Barbara Windsor with Lionel Bart during rehearsals for Twang! in 1965!
Credit: Getty
The career of Barbara Windsor, who has died aged 83, likely brings to mind one of two popular images: her bikini top flying off in Carry on Camping; or throwing people out of her pub as EastEnders’ Peggy Mitchell, the embodiment of her transition to national treasure – from dollybird to matriarch.
But Barbara Windsor was more than the famous bust. She was an accomplished star of stage and screen before she became Carry On’s favourite brassy, bubbly sexpot. “She was eaten whole and swallowed by the Carry On machine,” said Tony Jordan, the EastEnders head writer who also wrote the 2017 TV biopic Babs. Not sure she’s ever said that out loud, but you could argue that, if anything, it spoilt her. Barbara Windsor should not be defined by the Carry On films.”
Bubbly Babs star of nine Carry On films
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December 12, 2020 5.49pm
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DAME BARBARA WINDSOR: 1937 - 2020
Dame Barbara Windsor, the actress who has died aged 83, became a national institution by passing off high bosoms and low comedy in the Carry On films, and after many vicissitudes ended her career playing Peggy Mitchell, landlady of the Queen Vic in EastEnders.
“Bubbly Babs” won many fans as a generous-hearted and irrepressible Cockney and was a darling of the tabloids: she got on well with journalists and knew how to provide winning copy.
Barbara Windsor and Sid James during rehearsals for Carry On London in September 6 1973
Credit: Mirrorpix
Filming had wrapped for the day on the Pinewood Studios set of Carry On Henry when Sid James approached Barbara Windsor.
“Hello Barbara, I’ve bought you a present,” said James, then 58 years old, still dressed as Henry VIII. Windsor, who was 34 at the time, would later recall: “He stuck his tongue into the fruit and started licking it, slowly and suggestively. ‘Oh dear, I thought… I’ll have to keep well away from him.’”
The encounter at Pinewood Studios in November 1971 obviously stayed with Windsor, as she wrote about it in her memoir, All Of Me, My Extraordinary Life. She had, she reported, felt James’s eyes on her throughout the making of Carry On Henry. However, she had not appreciated until that moment the true depths of his obsession.
Inseparable: Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor in Carry on Christmas
Credit: Fremantle Media/Shutterstock
It was no surprise that the first wave of obituaries for Dame Barbara Windsor, who died this week at 83 following a six-year struggle with Alzheimer’s, featured images of scenes she’d shared with Kenneth Williams. They went together like boiled beef and carrots, and were no less London-flavoured than Harry Champion’s song of that name. Williams could hide it well – most of us think of him first in his posh mode – but his birthplace in Barnsbury, Islington was a walkable distance from Barbara’s first address, in Shoreditch. Powerfully different personalities though they were, each saw something local and familiar in the other; an odd-couple friendship that would last 24 years until his death in 1988.
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