voice and fine sense of fun ensured she got numerous parts in the leading revues of the era. Intimacy at Eight (with Leslie Crowther and Dilys Laye), High Spirits (with Ian Carmichael) and The Belles of St Martin’s, with her lifelong friend, Hattie Jacques, were all shows in which the young Joan Sims starred.

Her first big film role came when she played a cameo part in Doctor in the House (1953). Her Nurse Rigor Mortis fought off the advances of Dirk Bogarde by eating an apple and chatting about bedpans! It showed Joan Sims to be a mistress of the glib one-liner and roles in The Belles of St Trinians (1954) and Doctor at Sea (1955) followed.

When the second Carry On was being cast in 1958, it was no surprise that Joan Sims was given a central role as an innocent student nurse in Carry On Nurse. What was to become the regular team (Hattie acques, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor and Charles Hawtrey) were brought together for the first time (Sid James and Barbara Windsor were soon to follow). Joan Sims went on to do 23 more Carry On movies, and while her career probably became too identified with the series she was a loyal member of the cast who relished the films’ pranks and slapstick humour.

She was always honest about the Carry Ons: she never pretended they were anything but entertainment. Some (notably Williams) derided them, but she considered them "just another film" and realised that thanks to them she had fame and a regular wage. "By 1976," she admitted, "they had lost the magic of earlier Carry Ons." That was Carry On England, and it was the last she made.

She maintained two worries about the Carry On series to the end. The fees paid were never generous. Joan Sims, as a leading lady, was paid £2,500 per film (the men were on double that), but no-one was paid for the numerous repeats on television. Secondly, she was greatly saddened, in 1998, by a play on elevision and at the National Theatre which delved into a Sixties relationship between Sid James and Barbara Windsor. She felt that such a public airing was hardly necessary with Sid James’s widow still alive.

Joan Sims enjoyed, as she put it, "Carrying on Carrying on". The locations were far from genuine or exotic (the desert scenes for Follow That Camel were filmed on a cold and windy Camber Sands in Sussex), but he revelled in being part of the team and she even forged a closer relationship with the erratic Kenneth Williams than the other Carry Oners. He even proposed to her, but when she politely refused the subject was brushed aside and never mentioned again.

For 20 years Joan Sims was virtually either working on or preparing a Carry On. They flowed off the cinematic conveyor belt: the more outrageous and predictable they became the more the public seemed to love them. There was hardly a subject left untouched: Henry VIII, the French Revolution, cowboys, teaching, camping, etc. Joan Sims was there delivering choice performances and dotty lines in crass situations.

Wisely when, in 1992, Carry On Columbus was being cast, she had the wisdom to be "unavailable". Without the old cocktail of zany actors and an odd-ball script, the film sank without trace.

Throughout the Seventies, she was in constant demand, appearing in numerous TV specials such as The Kenneth Williams Show, The Two Ronnies and a Stanley Baxter Christmas Show. She was in popular itcoms like Till Death Us Do Part and My Good Friend. She made a distinguished appearance (with Laurence Olivier and Katherine Hepburn) in the 1974 award-winning film-for-television Love Among the Ruins. In 1992, she played the crusty old Betsy Prig in the BBC‘s highly praised Martin Chuzzlewit.

Two of her most acclaimed late performances were alongside Dame Judi Dench. Firstly Joan Sims was the bubbly Rocky (sic)(spouting "Rock on!" in that cheery voice) in the very popular As Time Goes By with Dame Judi and Geoffrey Palmer. Then last year, the television drama (The Last of the Blonde Bombshells) about a wartime ladies band regrouping and playing for a younger generation proved an absolute winner. Joan Sims was on piano, Dame Judi on horn, Dame Cleo Lane sang and Sir Ian Holm (in drag) was on drums. With reason, Joan Sims quipped: "I do keep the best company!" The play won several awards and showed that there was another dimension to this talented actress. It was an impressive au revoir to the stage and screen.

Joan Sims had experienced many a torment in her life. As she openly admitted in her life story, she had occasions when she had to dry out and several painful illnesses which left her unable to work. But her spirit seldom flagged and as long as she was working among her friends she was invariably cheerful, energetic and generous hearted.

She never married.

This obituary appeared in The Scotsman (UK) on June 29, 2001.

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