‘And who are you, my darling?” Fenella Fielding said when I plonked myself down next to her on a sofa at my local literary festival. There she was, tiny, frail, almost kabuki-like, with the giant lashes and red lippy. Her look was unchangeable and it matters not to me if it was the artifice of wigs and makeup – there was a core in her that made her carry on being Fenella Fielding long after the Carry Ons that made her famous.
I asked for a picture. She arranged herself and made that noise. It undid me. She was a purr in human form and my eyes popped out of my head.
The organisers of the festival were worried about whether she was up to performing. She was there to introduce an event about Andrew Logan and the Alternative Miss World. She did it beautifully, always the pro. With that voice.
The event started off with an attempt at serious discussion, but soon descended into marvellous chaos, with a catwalk of people falling over while dressed in costumes made of plastic bags and Lurex and God knows what else.
Fielding fitted perfectly into this strange, utterly English camp boho set. She lived and breathed magic, subversion and charm. In Carry On Screaming, she is not sex personified, but sex as self-combustion. Wow. No wonder Fellini wanted her to represent the incarnation of desire in one of his films (she was busy in the theatre).
Beaten by her father, she had to fight to act: “I think my parents had visions of me being found in the Thames with six illicit foetuses in my womb and needle marks up my arm,” she once said. She had her ups and downs. She had to contend with Kenneth Williams being vile to her. She once inquired: “Why is your bum so hard, Kenneth? Do you leave it out at night?”
To see her simply as the queen of double entendre is to underestimate her cleverness. She played Hedda Gabler opposite Ian McKellen. She was brilliant with Morecambe and Wise. Her friendship with Doris Lessing was intriguing. Lessing saw her performances as natural, not skilled, which Fielding described in her memoirs as “the department of fucking cheek”. She was as camp as Christmas, with all the steel that that involves. She was a charmer, an original, a total fox till the end. She died with her lashes on.
