The Role That Made Fenella Fielding — And Then Stopped Her

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]A long, low-cut crimson dress. I'm afraid my brother is resting.

[00:00:06]Will I do? A sheer long clouds of dry ice curling around her, and then that voice, low, smoky, >> [music] >> impossibly seductive, delivering those words that became one of the most quoted lines in British comedy history.

[00:00:23]>> Would you mind if I smoke? That was Fenella Fielding as Valeria Watt in Carry On Screaming, 1966.

[00:00:31]>> And I was trying to give it up. And for the rest of her life, right up to her 90th year, people would stop her in the street and ask her to say it again, just for them, just one more time. It's one of the great iconic moments in the entire Carry On canon, and it may also be the moment that quietly derailed one of the most talented careers in British entertainment.

[00:00:56]Carry On Screaming was a spoof of Hammer horror films, >> [music] >> and Fenella Fielding was perfectly, brilliantly cast.

[00:01:03]>> Oh, and do call me Valeria.

[00:01:07]>> Valeria Watt, vampish, [music] predatory, icily glamorous, was everything the Carry On films usually weren't.

[00:01:16]>> As well, I think that's quite enough of that sort of talk, don't you, Sydney?

[00:01:19]>> While the rest of the cast mugged and grinned and double entendre'd their way through Pinewood, Fielding played it completely straight. Arch? Yes. Knowing?

[00:01:29]Yes, dear. Yes, that, dear. Absolutely, but straight. And that restraint made her 10 times funnier than anything around her.

[00:01:39]I am your mistress.

[00:01:41]>> Don't say that, dear.

[00:01:42]>> Her scenes with Kenneth Williams, playing her undead brother, Dr. Orlando Watt, crackle with a very particular chemistry.

[00:01:50]>> Someone else must have subjected the finger to an electrical charge.

[00:01:53]I don't like it. Neither do I. Two camp icons, both originals, both working at the absolute top of their game. Their comic timing together is extraordinary.

[00:02:05]When Williams deadpans What time is it?

[00:02:08]and Fielding replies Just past December.

[00:02:11]It's perfection. Two performers who understood instinctively how to share a scene without competing for it. Why should a man be dressed as a woman?

[00:02:20]>> I don't know. Perhaps his parents wanted a girl.

[00:02:24]What most people don't realize is that Carry On Screaming was only Fielding's second Carry On film. She'd had a small role in Carry On Regardless five years earlier. And after Screaming, not another one. She never appeared in a Carry On again. Get Oddbod Junior up.

[00:02:41]I'll get the woman out of the bath.

[00:02:42]We'll do him next.

[00:02:45]To understand Fenella Fielding and Kenneth Williams, you have to go back to 1959, seven years before Carry On Screaming.

[00:02:53]The two of them were cast together in Pieces of Eight, a West End comedy review written largely by a then unknown Peter Cook and premiering at the Apollo Theatre. I knew it. We're done for. Not yet.

[00:03:08]He doesn't know it's her. It should have been a triumph for both of them. It was in the end, but not before Williams had made Fielding's life thoroughly miserable.

[00:03:18]The trouble started before rehearsals even began. Fielding had been granted star billing alongside Williams, and Williams resented it immediately. He maneuvered behind her back to ensure she wouldn't have co-star rights over the material, meaning he could veto sketches, but she couldn't.

[00:03:38]>> Oh, well, of course, if you want a second opinion. Well, I don't understand. Fielding only found out when she noticed that every piece she'd been hoping to perform had quietly disappeared from the program. As she put it herself, "Every bloody thing that I thought I would like, Kenneth has said no to, but I hadn't been told."

[00:03:59]>> But what else could I do? Then, during rehearsals, Williams played a game that only a particular kind of difficult performer can pull off. One day, he'd urge her to ad-lib more, then complain to the director that she was improvising too much. The next day, he'd tell her to stick rigidly to the script.

[00:04:19]How I hate these honest, law-abiding people. Why can't everyone be thoroughly horrid? Then, complain she was a slave to the written material. He called her "madam" and "La Fielding" >> [music] >> and sometimes simply "it". The reviews, when they came, were warm about both of them, and in some cases, kinder to Fielding than to Williams, which made things considerably worse. We can't get rid of them tonight. What about the disposal of the bodies? The dustman don't come till Friday. When one newspaper described her as a beautiful butterfly of comedy, Williams emerged from the wings with the review in his hand and, in Fielding's words, had the most terrible temper about it. "Oh, for heaven's sake, pull yourself together."

[00:05:06]"Oh, very well for her to say, 'Pull yourself together.'" Her response was characteristically dry. "I can't help the fact they've said something nice about me." By the time they came to make Carry On Screaming in 1966, neither of them was looking forward to working together again. What happened instead was that they got on rather well. What's he doing here? What's he after? The same as he was after last night, I imagine. Fielding disarmed Williams by behaving so eccentrically that he simply couldn't work out what she was doing. "She is such an enigmatic creature," he wrote in his diary. I hope you didn't leave it anywhere embarrassing.

[00:05:46]>> That's what I'm afraid of. He meant it as a criticism. She took it as a compliment, and the film they made together is extraordinary. In 1987, the year before Williams died, the two of them met again. By then, both had had enough time and distance to reflect on what they'd meant to each other and to the audiences who'd loved them. A complex, prickly, competitive relationship, but one that produced, in that one glorious film, something genuinely unforgettable. But it's an awfully dated metaphor in there. Fangs ain't what they used to be.

[00:06:24]Here's the paradox at the heart of Fenella Fielding's career. She was, by any serious measure, a genuinely remarkable actress. The Times called her Hedda Gabler one of the experiences of a lifetime. If only you weren't so necessary to me. Noël Coward admired her. Federico Fellini wanted to work with her. She performed Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Sheridan, often to critical acclaim that her more famous contemporaries might have envied.

[00:06:56]How sweet of you to come back to see me so soon. But ask almost anyone who Fenella Fielding was, and they will tell you about a crimson dress, a chaise longue, What must you think of me? I'm such a terrible hostess. and a line about smoking. The leary defined her and then confined her. We've done nothing wrong, have we? I don't know. Casting directors who'd seen Carry On Screaming saw only the vamp, the sultry voice, the arch glamour. The range that theater audiences knew she possessed simply didn't register. As Giles Brandreth observed at her memorial service, she and Kenneth Williams shared a frustration that despite their considerable gifts as serious actors, they were painted into a camp corner from which it was almost impossible to escape.

[00:07:51]>> Him, old goody-goody? You must be mad.

[00:07:54]>> Well, we might get him over on our side for a while.

[00:07:56]>> Their distinctive voices and manners had made them near parodies of themselves. A 2007 article in The Independent called it one of the mysteries of British life that Fenella Fielding, whose wit and stage presence had captivated figures like Kenneth Tynan, Noël Coward, and Federico Fellini, had drifted into obscurity rather than being celebrated.

[00:08:21]She was appointed OBE in 2018, the year she died at 90. Recognized, finally, >> [music] >> for a full career that the world had largely reduced to those unforgettable seconds on a chaise longue. Well, do you mind if I smoke? Of course not. This Which isn't to diminish those seconds.

[00:08:43]They were, and remain, absolutely brilliant. But so was everything else she ever did. And that, ultimately, is the saddest part of the Fenella Fielding story. Not that she was forgotten, but that she was remembered for only one thing by a world that should have known better. Would you show me your whistle?

[00:09:04]I think it's a beautiful one.

[00:09:07]Drop a comment below.

[00:09:09]I'd love to know if you saw Fenella Fielding in anything beyond Carry On Screaming, because there's a whole career hiding in plain sight if you know where to look. Subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you in the next one. Please help him. You'll kill him.

[00:09:24]Give me one good reason why I should help him.

[00:09:26]>> I shall be very, very grateful.