EMILY BUNG is dead. So are Lady Ruff-Diamond, Gloria Passworthy, Cora Flange and 20 other characters from the Carry On films.
They were all Joan Sims, the comedy veteran who died in hospital yesterday, aged 71. She had been ill for some months. Her career spanned films in the Doctor and St Trinian’s series and television’s Only Fools And Horses, but it was her appearances in 24 Carry On films that made her famous.
Although trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she was told that the scope of her roles would be restricted because she had “too happy a face”. Barbara Windsor, who acted with her in eight of the Carry On series, said yesterday: “Her talent was wonderful. She could do any accent. She could dance, she could sing, she could play dowdy or glam. We laughed all the time and giggled a lot. I will sorely miss her.”
Richard Hatton, Miss Sims’s agent and personal manager, said: “I worked with her for the last five years and I got to know her very well. It is wonderful to be able to say that she really did have all the qualities her fans would have wished. She really did have a great sense of humour, a sympathetic and endearing personality, terrific talents and unfailing consideration for others. Everyone who knew her is going to remember her for ever.”
Patrick Janson-Smith, the publisher of Miss Sims’s recent autobiography, High Spirits, which is due in paperback next month, said: “She was a really delightful woman, but quite a private person, living alone in a small rented flat in Kensington. She was not a great hoarder, and did not have lots of memorabilia to remind her of her successes.
“When she was writing her book it was quite a job to coax the story out of her, but when she came to our sales conference she was an immediate hit. There was this instant warm glow of recognition shared by everyone there, from the ages of 21 to 70. She was a national treasure.”
Gerald Kaufman, the former Arts Minister, was a fan who reviewed her autobiography when it appeared last year. He said that the actress had spent most of her life not being taken seriously, although she yearned for more serious roles. He recalled that it was the film director Anthony Asquith who told her that her face was “too happy”. Her roles included Emily Bung in Carry on Screaming, Cora Flange in Carry On Abroad, WPC Gloria Passworthy in Carry on Constable and Lady Ruff-Diamond in Carry On Up The Khyber in which, as a ceiling fell on her, she ad-libbed: “Oh dear, I seem to have got a little plastered.”
Her television roles included Auntie Renee in Only Fools And Horses and Madge in As Time Goes , as well as appearances in The Canterville Ghost and Martin Chuzzlewit. Having outlived most of her veteran colleagues in the Carry On team, Miss Sims had suffered bouts of drink and depression, and more recently had a fractured rib, fractured spine, an attack of Bell’s palsy and a hip replacement.
She died at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital although the cause of death has not yet been disclosed.
Last year she played a rakish pianist alongside Dame Judi Dench in BBC1’s The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, a drama about women growing old disgracefully.
In her autobiography, she wrote: “More than anything, enthusiasm from an audience satisfied my need to feel wanted. Switch that camera off and I sink back into my timid self.”
She admitted that her injuries turned her into a “couch potato” watching hours of television. She was embarrassed by some of the material being screened.
“I don’t know whether things have to be quite as explicit as they are nowadays,” she said. “Carry On films were much more innocent.”
This obituary appeared in the London Times on June 29, 2001.