Joan Sims, who played a series of lusty vamps in Britain's saucy
"Carry On" films, has died at the age of 71, her agent said
Thursday.
Sims, who died on Wednesday at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, had been ill for some months, her agent's office said, but it did not give a cause of death.
Sims' most recent appearance was in a television film, "Last of the Blonde Bombshells," with Dame Judi Dench, in which she played one of a group of aging women who reform their old jazz band for one last performance.
Sims, who lived in London, brought great exuberance to her performances in 25 "Carry On" films, where the humour was based largely on lewd innuendo.
She joined the Carry On team in the 1958 film "Carry On Nurse" and later roles included Lady Ruff-Diamond in "Carry On Up The Khyber" and Gloria Passworthy in "Carry On Constable."
Some of the most outrageous humour was found in her exchanges with the late actors Kenneth Williams and Sid James, both known for their love of the double-entendre.
An only child who never married, Sims had stringent formal acting
training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
But she became known for playing what she called "everything from old ladies to dizzy blondes and giggling girls or - as someone once said to me - the falling-down parts".
She described the Carry On films as "saucy postcard, end-of-the-pier humour, and they were always family entertainment, because if you were old enough to understand the innuendoes, you were old enough, and if you were young they could seem quite innocent."
She made her last Carry On film, "Carry On Emanuelle," in 1979.
Other TV roles included Auntie Renee in "Only Fools and Horses" with David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst.
Sims acknowledged she had a problem with alcohol and spent time in rehabilitation. Asked in an interview last year if she was an alcoholic, she replied, "Well that's what they say I am, dear. Actually, I don't think I am."
This obituary appeared on the Excite (Australia) web site on June 29, 2001.