Scotsman Obituaries: Sylvia Syms, ​British star of Ice Cold in Alex and Victim

Sylvia Syms, actress. Born: 6 January 1934 in London. Died: 27 January 2023 in London, aged 89

Sylvia Syms had the looks of a Hitchcock blonde but never sought Hollywood fame (Picture: Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Although it may seem tame now, the movie Victim, with its theme of homosexuality and blackmail, was considered too hot to handle by several of Britain’s top actors and actresses at the beginning of the 1960s when homosexuality was still illegal.

Jack Hawkins, James Mason and Stewart Granger all reputedly passed on the role of the gay barrister before Dirk Bogarde took it on. Bogarde was a heartthrob matinee idol at the time, though ironically there is little doubt that he was gay – he lived with the same man for almost 40 years, though he never formally “came out”.

It was a similar story when director Basil Dearden came to casting the female lead. Sylvia Syms had had a big hit with the classic war film Ice Cold in Alex and might have seen Hollywood as a logical next step. Instead she accepted the role of the lawyer’s wife, struggling to understand and accept his attraction to men, although the film contains nothing more graphic than him putting his arm around another man. Bogarde himself decided to spice up the dialogue with the addition of the line “I wanted him” to make it clear they were more than just good friends.

Syms with Hardy Kruger on location in Cambridge in 1958 for the filming of British comedy Bachelor of Hearts (Picture: BIPS/Getty Images)

“Many much more famous actresses than me had turned the part down,” said Syms. “But I wanted to do it because I wanted the law changed.” Syms had gay actor friends who lived in fear of the law and the triple threats of blackmail and of exposure and the impact that would have on their careers. One friend committed suicide after being “outed”.

The British Board of Film Censors demanded cuts before passing a film on a subject that it believed the majority of people regarded as “disgusting”. In the United States Victim was effectively banned. But its story of a man struggling with his sexuality and determined to expose a blackmail plot humanised the subject in the form of a thriller and arguably led to the liberalisation of public attitudes and the legalisation of homosexuality a few years later.

Ice Cold in Alex and Victim remain the high points of Syms’s career. Hailed as one of the most beautiful women in the world in her twenties, she filled out in later years and had some notable character roles – and many more totally forgettable ones. “I’m horrified when I look at pictures now and see a fat old lady with a bulging face,” she said. “I was extraordinarily beautiful back then but I didn’t know it.”

She played the title role in 1991 TV drama Thatcher – The Final Days and was the Queen Mother to Helen Mirren’s Oscar-winning Elizabeth in The Queen (2006). Syms became a small screen regular in dramas, sitcoms and soap, playing Peggy Mitchell’s dressmaker friend Olive Woodhouse, whose wedding dresses led to a fair bit of friction on odd episodes of EastEnders between 2007 and 2010.

The actress pictured after receiving her OBE from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 2007 (Picture: Fiona Hanson/AFP via Getty Images)

The youngest of five children, Sylvia May Laura Syms was born in London in 1934. Her father was a civil servant. Her mother was an auxiliary nurse who was badly hurt in a Second World War air raid. She never fully recovered and Syms was devastated when she committed suicide when Syms was only 12. Syms had struggled with being separated from her mother during the war and later talked of feeling unloved. She had a nervous breakdown in her teens and continued to suffer from bouts of depression.

Nevertheless she managed to get into Rada in London, and Anna Neagle, one of Britain’s leading actresses at the time, subsequently took her under her wing. Syms played her daughter in the 1956 film My Teenage Daughter.

Also in 1956, Syms married Alan Edney, whom she had known since her mid-teens. She credited marriage with bringing more stability into her life. Their first child was stillborn, a second died at a few days old. They adopted a boy, Ben, and later had a daughter, Beatie Edney, an actress who appeared with Sean Connery in Highlander.

Syms and Neagle worked together again, playing nurse and matron, in medical drama No Time for Tears. She got the first of her three Bafta nominations for her performance as “the other woman” in the film Woman in a Dressing Gown. Ice Cold in Alex came out in 1958, as did light comedy Bachelor of Hearts in which she was wooed by Hardy Kruger, and she co-starred with the young pop sensation Cliff Richard in Expresso Bongo the next year.

Location shooting in the Libyan desert for Ice Cold in Alex was a culture shock and Syms might have been killed when a vehicle rolled down a sandy ill and almost went over the top of her. “There were holes in the ground instead of proper lavatories and we used DDT fly repellent as hairspray”, she recalled. “I’m amazed we didn’t all die.” She got paid just £30 a week on the film and earned more when a clip of the famous scene of her, John Mills, Anthony Quayle and Harry Andrews having a beer – ice cold in Alex(andria) – was used in a Holsten Pils TV advert.

There was a spate of war films in the 1950s and 1960s, but this was also the era of the “angry young man”, and occasionally woman, and Syms never really fitted into this new “kitchen sink” movement.

She seemed to belong to a previous generation of leading ladies, which perhaps made her characterisation in Victim more effective, but might also help explain why her career never quite took off as it might have done with more exciting leading roles and more films that have survived the passage of time.

Over the next 40 years Syms worked steadily in film and increasingly in television, moving more towards character roles. She played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at the Edinburgh Festival in 1984 and had the distinction of appearing in the last episode of the original run of Doctor Who in 1989.

Syms and Edney divorced in the 1980s. She is survived by their two children.

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