Celebrity deaths in 2020: Beloved stars lost this year from Sean Connery to Caroline Flack
We remember those who have sadly died, looking back at their lives, careers and the legacies they left behind
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2020 saw a staggering loss across the world due to the global pandemic.
| UPDATED: 07:02, Wed, Dec 30, 2020
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2020 has been a year unlike any other with unprecedented wildfires in Australia at the start of the year and the coronavirus pandemic spreading around the world. More than 1.7 million people have died as a result of Covid-19 but in a year full of tragedy, which of the world’s greatest stars have died so far?
Rosalind Knight, who has died aged 87, was born into a show business family and quickly made her own impression on screen in the early Carry On films.
She first played the hapless, short-sighted Student Nurse Nightingale in Carry On Nurse (1959), the second in the series, seen keeping vigil over an unconscious patient and watching his drip feed with great intensity - before losing her glasses in a hospital sluice.
Rosalind Knight s talent for comedy was firmly recognised, and she featured in Carry On Teacher the same year in a more substantial role.
She went on to display her talents in comedy and drama but will be best remembered in her later career for two TV sitcoms. Gimme Gimme Gimme (1999-2001) featured Kathy Burke as a loud-mouthed Londoner, with James Dreyfus as her gay flatmate, both looking for a male partner. Knight was Beryl Merit, landlady of their Kentish Town flat - and a retired sex worker who still indulges in S&M and picks up young and married men.
The best directors always wanted Rosalind Knight in their casts. Photograph: Simon Annand/PA
In a career stretching over seven decades, the distinctive, cut-glass character actor Rosalind Knight, who has died aged 87, renewed her TV profile with younger audiences in two quirkily original comedy sitcoms: Jonathan Harvey’s Gimme Gimme Gimme (1999-2001) and Robert Popper’s Friday Night Dinner (in the second series, 2012).
She dressed down and mussed up her hair for Beryl Merit, a retired prostitute and landlady of the north London flat shared by Kathy Burke’s foul-mouthed Linda La Hughes and James Dreyfus’s acidulous actor; and reversed that process for Cynthia Goodman, aka “Horrible Grandma”, who aggressively stiffens the tone of the Friday night ritual hosted by her son (Paul Ritter) and his wife (Tamsin Greig).