She may be only four foot ten and a half inches tall, but she’s a towering giant when it comes to her fans.  The diminuitive  Barbara Windsor makes time for everyone, signing, posing and conversing…lots of conversing and ‘carrying on’.  Appropriately she played the first female God in the musical Spamalot during it’s Summer Season of Charity Celebrity Gods at London’s Playhouse Theatre in 2013. Her height, or lack of it was one of the reasons she accepted the role, saying,”this would be the first and only time people would look up to me.” Since starting her stage and screen career in the early 1950’s, she has scaled the heights with nominations for a  BAFTA for Sparrers Can’t Sing (1963) and a Tony in 1964 for Oh,What A Lovely War!

Barbara was at the British Film Institute a couple of weeks ago, so I quickly did this sketch based on her typical pose in the nine Carry On films she starred in during the sixties and seventies as the ‘good-time girl’. I think this one may have been from either Carry On Doctor or Carry On Doctor Again.To digress, she has an honorary doctorate from the University of East London.  Anyway, Barbs took the time to meet and greet the large crowd gathered to see her. When she saw this sketch, she commented, ‘We had such fun making those films” and wrote a great dedication in exemplary handwriting, before carrying on to the next person.