The Surprisingly Saucy Cinema of Sylvia Syms | FilmInk

Actors live on in the memory in a number of ways: an iconic photo, a great performance(s), a decent part in a cult film, an exotic private life and/or a memorable death. Sylvia Syms is probably best remembered for watching John Mills drink a beer. The scene was the iconic ending of the 1958 film Ice Cold in Alex, which became uber iconic when used in a Carlsberg beer ad – much to the consternation of Syms who was only paid 30 quid a week to make the movie in the first place. Still, it’s always nice to be remembered in a positive way for something, and when Syms died earlier this year most obituaries mentioned Alex within the first sentence.

There was more to her career, of course, a lot more – other films, kids, an OBE, lots of TV and theatre. But she’s probably best known (in Australia at least) for the series of movies she starred in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: Ice Cold in Alex being the best known but if you read this magazine, chances are you’ve also seen Victim and The World of Suzie Wong, for starters.

Syms was never quite an A-list star, but few women were in British cinema, at least not in the 1950s, when executives displayed a knack for destroying the career of any female actor with a bit of X factor through inept vehicles (Margaret Lockwood, Anna Neagle, Glynis Johns, Diana Dors).

Popular British films of that decade tended to comprise of war stories and comedies, with the womenfolk spending a lot of time sighing, saluting, scolding, and giggling.

Mention of that decade conjures up images of actors like Dinah Sheridan, Virginia McKenna, and Belinda Lee – talented, beautiful performers, usually shunted off into thankless “sensible gel” parts: wives, nannies, nurses, teachers.

Sylvia Syms was also one of these, but she was lucky in that her film career started in the second half of the decade. This meant that she got to sit in on the kitchen sink, that neo-realist movement that hit British cinema out of theatre, documentary, and Europe, an attempt to tell different sorts of stories – more working class, franker in terms of sex, subject matter and language, less studio bound, directors better at personal publicity and making careers in Hollywood, etc, etc, etc.

At first glance, Syms wasn’t the most obvious choice to be associated with this genre/movement/wave/whatever – she was a RADA grad, had a long term contract with a studio, always gave off genteel vibes – and she was certainly never indelibly linked with it the way, say, Rita Tushingham was. But looking back, Sylvia Syms played a number of cutting edge roles. Admittedly, they were mostly “sensible gel girlfriend/wife” parts (there wasn’t much else on offer, unless you were Audrey Hepburn), but she did get to play a wide array of them.

Syms got to be in love with a murdering con man (My Teenage Daughter, above), a married man with a depressed wife (Woman in a Dressing Gown), accidental smuggler unjustly sent to prison (The Birthday Present), German exchange student at Cambridge (Bachelor of Hearts), dodgy Soho hustler (Expresso Bongo), black man (Flame in the Streets), prison warden supervising her husband on death row (The Quare Fellow), an Italian army officer despite being a nun (Conspiracy of Hearts), her gay husband (Victim), her female flatmate (The World Ten Times Over), and an outrageously miscast Louis Jourdan (Amazons of Rome). I don’t think any actress in English speaking cinema of this era had such a variety of love interests as Sylvia Syms.

It helped that she was beautiful, of course (that always helps in the movies, as in life) and that she could act: it’s hard to think of a bad Sylvia Syms performance – sometimes she was miscast, but never bad. She always brought a level of intelligence to her roles along with a sense of fun. And she was highly adept playing “smouldering hot lava of emotion and sensuality under an outwardly straight-laced and sensible facade” that made her – and this is meant with nothing but the greatest respect to the recently departed – sexy as hell.

Anyway, we’d better get into some biographical stuff…

Syms was born in London in 1954. Dad was a trade unionist, and her family was middle-class (convent schools, RADA), but it wasn’t an easy life: wartime childhood; her mother committed suicide when Syms was twelve; dad died young; she battled depression all her life.

Her rise to fame was rapid: appearances in rep, understudying on the West End, then a big fat lead role in a BBC TV play, The Romantic Young Girl, which led to two offers: one from Herbert Wilcox to play Anna Neagle’s “wild” My Teenage Daughter (1956), and a seven-year contract with Associated British. Syms accepted both, and came to regret the latter especially, although Associated British put her in a lot of good parts.

My Teenage Daughter was described as Britain’s answer to Rebel Without a Cause, and in a way that’s true, in that it’s about a middle-class teen going off the rails, although it pays far more attention to the adult characters than the Nick Ray-James Dean classic.

Syms plays (quite well) a sensible gel lured by a fast-talking party-crashing con man played by Kenneth Haigh who drives a Bentley, knows how to ‘jive’ and accidentally kills his aunt, causing Syms to wind up in prison, but she comes crying back to mum at the final curtain. The film was a local hit, Wilcox’s last, and Syms was the hottest ingenue in British cinema.

Associated British then had her play sensible gels romanced by George Baker in two films. She was a children’s nurse to his sleazy doctor in No Time for Tears (1957) (co-starring Anna Neagle), and a puritan in a dumb hat to his dashing cavalier in the English Civil War swashbuckler The Moonraker (1958). Both films are enjoyable, by the way: No Time for Tears needed less subplots and more soap, but it’s not bad and Syms’ character sings and dances in this random dance number at the end; The Moonraker has too many cast members who look like George Baker but is quite lovely with terrific colour. The hidden gem of this period though, is The Birthday Present (1957), where Syms plays the wife of a man (Tony Britton) who tries to smuggle a present for his wife into Britain and winds up in prison; it’s a neat little film, worth checking out, directed by Pat Jackson.

In October 1957, Associated British announced Syms would star in Sara Dane, based on the Australian novel, to be shot in Australia, which would’ve been awesome. But no film resulted. Instead, Syms went over to Rank to make a rom com, Bachelor of Hearts (1958), romancing Hardy Kruger playing a German at Cambridge Uni. The script – by Leslie Bricusse and Frederick Raphael! – was originally meant to be about a Richard Attenborough-style working-class kid at Cambridge on a scholarship, before being reworked as a vehicle for Kruger, red hot after The One That Got Away (1957). The film has nice colour, location footage, Belinda Steele as an ingenue, Peter Cook as an extra and maybe one funny joke.

While Associated British didn’t pay Sylvia Syms much, they did give her three terrific parts in a row – or rather, director J. Lee Thompson did. First was Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), where Syms smouldered like never before, panting over married Anthony Quayle (she’s the sensible gel that he’s tempted to root while his wife, Yvonne Mitchell, has a scenery-chewing breakdown). Second was Ice Cold in Alex (1958), where she traipsed over the desert in shorts with John Mills and Anthony Quayle, tumbling in the dunes with Mills before she watches him skol that beer. Then there was No Trees in the Street (1958), a little remembered melodrama, playing a lower class woman basically pimped out by her mother to a gangster (Herbert Lom) and loved by a detective (Ronald Howard).

The films vary in quality (I’m not a huge fan of the writing of Ted Willis, who scripted Dressing Gown, No Trees and later Flame in The Trees; he generally wrote terrible female parts) but Syms is excellent in all three films. She also looks gorgeous in every single one, though all in different ways – indeed, she’s so longingly shot, I’m convinced either J Lee Thompson or his DOP Gilbert was actually in love with Syms. If you don’t believe me watch the films – she gets these brilliant close-ups emphasising her fabulous deep big eyes and although she’s in unglamorous environments, she never looked better. She’s far too good looking for all her middle-aged leading men, incidentally, but such is Syms’ allure (and acting ability) that she steams up things quite believably with Quayle, and even gets some heat going with John Mills aka the least sexy British drama star of the 1950s.

Syms also looked terrific in Expresso Bongo (1959), some Soho-sploitation based on a hit stage musical, playing the not-too-bright showgirl/stripper girlfriend of Laurence Harvey. It’s an engaging performance in a most likeable film (if you can handle Harvey’s accent). Cliff Richards’ presence in the cast helped make this popular, but Syms’ contribution – grounding the reality of the story – cannot be underestimated.

Rank came calling again, giving her the female lead in one of their big budget location movies: Ferry to Hong Kong (1960), a complete turkey with Syms having to act her arse off to convince us that she’s attracted to sweaty, tubby Curt Jurgens.

The studio made up for it when Ralph Thomas and Betty Box cast her alongside Lili Palmer as a nun protecting kids in World War Two in Conspiracy of Hearts (1960) – a splendid performance in a wonderful warm-hearted film (possibly the best from Thomas and Box), and a big hit too.

Incidentally, most of Syms’ films around this time did well at the British box office – My Teenage Daughter, Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex, Expresso Bongo, Conspiracy of Hearts. If she wasn’t quite “A-list”, you could argue she was “A-minus”.

Syms had a taste of Hollywood when cast in The World of Suzie Wong (1960). It was a thankless part – the sensible gel in love with artist William Holden who loves prostitute Nancy Kwan – but at least it was an international box office success, with just the right amount of miscegenation for the time.

Syms might’ve had a Hollywood career – it’s a shame that she didn’t have a crack – but, as she later explained, “the thought of having to be beautiful all the time frightened me.” And she wanted a family – she married young, to her childhood sweetheart, and lost two children, one still-born, the other at two days old; they had two more children, one of whom, Beatrice, became an actor. (Incidentally, hubby Alan Edney turned out to be not such a winner – they were together for 33 years, when he revealed he had a two year old daughter to another woman.)

Besides, the British film scene was increasingly interesting. Syms was in two taboo-busting movies financed by the Rank organisation: in love with a black man (Johnny Sekka) in Flame in the Streets (1961) and a gay man (Dirk Bogarde) in Victim (1961).

The first, directed by Roy Baker, is a bit whiffy – the excellent cast (including John Mills as Syms’ dad) play types as opposed to characters – but the latter, directed by Basil Dearden, holds up very well.

It was gutsy of Syms to take on both roles, even though she doesn’t have much to act in either apart from “nice person”. On a more basic level, maybe Syms simply liked playing love scenes against co-stars who were more handsome than the middle-aged dudes she was normally stuck with. Incidentally, Victim only got greenlit because Sylvia Syms agreed to appear in it (a number of other actresses turned it down, not wanting to play a lavender wife), which is very cool.

Around this time, Syms ducked over to Yugoslavia, as it was then known, to appear in Amazons of Rome (1963). If it’s a little odd seeing Sylvia Syms in Ancient World garb, well, everyone was making peplums around this time (if Jeanne Crain could, why not her?) and it was one of her best parts, as Cloelia, the Roman woman of legend who leads troops across the Tiber. Syms is a lot more at home than co-star Louis Jourdan who plays an apple-chomping barbarian General and pretty much sinks the film single-handedly.

Syms was Tony Hancock’s leading lady in The Punch and Judy Man (1962) aka The Film Hancock Did after Sacking His Writers Which No One Really Likes – it was a character actor lead, playing a social climber, and quite well.

There were also two kitchen sinky style films. In The Quare Fellow (1962), Syms was the wife of a man on death row who flirts with a prison warden (Patrick McGoohan). This was a passion project from Columbia studio journeyman and Sam Katzman fave Arthur Dreifuss, adapting Brendan Behan’s play – Syms’ character wasn’t in the play but became the focus of the film, which caused her to get worse reviews than she deserved (from the few people who saw it). She’s actually quite good in a less typical performance (lower class, trash bag) – although the film should’ve been closer to the play.

An even more ‘one-that-got-away’ was The World Ten Times Over (1962), from writer-director Wolf (Bachelor of Hearts) Rilla, which is a shame because Syms was sensational as the dance hostess who shares a flat with June Ritchie. Both have man trouble: Syms is knocked up and her dad (William Hartnell) is a dill, while Ritchie goes out with a self-pitying married man (Edward Judd). At the end, both women kick their blokes to the curb and decide to battle on together, which has caused some to read this as a lesbian love story – maybe it is, but it’s definitely a female friendship story, very feminist for its time. If it had found an audience, even a few critical champions, Syms might have kept in the forefront of directors’ minds, but it didn’t.

The lead roles dried up and during the swinging sixties, as producers turned to new(er) female faces like the Redgrave sisters, Julie Christie, Carol White, Sarah Miles, Susannah York, Maggie Smith etc.

Sylvia Syms drifted off into character actor land where she stayed for the rest of her career, often better than her material (eg Danger Route). Every now and then, she’d get a terrific part in a high-profile project, knock it out of the park, and remind everyone how good she was (eg The Tamarind Seed, The Queen, Thatcher: The Final Days). And she never stopped being saucy.

In The Tamarind Seed, she goes topless in a scene with Bryan Marshall. She’s electrifying in the part, incidentally. But then she often was.

If you do nothing else, check out Ice Cold in Alex if you haven’t already.

RIP Sylvia Syms