Damian Lewis? No, the best Henry VIII ever was... SID JAMES!
Damian Lewis says his schooldays at Eton were ideal training for his latest role: Henry Viii in the TV adaptation of Hilary mantel’s Booker-Prize-winning historical novel Wolf Hall. a privileged education at England’s grandest public school taught him about status and hierarchies — all the lessons the Tudor king had absorbed from birth in the 16th-century royal court.
But an Old Etonian background can’t explain the barn-storming performance of the greatest on-screen Henry of them all — a South african Jewish actor who started out as a hairdresser and whose battered face and broken nose were the legacy of drunken bar-room brawls.
His raucous, randy version of the monarch stands out among a host of other interpretations over the years.
For example, Robert Shaw, himself a hell-raiser, played Henry in the cinema version of a man For all Seasons in 1966, while much more recently, Jonathan Rhys meyers was the king in four series of The Tudors on TV.
Other great thesps include Richard Burton in anne Of The Thousand Days (1969), Charles Laughton in The Private Life Of Henry Viii (1933), Keith michell in the BBC series The Six Wives Of Henry Viii (1970), and Hollywood action man Eric Bana in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008).
But to me, Sid James was king of them all.
James, born Solomon Cohen in Johannesburg in 1913, played the Tudor king in Carry On Henry, the 21st and one of the best-loved instalments in the bawdy series.
Just about every Carry On stalwart has at least a cameo in this 1971 classic — Joan Sims as Henry’s harridan of a queen, Charles Hawtrey as her lover, Sir Roger de Lodgerly, and Barbara Windsor as Bettina Bristol, the object of Sid’s lust on and off screen.
But the gravel-voiced actor with the dirtiest laugh in cinema stole every scene he played. Scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell gave him the best lines: ‘marvellous,’ he mutters as another wife is led to the scaffold. ‘after six months of married life, the only thing i’m having off is her head.’
WHEN Damian Lewis’s Henry marries his anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall, you can be sure it won’t be as brisk as the Carry On ceremony. as the archbishop begins the vows, Sid cuts in: ‘i do — and so does she. Right love, through there!’ and he ushers his new bride into the bedchamber with a slap on the rump.
it’s that earthy vigour that sets Sid ahead of his illustrious rivals. There’s none of the theatrical posturing of Burton and Laughton. and he’s a long way from Rhys meyer’s often fey portrayal.
Perhaps the closest successor role to James was Ray Winstone, who played the king in the 2003 TV movie Henry Viii with physical menace and a Cockney growl that wouldn’t sound out of place in a modern-day Carry On.
Even Homer Simpson played the king in a 2004 episode of The Simpsons, which featured him performing the knees-up music hall song, i’m Henery The Eighth i am.
The first recorded Henry on screen was arthur Bourchier in a 1911 silent short directed by the great Shakespearean Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
monty Python’s Terry Jones donned the regal robes for a 1969 TV series, The Complete and Utter History Of England, while mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, supplied his lines in a Looney Tunes cartoon special called Book Revue in 1946.
Still, Sid trumps the lot, and in Carry On Henry his best bits of all are the scenes with Barbara Windsor. Sid, a compulsive womaniser, had become obsessed with his costar, though she was married to one of the most notorious gangsters in London, Ronnie Knight.
in one typical scene, he pleads to be allowed to unlace her bodice, and she places a couple of marrows in his outstretched hands instead. Sid’s eye-popping frustration looks very real.
in real life, she gave in to Sid’s demands for sex, in the hope he would lose interest. Her husband got wind of it and, according to gangland legend, broke into Sid’s home and left an axe buried in the living room carpet as a warning.
The axe was Henry’s favourite threat, too. When Joan Sims as Queen marie refuses to stop sucking cloves of garlic like boiled sweets, Sid (as Henry) boils over. ‘Don’t make any hairdressing appointments,’ he bellows, drawing his finger across his throat.
Wonderful dialogue like that doesn’t win any Booker prizes, it’s true. But Wolf Hall would be a whole lot funnier if it did.