‘Bubbly Babs’ of Carry On films gained renown as a serious actor in EastEnders
Dame Barbara Windsor, who has died aged 83, became a British institution by passing off high bosoms and low comedy in Carry On films and, after many vicissitudes, ended her career playing Peggy Mitchell, landlady of the Queen Vic in
‘‘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. But the reality of her life was widely different from the image she projected. Even her famous bust, as she would say in later years, was not as prominent as her admirers preferred to imagine – striking though it appeared on a woman only 4ft
10in tall.
‘‘Sitting there you look quite normal,’’ Sid
James once told her. ‘‘So how come when you get up on stage you have these enormous knockers?’’ ‘‘It’s called acting, Sid,’’ she replied, without looking up from her book.
Despite her saucy image, Windsor was coy by the standards of later disrobings. When she finally went topless for the first time in Carry
On Camping (1969), she insisted that the field be cleared for the scene. It was 1972 before she appeared completely nude.
Although she and her infectious giggle became indelibly associated with the Carry
On series, she appeared in only nine of the 31 films. She professed impatience with the technical side of filming and insisted that she preferred the theatre. But it sometimes seemed that her chief ambition was to be a gangster’s moll.
She insisted on the gentlemanly qualities of the Kray family, had an affair with Charlie, and visited Reggie in prison. At some stage in the early 1960s she married Ronnie Knight, a friend of the Krays. Kenneth Williams accompanied them on honeymoon, together with his mother and sister.
As long as they were married, she publicly rebutted all suggestions of Knight’s criminality. Later she admitted that she had known from the start that he was a villain – ‘‘but I didn’t care’’. For years she took the trouble to present the facade of a happily married woman, though she was far from faithful.
One of her lovers was James, who became obsessed with her. ‘‘I drifted into an affair with Sid for the sake of a quiet life,’’ she explained. James died in 1976.
Windsor’s marriage began to collapse in
1980, after Knight was acquitted of murdering Tony Zomparelli, who had stabbed his younger brother to death in a Soho brawl in
1970. In 1984 Knight fled to Spain where, after their divorce in 1985, he married again.
Windsor appeared to be more concerned by the inflated cost of the later wedding than by the fact that it was taking place. She remained in touch with Knight, and in 1994 supposedly helped to talk him into giving himself up. The next year he was sentenced to seven years for his part in the Security Express robbery.
By that time she was in trouble herself, having put large sums of money into a pub run by her second husband. Her career was faltering, and she was reduced to appearances in provincial theatres.
When she landed the role of Peggy Mitchell, the interfering but wellmeaning landlady of The Queen Victoria in EastEnders, it was, as she said, ‘‘the difference between having a roof over my head and being out in the street’’.
Her presence also gave a tremendous fillip to the ratings, which went up by five million on the evening of her first appearance, in November 1994. For her rows with screen son Grant (Ross Kemp) she had to stand on a box.
Yet no-one could have been better qualified to play a woman whose toughness and warmth of heart prove a match for all that life could fling at her. She showed herself to be a serious actress and a powerful presence on the small screen. She played Peggy for 16 years, leaving in 2010, with only occasional reappearances before her final scenes as the character was killed off with cancer in 2016.
An only child, she was born Barbara Anne Deeks. She was a bright girl, who achieved the highest marks in north London in her 11-plus. But she was drawn towards showbusiness early. Her parents separated when she was 14, and she got a part in a show called Love from
Judy as one of eight orphans.
She spent 21⁄2 years on the road, with all the instability that entailed, and by the age of 21 had had three abortions. When she took up with Knight in the late 1950s he was initially, for all his disadvantages, something of a stabilising force in her life.
In the theatre her breakthrough came in
Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be, directed by Joan Littlewood, in 1960, and two years later she made her screen debut in Sparrows Can’t
Sing, also directed by Littlewood. Successes included The Threepenny Opera with Vanessa Redgrave in 1972, and as Twiggy’s maid in the film of The Boy Friend.
In 1986, after her divorce from Knight, she married Stephen Hollings, a chef who was 19 years her junior. For some years she gave out that the marriage was blissfully happy, only to change her tune entirely in 1994, when she announced that their relations had been a sham and that she had had at least four lovers while she had been with him.
Work was drying up in this period, though in 1988 she played a seaside landlady and a French maid in the musical film It Couldn’t
Happen Here, with the Pet Shop Boys. Her last role of note came in 2010 when director Tim Burton, an admirer of her work in
EastEnders, cast her as the voice of the Dormouse in his hi-tech partially animated film Alice in Wonderland.
She was appointed an MBE in 2000, promoted in 2016 to a damehood. She won a number of industry accolades, including best actress in the 1999 National Soap Awards.
Hollings was replaced in her life by Scott Mitchell, an actor whose parents had been friends of hers. ‘‘I can honestly say that I’ve never been this satisfied or happy in a relationship,’’ she announced in 1997.
Mitchell was 25 years younger than she was, and when they married in 2000 many predicted that the relationship would not last. In fact Mitchell proved to be a stalwart companion who supported her with patience and good humour in her final years, which were blighted by dementia, diagnosed in 2014. In recent years the couple talked in interviews about its effects, and campaigned for improvements to the care system.