That extreme rarity, a natural rather than thought-out comedian, Joan Sims, who died on June 27th aged 71, exuberantly enhanced the bawdiness of one of the British film industry's biggest successes, the Carry On films.
During her half-century career, she appeared in more than 100 film and television productions. She had roles in such productions as the 1975 film Love Among the Ruins, starring Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, and the early 1990s BBC sitcom As Time Goes By with Dame Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer. Last year, she co-starred in the BBC film The Last of the Blonde Bombshells with Dench.
But unquestionably, her greatest fame came from the Carry On film. Second only to Kenneth Williams's record 25 Carry On episodes, Joan Sims's 24 episodes spanned 20 years, from Carry On Nurse in 1958 to Carry On Emmannuelle in 1978.
She was not in the first of the series, Carry On Sergeant, but in November 1958, she was hired to play the student nurse in the second, Carry On Nurse. She matured from na∩ve nurse Stella Dawson to the glamorous saloon queen, Belle, enamored by Sid James's Rumpo Kid in Carry On Cowboy, as well as the shrewish wife Calpurnia opposite Williams's Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo.
"She was cherished as Lady Ruff-Diamond ("Oh dear, I seem to have got a little plastered") in Carry On Up the Khyber, considered the best of the series and included by members of the British Film Institute among its 100 favourite films of the 20th century.
In Carry On Constable (1960), her role was that of a police officer called Gloria Passworthy - and the jokes were to match. For Carry On Regardless (1961), she was required to take the tickets at the door of a wine tasting, then take part, ending up by falling down drunk.
Simultaneously, she was also appearing - on a similar nudge-nudge-wink-wink basis - in that other highly successful, if slightly more genteel, run of films, the Doctor series. By 1960, she had reached her third, Doctor In Love, followed by Doctor In Clover, all with Leslie Phillips, a more refined leading man than the bucolic Sid James, but the Doctor films satisfied her less than the Carry Ons, which she said gave her unique comradeship and fun during shooting.
The producer Peter Rogers did, in fact, claim he would do anything for his Carry On team - the camp Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey, the randy Kenneth Connor, the mountainous Hattie Jacques - except pay them. The top men in the cast got a £5,000 sterling fee and the women, including Joan Sims, £2,500 - well below the market rate. By the final one, Carry On Columbus (1992), the jokes had grown laboured and joyless, and Joan Sims wrote that she was glad she was not in it.
Her motivation for acting, she claimed, was a child's desire to please. Her mother had been deeply in love with a man who, after a misunderstanding, took off, returning after a few weeks to discover his beloved had married on the rebound. Divorce not being an option in those days, her father and mother showed no affection towards one another - and little to their daughter. Joan Sims compensated by dressing up and entertaining passengers at Laindon Station, in Essex, where her father was station-master.
At Brentwood County School for Girls, she became determined to find something at which she could excel. Acting seemed the most likely - she arranged entertainments in the school air-raid shelter, joined amateur groups and danced in Gilbert and Sullivan. But she failed her school certificate twice, and only got a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on her third application.,
In 1952, she got her first small role in a British film, Colonel March Investigates. The following year, she had a bigger part, with George Cole in Will Any Gentleman? and appeared in the revue High Spirits, where she met John Walters and from which she took the title for her autobiography, High Spirits (2000).
Never married, though in her youth she had two close relationships, she claimed that, generally, men were put off by funny women, and that sometimes she had had to steel herself to get through the filming of the Carry Ons - especially as the male cast were apt to play practical jokes on her. In her last years, Joan Sims struggled against illness, heavy drinking and depression.
Irene Joan Sims: born 1930; died, June 2001