How to Become Sid James in 7 Easy Lessons

Forget the booze and the betting and the nicotine addiction. Sid James’s vices have already been analysed, demonised and dramatised countless times. His skills as a performer however, and the bedrock of believability he brought to so many roles, have been largely overlooked. The recent release of The Man in Black and, to a lesser extent, Quatermass II, may help to redress that oversight, but despite starring in seven Hammer movies he’s seldom seen as a stalwart of the studio. Let’s face it, for the majority of people he’ll always be Carry on Sid. Fair enough. There are worse ways to be remembered. But here we’re shining a light onto the nature of his extraordinary success, as we attempt to look beyond his Carry On capers and uncover Sid James’s real secret.

‘I saw him act… it was in a straight play. Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men. And he moved us to tears.’ When Harry Rabinowitz recalled one of his old friend’s earliest roles in a stage production from 1940, his comments provided an insight to how powerful a craftsman Sid had already become. (Incidentally, it feels strangely inappropriate to call him James, and besides, he preferred to be addressed by his first name). Rabinowitz added, ‘I can sit here, many years later, and I can see that hunched back, and I can hear that slightly strangled voice coming out… And I could see that this was the actor, in embryo that we all got to know later.’

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in May, 1913, Sid’s family lived at the home of his maternal grandmother in the inner city province of Hillbrow, on – oh, the irony – Hancock Street. Many facts regarding his earliest years are disputed (in part because Sid himself gave slightly differing accounts of his pre-Britain days), and even his birth name has been wrangled over. Some sources state it was Solomon Joel Cohen and others are adamant he was born Sidney Joel Cohen. But we know for certain he was affectionately referred to as ‘Sollie’ throughout his youth, and that from childhood, showbiz was in his blood. He was the second son of London-born vaudeville artists Reina and Lazarus Joel ‘Laurie’ Cohen and although during his teens and twenties he tried a number of trades, including diamond polisher, dockyard hand, boxer and hairdresser, acting had always appealed to him. He joined the Johannesburg Repertory Players in 1937, gaining experience and exposure which ultimately led to work with the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

‘I’m a car salesman by nature, [and] a jockey by profession’ – Sid James

During the Second World War he served in South Africa’s Union Defence Force Entertainment Unit and after being demobbed promptly moved to England to pursue an acting career. Already known as Sidney James by this point, he swiftly won roles in a steady stream of movies including the Anne Crawford melodrama, Night Beat (1947), Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (1949), Once a Jolly Swagman (1949) and Paper Orchid (1949), directed by Roy Ward Baker, who later helmed a number of classic Hammer horrors.

Sid isn’t simply passable in these films from the 40s – he’s already very, very good. Critic Barry Norman summed up what made him so convincing. ‘He never appeared to be acting,’ he noted. ‘And to act without appearing to be acting is an enormous skill.’

Little wonder Hammer secured his services and gave him two crucial roles in The Man in Black. It’s often pointed out how serious one of those characters, Henry Clavering, is in the movie, and true enough, Sid plays the unhappy husband with a remarkable intensity. But he was equally powerful as the hard-as-nails barman in The Small Back Room and the tough, plain-speaking Rowton in Once a Jolly Swagman. What’s surprising and unique about his performance as Clavering is how unlikeable he makes him, or rather, how he doesn’t bother to elicit the audience’s affection. It’s one of the very few times Sid comes across as remote and cold. Clavering plainly holds no love for his wife or stepdaughter, and is clearly more focussed, obsessed even, by his own interests – notably yoga.

Sid James (l) in his first film for Hammer, The Man in Black, directed by Francis Searle who was also at the helm for The Lady Craved Excitement.

Yet the obvious way to have played Henry Clavering would have been as a man desperately in love with his wife, an approach that would have made her treachery all the more cutting. As it is, even though we can’t approve of Bertha’s crimes, it’s hard to imagine anyone weeping over her husband’s apparent death.

Clavering’s coldness is a bold but well-measured move by Sid. It helps give the melodramatic premise a degree of verisimilitude and it allows the married couple’s relationship to feel authentic. They’re two icy, ambitious, calculating individuals locked in a marriage that brings neither any emotional succour. To escape the other they need to be devious, conniving and self-centred. If Sid had played Clavering as a loving, loveable sort of spouse, his battle with Bertha wouldn’t have rung true.

And his scheme undeniably places a grim toll on Joan – something a kinder parent would have been reluctant to carry through. But with Clavering played as an austere, detached type, Sid ensures the central relationships, the family’s overall set-up and the elaborate plan his character puts into operation, all make some kind of sense.

His turn as Hodson delivers much more fun. The film is necessarily low on laughs but the scenes with Clavering’s right-hand man provide some lovely moments of underplayed humour. Hodson’s mumbling truculence towards Bertha is a highlight, but Sid also plays the old seaman’s softer side to perfection, giving the piece much-needed heart when so many of the characters pursuing their plots at Oakfield Towers are relentlessly venal.

Sid in the guise of Hodson, seen here with his The Man in Black co-stars, Anthony Forwood and Hazel Penwarden.

The Lady Craved Excitement (1950), his next film for Hammer, gave Sid much less to do but offers a fascinating insight into his comic evolution. It wasn’t his first humorous picture but it provided his first broad, comedic role. Years later he discussed the importance he placed on business, something the AACT defines as ‘Incidental activity performed by an actor for dramatic or comic effect. This might include… lighting a pipe, having trouble with a door, checking a mirror, etc.’ Business is usually unnecessary to the plot but perks up a scene, enlivens a character and adds colour to a performance.

And in The Lady Craved Excitement, Sid, portraying a perpetually put-upon Italian called Carlo, emerges as an expert in the art. Watch the early exchange where he’s being manhandled by five other characters. They each have greater agency as he attempts to fire them and they all fight back, pushing and pulling him en masse, but Sid walks away with the scene in his pocket. He ensures all eyes remain on Carlo with 25 separate gestures in the space of a minute. A few are necessary but most are small, incidental finger movements, taps of the hand, tiny shrugs and beseeching open palms. Nothing too over-the-top, and never enough to be incongruous, but it’s a deft, playful dynamism that adds to the force and joy of the comedy.

Sid in an early comic role, playing Carlo in The Lady Craved Excitement.

Later in the movie we’re treated to a scene where Carlo tries to placate a police inspector who remains stony-faced and unresponsive to all the Italian’s entreaties. His attempts last over a minute but veteran Hammer director Francis Searle keeps the camera on Sid throughout, only breaking the shot when Carlo eventually tumbles over a pile of chairs, finally cutting to capture the reaction of other characters, just in case we’d forgotten they were there. In that passage Sid unleashes a masterclass of movement, imbuing an otherwise vanilla scene with interest and action. It should also be noted that partway through the shot we hear, possibly for the first time, that guffaw. That full-throated expression of dubious mirth that became the sound of a sub-genre: the Sid James laugh.

The Monthly Film Bulletin called The Lady Craved Excitement, ‘A light crime-comedy with some impossible and quite amusing situations; suitable entertainment for the young,’ which feels slightly sparse in its praise. The film is a diverting, madcap 69 minutes that yaps and wags its improbable tale like an excited puppy. More than this, it pinpoints a moment in time for the artist formerly known as ‘Sollie’ Cohen. Because if we look beyond the picture’s two, top of the bill stars, Hy Hazell and Michael Medwin, we find Sidney James in the process of becoming Sid James. Comic legend and a one-man abbreviation for earthy, good-humoured comedy with a laugh that launched… well, a thousand more laughs.

Sid always excelled in paternal roles, and expertly plays a father figure to The Flanagan Boy as portrayed by Tony Wright (r).

But that persona’s realisation was some years away and in his next movie for Hammer, The Flanagan Boy (1953) he’s back to drama, playing a boxing trainer in a role that must have brought back memories of his own time in the ring. It’s a strong, solid performance and his scenes with Barbara Payton have a fabulous feel of an immoveable object (Sid’s character) meeting an unstoppable force (Payton’s alluring schemer) that form the highlight of this enjoyable b-movie.

An awkward moment from The Flanagan Boy as Lorna (Barbara Payton) confronts Giuseppe’s family.

If The Flanagan Boy is possibly underrated, Sid’s next Hammer production is definitely, inexplicably underrated. In the gripping noir, The House Across the Lake (1954), he’s on top form as the financially successful but world-weary Beverly Forrest, husband of femme fatale Carol, played by the magnificent Hillary Brooke. Sid makes it all look so easy. The scene where he introduces himself (and his predicament) to writer Mark Kendrick (played by Alex Nicol) shows him at his best, mixing moods, half-threatening his guest, half-bemoaning his own situation, cracking poor jokes and dispensing hard-won wisdom, all whilst playing pool, knocking back booze, topping up his glass and scrutinising the young man who clearly - in Beverly’s mind - ricochets between threat and soul mate. It’s the kind of scene which could be edited from the movie and screened on its own as a short film.

Sid with Alex Nicol who commented, ‘It [The House Across the Lake] was a great script, and Sidney James, a wonderful actor, was in it, along with Hillary Brooke.’

‘You see, Mr Kendrick, I still happen to be in love with my wife,’ Beverly admits towards the end of their conversation. ‘It’s not very modern or sophisticated of me, but there it is.’

Mark asks how his spouse feels, and Beverly hesitates for only a moment. ‘Carol? Carol’s in love with Carol.’

And from that moment of candour, we know precisely the way things will quickly and painfully unravel.

Discussing Sid’s role in the drama, Andy Roberts, writing in The Daily Telegraph, enthused, ‘…his incisive performance of quiet self-loathing as the US expatriate businessman Beverly Forrest is a far cry from his future Carry On film image - a lonely, dignified cuckold who takes refuge in alcohol and who is ultimately murdered by the one figure he trusts.’

If that doesn’t make you want to visit The House Across the Lake – nothing will!

Marketing material for The Glass Cage, known in the US as The Glass Tomb.

Sid has a lesser role in The Glass Cage (1955), a strange film in which he plays blackmail victim, Tony Lewis. He was back on firmer ground in his penultimate Hammer movie, Quatermass 2 (1957), portraying journalist Jimmy Hall. Despite his third-pace billing Sid only turns up about halfway through this sci-fi classic and he’s murdered less than twenty minutes later, making this the fourth of six Hammer pictures in which his character doesn’t make it out of the story alive.

Director Val Guest revealed he cast him to ‘lighten the story a bit’ and his presence works well, his genial, easy-going reporter contrasting effectively with Brian Donlevy’s terse, no-nonsense Quatermass. He pulls off his early, light-hearted scenes with ease and when Hall becomes more serious, concerned about the alien invasion, we desperately hope he’ll have the nous to lie low. But in a moment of heroism he tries to warn the outside world of the dangerous truth and ominous-looking guards slowly advance and gun him down. His death ranks as one of the most memorable scenes in the film and helps bring home the reality of the threat facing humanity. Talk of an invasion from outer space is one thing, but when we see Sid James’s face contort in pain and watch him slump to the floor, then we know the world is in real trouble.

Sid with Brian Donlevy (r) and Percy Herbert, who later appeared in one of Sid’s favourite Carry Ons, Carry On Cowboy (1965).

Sid’s arguably miscast in his final film for Hammer. In the comedy romp, A Weekend with Lulu (1961) he turns up towards the end of the picture, playing a former soldier who remained in France after the war. It’s a familiar role for Sid, by now. A betting man. The almost-spiv, confident and somehow conspiratorial with the audience, always on the look-out for a chance to make a little extra money with the unspoken understanding of hey, isn’t that what we all want?

Sid should have played the role that went to Bob Monkhouse – the plucky chancer who’s up to his neck in trouble but has a dodgy ruse up his sleeve for every occasion. As it is, Monkhouse is perfectly fine as the lead, but the film feels like it takes off whenever Sid’s onscreen. His final act in a Hammer production is to realise he’s been conned, and after virtually shrugging off the deception, he thrusts a dollop of melted ice-cream into the face of a friend who’s also been hoodwinked, for no other discernible reason other than he can.

It’s his only moment of slapstick in the film, as if he’s bidding farewell to Hammer by showcasing the kind of schtick he’ll be tied up with during the next chapter of his career.

A lobby card for A Weekend with Lulu, Sid’s final hurrah with Hammer.

That chapter had begun without him knowing about it, when, during the previous decade, two promising young writers had rewatched The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) at the cinema, solely to discover the name of the actor who’d played one of the heist movie’s four thieves. The performer in question was, of course, Sid James, and those cinemas goers – Ray Galton and Alan Simpson – cast him in a radio show, Hancock’s Half Hour, which became a national institution, still revered by many today. Sid later called it the best thing ever to have happened to him, and in 1956 the show transferred to television with Sid James the only regular cast member (aside from Tony Hancock) to retain his role from the radio version.

After six triumphant series comprising over 50 episodes, Sid was ditched because Hancock had become frustrated with his presence, fearing his audience perceived them as a double-act. The seventh series contains some classics, most notably The Radio Ham and The Blood Donor, but the feel of the episodes had changed and Sid’s absence was keenly felt, leaving the sitcom bereft of an everyman figure. Ray Galton later explained, ‘It wasn’t so much the crookedness of Sid [the character in the show] that we used after a while. It was this terrible, earthy realism of the man, as opposed to Hancock’s phoney artistry.’

It proved to be the programme’s final season and Hancock then tried his hand at movies, starring in The Rebel (1961), also written by Galton and Simpson. Successful in the UK, the movie won ‘the lad himself’ a BAFTA Award nomination for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles. But after jettisoning Sid, Hancock parted ways with Galton and Simpson and his agent, the formidable Beryl Vertue. Sid cited the split with the two writers as the move that damaged his former partner the most, and tragically, from the early 60s onwards, Hancock’s career nosedived into a terminal descent.

‘I think he really was the greatest friend I ever had…’ Sid James on Tony Hancock.

Meanwhile, the fame he’d won with Hancock’s Half Hour, coupled with his own innate acting skill, meant Sid’s career skyrocketed. In November and December 1959 he filmed Carry On Constable, taking a role initially intended for Ted Ray who was forced to skip the project due to a contract issue with ABC. It was the fourth Carry On production and the first of over twenty that he’d be involved with over a span of 15 years.

Sid’s performances in the franchise eventually morphed into one. Whether he was playing Mark Antony, Ebenezer Scrooge, Dick Turpin, Henry VIII or an aging Robin Hood (‘There’s plenty of twang left in my bow!’), the character itself was invariably the same because it was largely the iteration of ‘Sid James’ that the Carry Ons chose to project. But his roles in earlier entries such as Carry On Cruising (1962) where he played an upright, thoroughly decent authority figure, are excellent, albeit largely forgotten. ‘He was a remarkable actor,’ the films’ director, Gerald Thomas remembered, ‘his interpretation of a script was superb.’

Read Kenneth Williams’s diaries and we find in Sid an actor who understands the Carry Ons were intended simply to make people laugh. But he’s sweetly protective of them, and Williams recalls him being touched when he complimented him for his portrayal of the Rumpo Kid in Carry on Cowboy (1965).

The relationship between Sid and Kenneth Williams was perhaps more complex than some film historians acknowledge. Williams once wrote ‘…as a man, he [Sid] is kind and generous, albeit a philistine.’

The staggeringly successful Carry On series became the movies that Sid became unshakeably linked with. More specifically, he remains trapped in amber as the figure he played in entries such as Carry On Camping (1969) and Carry On Dick (1974). The jocular, cut-price Romeo, forever on the fiddle with a leer and a laugh, and a look to camera that suggests we’re all in this nonsense together.

These days, some critics point to his earlier work and use expressions like ‘a rare dramatic role’ when defining them, but in truth, Sid’s Carry On comedies remain the anomaly. During the course of a career lasting over four decades he featured in around 150 radio shows, over 200 individual television programmes, countless stage musicals and plays, as well 125 or so movies - by the 70s Sid himself had lost count of his big screen roles! Director Ralph Thomas opined, ‘It wouldn’t be a British picture if it didn’t have Sidney James in it,’ and we take his point. When Sid’s CV is presented in figures alone it’s easy to appreciate that his Carry On contributions, although significant, were merely a small fraction of his overall output.

Sid with John Slater in The Flanagan Boy. The Monthly Film Bulletin praised its, ‘…toughly realistic portraits of boxing world characters…’

Want to find the real Sid James? Interested in his true becoming? If it’s anywhere in his career, curiously, we can find it represented in his seven films for Hammer. There, in that diverse septet we can root out elements of his entire acting adventure. There are big parts and bit parts. Drama and comedy and crime and mashups of all those and other genres.

As Henry Clavering and in The Flanagan Boy we find the serious Sid who so impressed in works directed by greats including Carol Reed, Charlie Chaplin, Powell and Pressburger and Terence Fisher. The gentle humour of say, A Weekend with Lulu conjures up memories of his Ealing classics The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) plus his more innocent comedies along the lines of The Big Job (1965) and Too Many Crooks (1959), plus the character he plays in his last Hammer film is reminiscent of his parts in much-loved pictures like What a Carve Up! (1961) and isn’t a million miles away from the character he played opposite Tony Hancock.

The intensity of The House Across the Lake is echoed in his grittier dramas, including Hell Drivers (1957) and Once a Jolly Swagman and, of course, his physical humour and the broad comedy he demonstrates in The Lady Craves Excitement look ahead to his stint on the Carry On films.

Sid James – never one to phone in a performance.

That stint came to an end after Carry On Dick, at which juncture the series was already losing its box office pull, although Sid’s popularity remained immense. His long-running sitcom, Bless This House, was still a ratings-winner and in 1976 contract negotiations for a seventh and eighth season of the show were progressing well.

On 26 April, whilst playing the lead in The Mating Game, he suffered a fatal heart attack on stage at the Sunderland Empire Theatre. He was only 62 years old. ‘It’s such fun and so successful,’ he’d recently told his co-star, Diana Coupland, ‘we’ll still be working on Bless This House till one of us kicks the bucket.’

That account is an oft told one, but Coupland’s take on what made their show so successful is also worth repeating. ‘I don’t think we were the funniest programme ever,’ she observed, ‘But I do think people could associate with us.’

And perhaps that relatability is the key to Sid’s success as an actor. Of course, the creative team behind the sitcom’s 60-odd episodes (including Carla Lane and Dave Freeman) was crucial, as their leading man would doubtless have confirmed. ‘You rely so much on your writers,’ he once remarked, ‘So much! Without your writers – you’re gone!’ But it was Sid James who ensured Sid Abbott came across as real. As loving, flawed and funny as any member of our own (wished for) family. On a Thames Television budget and with a laugh track that was cranked up for every puny pun and double-take, he still – somehow – managed to appear authentic. And more than this, the audience simply enjoyed his company.

Perhaps this last factor, together with his relatability and acting expertise, was his real secret. Forget the laugh and the twinkle in his eye. Sid James was always worth watching because on some level, we liked the guy, although he himself voiced uncertainty about what lay behind his success. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied when asked about it. ‘I’m just dead lucky… The customers – if they like you, it makes a big difference, and if you’re part of the family. No one ever calls me Mr James. One fella did the other day – I felt like I’d been promoted!’

Victor Spinetti, who worked with Sid on the BBC sitcom, Two in Clover, remembered him with affection and his heartfelt take says it all. ‘If he walked in here now, everyone’s face would break out into a smile,’ he revealed. ‘The gift he had is that when he appeared – everybody smiled.’

And almost fifty years after his death, Sid’s ability to draw us in, engage us and yes, simply make us smile, thankfully shows no sign of diminishing.

The Man in Black and Quatermass 2 are available now as part of Hammer’s ongoing Limited Collector’s Edition range. You can find both titles, along with many more films and related merchandise, at the official online shop.