Throaty queen of the double entendre drifted into obscurity after Carry On fame
Fenella Fielding, who has died aged 90, was one of the most glamorous faces of 1960s British film, a slinky femme fatale with a throaty drawl and comehither stare best known for her roles in the
Carry On and Doctor comedy capers. Although renowned as England’s first lady of the double entendre, Fielding displayed a streak of engaging dottiness that rendered her more complex than her roster of smutty film comedies suggested. As a young actress she may have transfixed the camera’s gaze with glimpses of her ample charms but she also earned acclaim for her title role in Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler, acted in Shakespeare and Sheridan, and latterly gave readings of Greek poetry, one of her abiding personal passions.
“It’s one of the mysteries of
British life,” noted
The Independent in 2008, “that Fenella Fielding, whose wit and distinctive stage presence captivated figures such as Kenneth Tynan, Noel Coward and Federico Fellini, should have drifted into obscurity rather than being celebrated . . . as a national treasure.”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s she was one of the first British women to write and perform standup comedy, with solo shows and appearances in musical revues at such places as Peter Cook’s Establishment club in Soho.
But it was her looks, and her voice, that made her name. On television in 1965, she was ordered to cover up after arriving to take part in Juke Box Jury in a silk brocade gown with a neckline that plunged too deep for a Saturday teatime audience.
Vocally she could range from the plumminess of a duchess to raucous expletives, and once shared a Mayfair flat with a West End prostitute. But in person, as the journalist Gyles Brandreth recorded in his diary, “that husky, purring voice is for real”.
On the London stage she had a notable misfire in 1963 with So Much to Remember ,a feeble revue that she co-wrote. Films seemed to offer her a more reliable channel for her talent to amuse. Having made her debut in
Carry On Regardless (1961), she flaunted her cleavage in the schlock-horror send-up Carry
On Screaming, now something of a cult classic. As a hospitalised Russian ballet dancer in Doctor In Clover (also 1966) she kept a poker face when asking a fellow patient, played by Arthur Haynes, if he “wouldn’t mind holding my crutch for a moment”. She also appeared in Doctor In Love, the highestearning British film of 1960, and Doctor In
Distress (1963).
The daughter of Russian and Romanian Jewish immigrants, she was born Fenella Marion Feldman in Hackney, east London. Her father, who owned a cinema, physically abused her as a child and was unenthusiastic about the idea of her becoming an actress. After training at secretarial college and a brief spell as a cub reporter, she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts but left after a year. Dismayed and depressed at this setback, she was living with her parents and working as a shorthand typist when actor Ron Moody gave Fielding her first acting break. Her London debut was in the hit musical
Valmouth, in which she discovered her “mischievous wavelength” as one critic put it, followed by her West End breakthrough alongside Kenneth Williams in another revue,
Pieces Of Eight.
In the same year she co-starred in Follow a Star with Norman Wisdom (“Not a very pleasant man,” she recalled in her memoirs, “always making a pass, hand up your skirt first thing in the morning”).
She always regretted turning down an opportunity to work with the Italian film director Federico Fellini,. When she explained that she was already booked in a play at Chichester, she was not asked again.
Nevertheless, she found herself in demand on stage, television and radio, albeit meeting with mixed fortunes. On television she appeared in sketches with Morecambe and Wise, and was a regular panellist on the radio show Just a Minute.
Although she continued to make regular stage appearances, heavyweight roles began to dry up and by the late 1970s her career was flatlining. She was declared bankrupt after an agent fleeced her of her earnings and, having been obliged to sell her home, found herself on the dole. “It’s rather awful sitting in a room waiting for benefits and everybody knows who you are,” she remembered. “I had a terrible feeling I was finished. You’ve gone from this to that, and it’s just like you’re a failure. You think, what happened?”
Eventually she battled her way back. She starred in a one-woman show at the Lyric Hammersmith, toured in a production of Lady
Windermere’s Fan and featured in Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s film Guest House
Paradiso in 1999. Recently she played a flirtatious granny in the television teen drama Skins (2012). Her memoir Do You Mind
If I Smoke? appeared in 2017. Although she claimed to have conducted lengthy parallel affairs with two married men – in 1958 she was one of two actresses named in a divorce suit against the playwright Anthony Shaffer – she never married. –
“It’s rather awful sitting in a room waiting for benefits ... I had a terrible feeling I was finished.’’