SYLVIA SYMS

(6 January 1934 - 27 January 2023)

The English actress Sylvia Syms, who has died aged 89, had an exceptional talent all her working life in films, on stage and in television and radio. Born Sylvia May Laura Syms in Woolwich, south London, to trade unionist Edwin Syms and his wife Daisy, she was evacuated at the age of five during World War II and, as Daisy died when Sylvia was just twelve, she felt unloved but claimed that was the reason she never stopped working. She attended Rada and her first role on stage was in Shaw’s The Apple Cart at the London Haymarket Theatre. She did repertory work and later played in Ibsen, Sheridan, Shakespeare, Wilde, Coward, Osborne, Albee, etc, including Bernstein’s On the Town for the ENO.

She entered films in 1955 and appeared with Anna Neagle in My Teenage Daughter, then No Time for Tears, a hospital drama, again with Neagle. But it was Woman in a Dressing Gown that gave her a decent part as Anthony Quayle’s ‘other’ woman when his marriage is on the rocks. The film did well at the Berlin Festival and at the Golden Globes. The screenplay was by Ted Willis and in 1959 Syms had top-billing in another Willis script, No Trees in the Street, a drama set in a London slum where she was the sister of young criminal Tommy (Melvyn Hayes). Later on, she was in another Willis screenplay, Flame in the Streets, an interracial drama, in the part of a white girl planning to marry a black man.

Before that she made a great impression in Ice Cold in Alex (1958), another prizewinner at Berlin, in which Syms was a nurse trekking from Tobruk to Alexandria with two army captains played by John Mills and Anthony Quayle. In the same year she had also filmed The Moonraker with George Baker and Bachelor of Hearts with Hardy Krüger. Lewis Gilbert’s Ferry to Hong Kong was not a happy experience as it involved a troublesome Orson Welles, but Val Guest’s Expresso Bongo, a musical set in Soho, was a delight for Syms who played a stripper called Maisie and sings ‘You Can Look at the Goods but Don't Touch’. Laurence Harvey was the star with Cliff Richard and The Shadows providing the music. Syms went on to make more films in the 1960s including Conspiracy of Hearts, The World of Suzie Wong, The Quare Fellow, The World Ten Times Over, Operation Crossbow etc but arguably her most important film of that time was Victim (1961).

In Victim she was the wife of a barrister (Dirk Bogarde) who has a gay affair with a younger man who is being blackmailed. The plot revolves around suspicion, betrayal and homosexuality, a subject hitherto rarely seen on film. It had an effect on the laws governing homosexuality and its subsequent decriminalisation. There was more suspicion and betrayal in Blake Edwards’ The Tamarind Seed (1974), a spy story with Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. Syms played the wife of a diplomat who is having an affair with her husband’s assistant. For her part, Syms was nominated for a Bafta, as she was for Woman in a Dressing Gown and No Trees in the Street. Later on she graced Absolute Beginners, Shirley Valentine, Staggered, The House of Angelo, Food of Love and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, all with equal equanimity. In 2006 she was the Queen Mother to Helen Mirren’s The Queen and then appeared with Michael Caine in John Crowley’s Is Anybody There? Her last film was Paul Duddridge’s Together (2018) with Peter Bowles.

Sylvia Syms had an equally long career in TV, appearing in Peak Practice, Heartbeat, Rev, Gentleman Jack, EastEnders, Doctor Who and Doctor Zhivago, among many others. In 1991 she played Margaret Thatcher in Thatcher: The Final Days and appeared as the PM in a stage version of the Scott Inquiry on arms to Iraq and also in Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali’s Ugly Rumours. Other work included radio and directing her own theatre company. In private life Sylvia Syms was Mrs Alan Edney with a daughter, the actress Beatie Edney, and a son, Ben. She supported the Stars Foundation for Cerebral Palsy, Equity, the actors’ union, the Arts Council and was also on the board of Rada. In 2007 she was awarded an OBE. She was named a Film Review Rising Star in 1956 and in 1958.

MICHAEL DARVELL