Actress Joan Sims, best known for her comedy roles in many of the Carry On films, has died aged 71.
Her agent announced the news just before noon. Miss Sims had been ill for several months.
Between 1958, when she was in the first film Carry On Sergeant, and 1978's Carry On Emmanuelle, she appeared in 24 of the hit British films, often making up a bawdy pairing with Sid James.
Her roles in the series included Lady Ruff-Diamond in Carry On Up The Khyber, Emily Bung, the nagging wife of Harry H Corbett in Carry On Screaming and Desiree Dubarry, the lover of police chief Camembert, played by Kenneth Williams, in Carry On Don't Lose Your Head.
She was brought up as an only child in Laindon, near Basildon, where her father was a stationmaster, and joined amateur dramatics groups before studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Her film career took off after appearances on early television comedy shows with the likes of Ronnie Barker and Kenneth Williams. Miss Sims's film career did not make her wealthy - she claimed she was paid the same flat fee of £2,500 for her last film in the series as for her first - and latterly she had been largely out of the public eye, living a quiet, and some said lonely, life in a rented flat in a Kensington mansion block.
She had sold her more substantial home in Fulham several years earlier, complaining of money problems and expressing fears that she would be bankrupt.
Despite being one of those most closely associated with the sex-obsessed Carry Ons, she was something of a prude.
"I get quite embarrassed seeing some of the things on television," she said in one of her last interviews. "I don't know whether things have to be quite so explicit as they are nowadays."
She outlived many of her Carry On co-stars, including Williams, James, Corbett, Hattie Jacques and Charles Hawtrey.
One of her most recent appearances was in the BBC TV film The Last Of The Blonde Bombshells in which she starred with Dame Judi Dench.
This obituary appeared on the This is London web site on June 29, 2001.