Carry on films: Angela Douglas loved every minute on comedy classics

ANGELA DOUGLAS is best remembered as the glamorous, often upper-crust young leading lady in a series of Carry On films. 

But she gained a different sort of fame when she shocked 1960s Britain by falling passionately in love with the actor Kenneth More, who was a household name thanks to his starring role as Second World War flying ace Douglas Bader in Reach For The Sky.

The issue was that Angela was just 21 and More was not only more than twice her age but married with a young daughter.

In a huge scandal for the time, More – renowned for playing war heroes and upright Englishmen – left his second wife Mabel to live with the petite blonde ingénue he nicknamed “Shrimp”.

Eventually he was granted a divorce and married Angela in 1968 when he was 53 and she was 27.

Their marriage was very happy but not without its ups and downs including mutual infidelities.

There was also a brief trial separation before More’s tragic battle, beginning in the late 1970s, with muscular dystrophy and Parkinson’s – during which Angela devotedly nursed him until his death in 1982.

She movingly chronicled her eventful life with More in a best-selling memoir that is entitled Swings And Roundabouts.

Now, a still youthful 77 and happily remarried since 2009 to playwright and director Bill Bryden, Angela has written her debut novel, Josephine: An Open Book, about a young actress facing challenges in life and love in the 1960s.

While it is fiction, not a memoir, Angela has drawn on her own experiences and Josephine is her real middle name.

Some of the famous people she encountered such as Roger Moore, Michael Caine and Elizabeth Taylor make cameo appearances.

But it is no fluffy showbiz potboiler.

By turns it is serious, dramatic and, at times, shocking.

The heroine, years before #MeToo, endures lewd casting-couch approaches and even rape, an unhappy marriage and serious illness. There is a central love affair with an older married man, Steve, whom a somewhat cagey Angela surprisingly insists is not based on her “Kenny”.

As for sexual harassment, Angela says she encountered it but was able to fend it off.

“It happened to me but, you know, it is all manageable. You could deal with it yourself. Even at that time, at a young age. But it was happening all over the place in the 60s and 70s.”

Angela memorably starred in Carry On Cowboy as Annie Oakley (1965), Carry On Screaming! (1966), Carry On Follow That Camel (1967) and Carry On Up The Khyber (1968).

They bring back fond memories.

“I loved every minute,” she enthuses.

“It was wonderful – such a happy time. I was working with complete professionals and it was full of humour. We laughed all day long – you came home aching and exhausted because you were laughing so much. They were films of their time. But they are still enjoyed.”

Of her Carry On co-stars she was closest to Jim Dale – with whom she still keeps in touch – and the late Joan Sims. 

“A wonderful actress and a lovely person. She did both drama and comedy brilliantly. She was very talented but under-appreciated as an actress.”

Angela, who began acting at 14, met many major stars along the way, including Eiizabeth Taylor.

“She was stunningly beautiful and very friendly, very approachable,” she recalls. Sir Roger Moore was not only a colleague but a close friend.

“I worked with Roger on stage and then he became a family friend. He was the best man at my wedding to Kenny and my husband was his best man at his wedding to [third ex-wife] Luisa. We were family. He was just completely charming.”

She also worked with Sir Michael Caine on TV police drama Dixon Of Dock Green before he found stardom in the film Zulu.

“There’s something I’ll tell you that says a lot about him,” she relates.

“We came home on the bus together and I went to pay my fare and he said, ‘How much are you getting paid for this job?’ So I said, ‘£12’. He said, ‘Well, I’m getting £15, so put your purse away. I’m paying your fare’. Isn’t that sweet? He is very kind and a complete professional.”

While Kenneth More adored his young wife and they were “ecstatically in love”, she now admits there was a controlling aspect to their relationship.

The older, established star wasn’t keen on his beautiful young wife’s career overshadowing his own.

Sadly, the family she longed for that might have compensated never arrived after she suffered a miscarriage in 1969.

Her second marriage, to Bryden – her contemporary at 76 – is more of a modern, equal partnership.

“He’s Scottish, he’s interesting, he’s caring, he’s very funny and I’m very lucky. With my first husband I was emotionally lonely but with Bill I’m not.”

She is at first reluctant to expand but suddenly adds: “The Carry On films. It’s the only thing I’m remembered for! And that’s OK. I didn’t have ambitions and I wasn’t allowed ambitions in my first marriage.

“Part of the deal with Ken was that I wasn’t ambitious and if I was allowed to work, it was secondary to him. It was a condition he made and it was like blackmail. I bought it. His career was more important. I wasn’t encouraged to work.

“No younger woman today would’ve bought that condition but I did. Why? Because I was completely in love with him. He was very controlling of me and also very caring of me. It was a mixture of both.”

SHE insists she doesn’t have regrets that her career played second fiddle.

“The only thing I regret is that my parents lost their daughter. They’d struggled to give me the chance and everything [in her career] and I didn’t consider that then. I’m considering it now. It’s a bit late.”

But there were compensations.

“I saw the world with him. I travelled, I had a beautiful home. There are always pluses and minuses in life and you have to make your decision. If you really, really love someone, you want to make them happy, to be what they want you to be. It would be completely different nowadays, I’m sure, for a young woman. The 1960s were not liberated – well not for me.”

The Carry On films and other acting parts were allowed, she says, only when it fitted in with Kenny’s schedule.

“I remember, there was a theatre producer called Binkie Beaumont. We were all having supper and he said, ‘Kenny, I want Angela for a play. I need to check with you and see if it is all right with you’.

“And I just sat there. That happened more than once.

“But I didn’t have any mixed messages. Kenny made it very clear, right from the off, that he wasn’t entertaining the idea of living with a [successful] actress. I’m not sure he had that much respect for that profession.”

But she is philosophical. “I have survived,” she says. “You might not be talking to me if I hadn’t married Ken, if I hadn’t done the Carry On films, if I hadn’t written a few books. Do you know what I mean? I have survived.”

She is “proud” of her novel and hopes to write more and also return to acting “if anyone remembers me or wants me”.

She still uses her first married name. “I’m still Angela More. I won’t change that – I’m ‘A More’ [as in ‘amour’, the French word for love]. Why would I want to change something as lovely as that?” 

Josephine: An Open Book is published by Candy Jar Books at £15.99