SYLVIA SYMS ‘I wish I’d had Judi Dench’s career’
It is 60 years since she starred in war movie Ice Cold In Alex opposite the late Sir John Mills but the 84-year-old grande dame is as feisty as ever
ACTRESS Sylvia Syms burst into the public consciousness as Nurse Diana Murdoch in the 1958 Desert War epic Ice Cold In Alex – a blonde bombshell if ever there was one. Now aged 84 she has matured into a grande dame with an OBE and a nice line in self-deprecation.
In the intervening years Sylvia has appeared opposite some of the most prominent leading men of the post-war era from John Mills and Dirk Bogarde to Tony Hancock and Sid James. And as the 60th anniversary of the UK release of Ice Cold In Alex approaches, she is still going strong with her latest film, Together, due to be released next month. But if you have the temerity to suggest she might be something of a national treasure she will give you both barrels.
“A living great? I don’t think so!” she shrieks at the suggestion. “That’s very much reserved for other people. There are lots of parts other people have had that I’d like to have played including anything Judi Dench has done. Anything!”
Despite a CV which shows that she has not stopped working since the mid-1950s, she claims: “I haven’t had longevity, not like Judi who’s in everything. I don’t think anyone sits in a casting and says, ‘Sylvia Syms, my God!’ I’m too ordinary. They just think, ‘She’ll do’.
“I’m not famous like Judi or Maggie Smith so I don’t get offered that much nowadays.”
In saying this Sylvia is being modest to a fault. Eight months after Together comes out she will hit our screens once more in the romantic comedy One Night In Bath.
And Sylvia reveals she has also been offered an advance to write her autobiography but says she turned it down because she does not think she is famous or interesting enough. What would she call it if she did? “Who The F*** Is Sylvia?” she replies.
By now you will have gathered that Sylvia is renowned for being feisty. But her bark is worse than her bite. In truth she is as soft as her Jack Russell “Bunny” who hops up on my lap to be stroked as we talk.
These days Sylvia is not in the best of health due to diabetes, back problems and a history of depression. But she loves living in her West London garden flat, several walls of which are adorned with photos of her glittering career, mainly showing her heavenlylooking younger self.
“I’m horrified when I look at pictures now and see a fat old lady with a bulging face,” she says. “I was extraordinarily beautiful back then but I didn’t know it.”
FOR much of her career Sylvia’s name was confused with those of two other actresses. “Joan Sims was always theoretically my sister, though she wasn’t. Sheila Sim was married to Dickie Attenborough and because they often saw the Queen I suspected Her Majesty thought I was married to Dickie.
“She was always extra nice, as if she knew me, which she didn’t except as an actress. I suppose it was a bit confusing but Sylvia Syms is my own name and it would have upset my father if I’d changed it.”
Sylvia was born in Woolwich, London, on January 6, 1934, and her father Edwin was a civil servant, trade unionist and keen amateur entertainer. It was the theatre shows to which he took the young Sylvia that inspired her love of acting.
But she was only 12 when her mother Daisy, who had suffered a severe head injury in a Second World War air raid, committed suicide. Two years later her father remarried and it was her stepmother Dorothy who did the most to try to help her through those difficult years.
“When I left school at 16 I had a near breakdown,” Sylvia once revealed in an interview. “Dorothy saved the day, sending me to a revolutionary place in the West Country where I did art therapy – making pottery and painting – and spoke to a therapist every day. It was an extraordinary concept in 1951.” After that she “sailed into” drama school and by 1953 was appearing in the West End in George Bernard Shaw’s play The Apple Cart with Noel Coward.
Four years later she made her first film and went on to appear in dozens more. But she has no horror stories from the casting couch.
“It did not happen to me, partly because a lot of the men I worked with had come up a different way,” she says. “You can’t imagine Anthony Quayle, war hero, groping. Or John Mills who had been acting since he was a boy. Orson Welles would not have bothered. I was very naive but I was also a respectable married woman.”
By the time she became a film star Sylvia had tied the knot with her teenage sweetheart Alan Edney, whom she married in 1956 when she was 22.
In 1959 she played opposite Cliff Richard in his second movie Expresso Bongo. “Cliff was the best-behaved and most polite and adorable young man I’d ever met. I have kept in touch with him a little. He is a very impressive man and one must never take any notice of silly things that are gossiped about because he was very religious.”
The 1961 film Victim, in which Sylvia portrayed the wife of a barrister (Dirk Bogarde) who is a closet gay, is credited with influencing the debate which led to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private.
Sylvia also admired Julie Andrews when they teamed up for 1974’s The Tamarind Seed, directed by Julie’s late husband Blake Edwards. “I expected this rather prissy woman but Julie isn’t. She is very direct and strong.”
Sylvia, a Labour Party supporter, has portrayed Margaret Thatcher three times, a task made difficult by the fact she was never a fan, but she says: “You can’t play someone if you hate them. You’ve got to be sympathetic.”
Alongside professional success Sylvia has had her share of tragedy. One of her babies was stillborn, another died at two days old. She and Alan adopted a son, Ben, then had a daughter Beatie Edney, herself an acclaimed actress currently best-known as Prudie from Poldark.
But all was not well in her marriage and after Alan admitted an affair which produced a love child, divorce ensued in 1989. “I did love Alan very much but we were so wrong together. I understood why he had done it – I think it was about sex. She was available and maybe I wasn’t and I forgave him.”
So what of her latest project? “Together is about an old couple who are separated when she is hospitalised and he is admitted to a care home. They take on the State saying, ‘We have managed 60 years and we will always manage perfectly well.’”
Sylvia herself is well looked after by her son Ben who has moved from Australia to be near her, and Beatie who lives in Notting Hill. Both are unmarried with no children. But Sylvia has no plans to quit acting. “I can’t announce my retirement because I don’t work enough. If someone offers me a job and I can still do it, I’ll do it.”
RICHARD & JUDY ARE AWAY