Barbara Windsor

With the last of the Kray brothers dying this week it is, perhaps, appropriate that Barbara Windsor's autobiography should hit the shelves. ALL OF ME is just that, our Babs, warts and all. Just 4'10", she has teetered on her 6 inch heels down a rocky road that has seen her go from innocent chorus girl to bawdy Carry On-er to her final resting place as matriarch of the dysfunctional Mitchell family in Eastenders. Curiously, her current husband is called Scott Mitchell! Life has often been stranger than fiction for the cockney sparrow who first found fame on the screen in Sparrows Can't Sing. Her first appearance on the big screen was in Belles of St Trinians as an un-named schoolgirl in 1954 was followed by a series of forgettable roles in unmemorable films.
A trained stage actress, Babs' first job was in the chorus of Love From Lucy. A position she stayed in for 2 years until she started getting film roles, small at first but then came her starring moment in Sparrows Can't Sing. The story of east end privation was the perfect vehicle for the peroxide blonde bombshell.
An audition for Fings Aint What They Used To Be for Joan Littlewood almost ended her chances when she mistook the derelict-looking director for the cleaner. However, fate took a hand and her role led to other musical parts alongside her burgeoning film career.
Babs' really became a household name with her appearance in Carry On Spying and went on to do another 8 in the series between 1964 and 1974.
However, much as the public loved Barbara on the screen it was her off-screen life which really hooked them. Perennially cast by circumstance as the 'blonde' , in every sense of the word, Barbara lurched from one unsuitable relationship to another, sometimes simultaneously. Ronnie Knight (gangster), The Krays (more gangsters), Sid James (lothario) and of course, the inimitable Kenneth Williams (who accompanied her on honeymoon).
Read the book and you will be hard pressed to keep a straight face, or believe it can all have happened! Barbara is painfully honest, not only about all the characters that have drifted and fought their way in and out of her life, but also about herself. How can you not love a woman who admits that her second husband, Stephen Hollings, is quoted as saying 'If men saw her like I used to, trying to pose seductively on the end of the bed with saggy boobs and straggly clumps of grey hair, they'd run a mile'.
Now, in her sixties, Barbara has at last found her home, her destiny, behind the bar at the Queen Vic. Long may she be pulling pints and anything else that comes her way!

All Of Me is published by Headline at £14.99
First published on Gay UK Net
© Paul Towers 3/10/2000