BARBARA WINDSOR
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BARBARA WINDSOR At the age of 61, Barbara is experiencing an extraordinary resurgence. For seven years she has been in EastEnders, as Peggy Mitchell, landlady of the Queen Vic, enjoying such a new wave of fame that it has prompted another Sixties star, Anthony Newley, to join her. The BBC is filming a documentary about her; and now, albeit by proxy, she has a starring role in Terry Johnson’s play, from which she emerges as chirpy, cheeky, flirtatious, shrewd and warm-hearted. Her qualities shine all the brighter when we learn that the other Carry On stalwarts were little like their screen personae - James, the eternal self-assured spiv, lecherous, sad and desperate in private; Kenneth Williams, master of the camp riposte and eloquently flared nostril, a whingeing, doom-laden mother’s boy, endlessly complaining about either his fee or his hemorrhoids. Most of the action takes place on rain-drenched locations, with a scantily dressed Barbara crouched over an electric heater in Sid’s trailer while Sid and Kenny snipe at each other. Was life behind the scenes really so dismal? "We didn’t get a lot of money and we did always seem to be doing outside shots in winter," she says. "But it paid the mortgage and I loved it. Joanie Sims would be standing around saying, “There’s meat at Tesco today, 50p off” and Kenny would be telling some filthy joke. It was a laugh. "It’s true that Sid was homophobic and that Kenny hated him - though I didn’t realise how much until I read his diaries. But it was really only the last one I did, Carry On Dick, which wasn’t a lot of fun. And we never had trailers, by the way. We’d sit on chairs and freeze, darling." She still looks the same bubbly Cockney sparrow, tiny, unaffected and intensely feminine in a neatly pressed blue and white T-shirt over mid-calf length leggings and a cripplingly high pair of white wedge-heeled sandals. As the unnatural tidiness of the place testifies, she lives alone. But there is a man in her life, her former manager Robert Dunn, and after a career hiatus in which she did endless tours of chilly regional theatres, life is good. "The other day I had to do a crying scene and I thought, "I’m going to find it very hard to draw on anything because I’m really happy," she says. "I sat there and sat there and then I thought, "Oh Sid died and we weren’t talking", and that’s what motivated me." In the event, Samantha Spiro gives an eerily convincing performance - as does Geoffrey Hutchings as Sid. Barbara, who admits to being nervous about seeing the play for the first time at its opening tomorrow, was not perturbed by the departure of its original star, Anthony Sher. "I can’t imagine Tony as Sid, can you?". Several people have told her they were amazed she allowed the play to go ahead but she is completely open about her three-year love affair with James which was conducted in secret while she was living in Stanmore with her first husband, the gangster Ronnie Knight. James, who had become famous as the foil to Tony Hancock, was also married and - despite a face famously described as "looking like a piece of knitting" - an inveterate womaniser. Until Barbara joined the cast to make Carry on Spying, he would never eat lunch with the rest of the team, instead entertaining a succession of what were known as his ‘lunchtime ladies’ in his dressing room. After Barbara came along, there were no more lunchtime ladies: "Sid used to keep on and on and woo me and flirt with me. But I always managed to get out of it until we were in a revue and got thrown together on tour. "We came back to London and had to do the Pete Murray radio show live from the Victoria Palace. They asked the artists to stay in a hotel but I said no. Sid’s face went like thunder and next thing the publicity man comes and says, "Please, Barbara, stay, Sid’s giving us shit. You have all these geezers on the go, it isn’t going to hurt you. For Gawd’s sake, put him out of his misery." "And I thought, "I like this man. I’ve slept with plenty of men I don’t like, so why shouldn’t I sleep with him?" And that’s why I went to bed with him. I swear I never mentioned it to anyone, but when I read the play, Terry had written a speech which says exactly that. How did he know what I was thinking? It really made me weep." Barbara hoped that sleeping with Sid would help him get her out of his system, but she was wrong. "I’ve got about 10 years left and I want to spend them with you," he told her. In fact, the comedian, who was 25 years older than her, had already had one major heart attack and drank and smoked heavily. But Barbara did almost leave her husband for him - something Knight apparently never suspected. "Sid started to phone me on Sundays and Ronnie said, "You’re with him in shows at night, you film together all day. If he wasn’t so old, I’d think you were having it off with him." It was very wrong of me. But I kept Ronnie happy and I kept Sid happy." When she decided the affair had to end, it was, as Johnson reflects in the play, the end of the road for James too. "He drank and smoked himself to death," she says. Despite his pleas, she refused to return his calls. "I cut him out of my life. "It was the only way I could stop it." In 1976, aged 63, James went on stage for the opening night of the farce The Mating Game at the Sunderland Empire and had a heart attack. Barbara heard the phone ringing as she opened her front door in Stanmore. "It was the Express. They said, "We’ve got some sad news for you." The first thing I did was ring Ronnie at his club and say, "You have to come home." Then I just went to pieces. I remember Ronnie saying, "Blimey, Barbara, I hope you cry like that when I go." If only he’d known."