Actor
 |
Best Film | Carry On Don't Lose Your Head |
| Best Character | The Rumpo Kid in Carry On Cowboy | |
| Silliest name | Gladstone Screwer in Carry On Again Doctor | |
| Films | 20 - Constable, Regardless, Cruising, Cabby, Cleo, Cowboy, Don't Lose Your Head, Doctor, Up The Khyber, Again Doctor, Camping, Up the Jungle, Loving, Henry, Convenience, Abroad, Matron, Girls, Dick, That's | |
| Best Line | "Yak, Yak, Yak" in all. |
Sidney James entered the world of the
Carry Ons in Carry On Constable in 1960 after being a well-known face in British films, a
face which various critics had likened to an over-worked punch bag and an army assault
course. Sid, himself, compared it to a bed
which had been slept in with the sheets left rumpled, and Sid has confessed previously,
"This ugly mug of mine has gone a long way towards getting me where I am today".
His face is not the only part of the package, what is probably most associated with Sid is his gravely, cockney, filthy, lecherous YAK YAK YAK laugh, which kept him in the centre of the action through 19 Carry Ons.
For all Sid’s personal problems,
betting, drinking and womanising, he was a professional through and through and was
perhaps considered more of an actor than a true comedian as Sid could not work without a
script. Whilst they were performing Carry On
London, a stage show based on the series, Jack Douglas, who has had vast experience on the
stage, suddenly started to improvise.
Sid was
left floundering, not knowing which way to turn and afterwards, Sid gave Jack a
‘right good rollicking.The joy of Sid’s Carry On performances is whatever the role, be it a King, a Roman General, or a shop floor foreman, he always kept the familiar chuckling, womanising, street-wise persona, or as Frankie Howerd says in Up The Jungle "He’s as common as muck!"
Sid has done somewhat different roles in a couple of the Carry Ons, for example in Cowboy (his favourite of the whole series) he sports an American accent and is the villain of the piece. In Dick, where he has two roles, he seems less at home as the quietly spoken Reverend Flasher than as the daring highwayman, Big Dick. In Don’t Lose Your Head, his identity as the ‘doodling dandy-prat’ as Citizen Camembert calls him, is to Reverend Flasher what The Black Fingernail is to Big Dick.
As often as not, his roving eye, in real life as well as in the Carry Ons, lands on Barbara Windsor – (Henry, Girls, Abroad and Camping to name but a few) – although this was not always welcomed by her, even though they did have an on-going affair. His screen flirtations with Barbara provided some of the best on-screen moments, perhaps the sexual chemistry from their personal life over-running on the screen. But after Camping the censor became increasingly concerned that Sid was getting too old to chat up young girls on film for family audiences.
all box
office records and was voted Best Actor by the critics.
Born in Newcastle, Natal, South Africa in 8th May, 1913, he was introduced to show business as a small boy performing with his parents in a musical team. He did not, however, take acting seriously till much later. As a young man, Sid was a schemer and had little regard for his female companions, using them as his playthings. When he got the daughter of a rich and influential businessman pregnant, he was bought a hair dressing shop by her father just to placate Sid so she could marry him.
He eventually split from his wife, and had to move abroad due to a contract put out on his life by his wife’s father. He came to England and continued building his reputation as an actor with hard work and gained his first screen role as an East End band leader in the crime melodrama It Always Rains On Sunday. A number of other character parts followed in the Lavender Hill Mob, A Kid For Two Farthings and Trapeze. He was also making his way in stage musicals as a gangster in Kiss Me Kate and the lead in Guys and Dolls.
"The two best things that happened to me in my working career", he would often say, "were Tony Hancock and the Carry Ons", but the exact number of films he has appeared in, is in excess of 200.
Popular and sociable,
his hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-betting lifestyle took its toll.
In the mid sixties he suffered a massive heart
attack and was forced to ease up.
He was in
such poor health during the making of Carry On Doctor that he played all his scenes from
his bed, but Gerald Thomas comments, "That was Sid and he carried on living in the
way he wanted".
When Barbara, at last finished their relationship, he said to her that he would be dead within a year, and he was. At his last performance at the Sunderland Empire in 26th April 1976, he collapsed on stage in front of the first-night audience and died on the way to hospital from a heart attack.
Amongst the warm and emotional tributes which poured in, Barbara Windsor summed up the feelings of many of the Carry On team (with perhaps the exception of Kenneth Williams – with whom he didn’t get on at all), ‘He was wonderful to work with, he was the Carry On films’. Hattie said of him, "He belied his brash image and all the things he looked like. In fact, he was a very kind man – yes and chivalrous. That old-fashioned word really applied to him. He cared for all his friends and they cared very much for him."
