Sylvia May Laura Syms OBE (6 January 1934 – 27 January 2023) was an English actress, best known for her roles in the films Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), Ice Cold in Alex (1958), No Trees in the Street (1959), Victim (1961), and The Tamarind Seed (1974). In 2006 she portrayed The Queen Mother in the Stephen Frears movie The Queen, about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the days leading up to Diana’s funeral.
Sylvia Syms Obituary
Although Sylvia Syms, who has died aged 89, emerged as an actor during the decade from 1956 to 1966 that saw British cinema changing radically, she seemed to belong to an earlier stiff-upper-lip tradition of British films rather than “kitchen sink” drama. Her cause of death is not known.
Nevertheless, the ethereal Syms starred in a wide variety of films during that period before she developed in later years into a fine supporting actor.
Syms was a plucky nurse in Thompson’s Ice Cold in Alex (1958), in dusty khaki on a trek through the north African desert from Tobruk to Alexandria in 1942.