Sid James
Sid James ( born May 8, 1913 in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, † April 26, 1976 in Sunderland; actually Solomon Joel Cohen ) was a South African- English actor.
Life
Sid James played already as a teenager roles on stage. Also, both parents were employed by the theater. However, he was not initially an actor, but worked in his native South Africa as a hairdresser and took occasional appearances as a singer and performer on. During the Second World War, he took part in several theater productions as part of a troop entertainment.
In 1946 he moved to England. There he made the acting profession. As early as 1947 he was in production Nightbeat his film debut. Starting in 1954, James was one for five years comedians Tony Hancock in his popular radio show Hancock 's Half Hour and the subsequent TV series.
In 1959, Hancock quarreled with James because he saw his rising popularity as unwanted competition and dismissed him from the production. The following year, James received a role in the British comedy Watch Your Stern, directed by Gerald Thomas.
Thomas and producer Peter Rogers in 1958 had started a film series whose titles each with Carry on ... started. As the protagonist of the third and latest film up to this point, Ted Ray, was prevented by contract, they hired James for the lead role of the fourth Carry on ... film, Carry on - This tight police. Sidney James played a good-natured and initially ill-fated police officer who has to bother with police students. In addition to director and producer Thomas Rogers he knew a lot of the cast and production crew as cinematographer Alan Hume, film composer Bruce Montgomery and the performer Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Connor, Joan Sims and Leslie Phillips already. From work to watch your star
By Carry on Constable James quickly became a fixture in the Carry on ... productions and next to Kenneth Williams, with whom he had a lifelong, mutual antipathy, the highest-paid actor in the series. In a total of 19 films in the series, he played mostly lead roles, often down to earth and good-natured characters with shrewdness and a pinch of self-mockery. Especially by his somewhat coarser humor and his characteristic laugh James was in the following years one of the most popular comedian in Britain.
In addition to his roles ... Carry on the multifaceted James starred in the drama trapeze artists ( with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis), alongside Charlie Chaplin in his melancholy comedy A King in New York, in the science fiction shocker enemies out of nowhere, opposite Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway and Audrey Hepburn in the caper comedy the Lavender Hill Mob and in the spy comedy the Iron petticoat next to Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn and was the star of several television series, including taxi and Bless this House.
James, who had already suffered a heart attack in 1967 - which is why he so mad in Is - In the desert, no water flows in the short term by Phil Silvers had to be replaced -, returned in addition to his numerous film and television productions and always come back to the stage. On the evening of April 26, 1976 he played at the Empire Theatre in Sunderland in County Durham the lead role in the premiere of the play The Mating Game, when he suffered his second heart attack. Despite immediate medical care he still died on the way to the hospital at the age of only 62 years.
Sid James was married three times and chatted for several years an affair with his co-star Barbara Windsor Carry on. This liaison was established in 2000, the television film Cor, Blimey! dedicated, in which Geoffrey Hutchings Sid James embodied. In the television film Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa, the autobiography of Kenneth Williams, he is played by Ged McKenna.
In the German dubbed versions of his films, he is often spoken of Edgar Ott and Friedrich W. Bauschulte.