Barbara Windsor wanted to start her biography with East-Enders and it's easy to see why. Six years ago the BBC soap threw her a lifeline that rescued her from tatty pantomimes in run down British towns, Carry On song-and-dance spin-offs and a debt of one million pounds. And for once she got to play her age. As Peggy Mitchell, the 60-ish landlady of the Queen Vic pub, she has a devoted weekly audience that hovers between 12 and 15 million. The one thing that she thought would scupper her chances of getting the role was the one thing that made her a British icon, the Carry On films.
In this PC, post-feminist age, it's difficult to explain the appeal of those old movies with such nudge nudge, wink wink titles as Carry On Camping and Carry On Dick. They showed a particularly British type of humour - a celluloid version of saucy end-of-pier postcards and music-hall shows. Their raciness relied on harmless, if simple-minded, double entendres, and the cast of stock characters was played by a group of music-hall veterans led by Sid James, with Kenneth Williams and Hatti Jacques.
Barbara Windsor appeared in nine Carry On films, always playing a variation on the same busty bird character who's dimmer than a 20-watt bulb and who never makes it to the end of a movie without flashing her naked backside or her famously ample bust. In 1972, her then lover Sid James told her that she'd always be the Carry On girl. At the time she laughed, but he was right. When the EastEnders call came over 30 years later, there was yet another compilation of Carry On films on the television.
"I thought they'll look at that and in their minds I'll be this big-tits girl with a giggle and a wiggle," she says, adding that her image held her career back.
In the 1960s, she had the start of a very promising stage career. The renowned theatre director Joan Littlewood cast her in a West End musical Fings Ain't Wot They Used to Be in 1959. It had a two-year run and transferred successfully to Broadway. She was with Littlewood again on Broadway in the early 1960s in Oh What a lovely War. Other theatre credits include a musical of Marie Lloyd's life, as well as The Beggar's Opera, Twelfth Night, and Entertaining Mr Sloane.
She did appear in one serious film, Spar- rows Can't Sing, directed by Littlewood. When it was repeated on TV a few years ago it prompted a friend to suggest that she could have had a Judy Dench type career. "So I said to him, `yeah, maybe I could' - but then maybe I could have spent my life working in Woolworths. Nothing wrong with that of course but you know what I mean, things just work out the way they do."
Even if she wanted to, she wouldn't be able to forget her role in the Carry On movies. As well as endless TV repeats, there is a range of mugs, posters and greeting cards from which she receives no royalties. One of the biggest selling items in Ann Summers, the risque lingerie shop, is a nurse's uniform, complete with her face on the packaging. "I think it's immoral," she says without a hint of bitterness. "We signed contracts to do films, not for all this. It doesn't affect me too much because I'm a survivor, but I think it's wrong."
She is a survivor and quite a remarkable looking one too. At 63, she looks at least 15 years younger, and at a trim four feet, 10 inches, she's tiny. In person, there's no sign of the famous Carry On cackle or the plaintalking forthright language that peppers her biography, but she sounds every inch as East End as Peggy. She does, however, look a lot more glamorous - both the lighting and make-up in EastEnders contrive to make her look washed-out and ordinary. She's upfront about the fact that she wears a wig and has had an eye lift, but says that other than that she doesn't take much interest in the way she looks.
In April this year, she got married for the third time - to Scott, a man half her age and the son of some friends. When we meet she's on the last day of a three-week publicity tour to push her autobiography, which, thanks to her ghostwriter, starts at her childhood years in the East End with her ambitious dressmaker mother and her busconducter father.
She still finds dealing with what she calls "the serious papers" a novel experience. "It's lovely," she says. "When they want a photo they make an appointment and send a photographer along." But she's philosophical about her experiences with the tabloids, which range from photographers lurking outside her house to her men selling their stories to the papers. "Maybe they need the money," she shrugs. "Who I am I to judge? I play the tabloid game myself."
It was in the late 1950s when she was, by her own description "ducking an' diving, doing a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of jazz, a bit of radio, a bit of cabaret", that she made her first appearance in the tabloids. Her boyfriend, the then-married Ronnie Knight, was in court for robbery and she was photographed at his side. His criminal exploits, which over the years included several robberies and a murder charge, kept her in the public eye throughout their 20-year marriage. But it was through her relationship with the notorious Kray brothers that she earned the tabloid tag of "gangster's moll".
She claims that when she met them in the 1950s she had no idea who they were. One night they appeared backstage at a show she was doing and she started dating Charlie Kray. The relationship only lasted a short time but she talks of him fondly, remarking how respectful he was - "not all over you like actors would be". When that ended, she dated Reggie, one of the infamous twins. Having heard rumours about the Krays, she asked an actor friend exactly what they did. She still didn't get it even when she was told that they ran the East End - "Then my friend told me that they were East End mafioso, but really it meant nothing to me."
Windsor's ostentatious wreath at Reggie Kray's funeral early this month made the papers. "People believe what they want to believe - that I was in 30 Carry Ons and that I grew up with the Krays or was more involved than I was, but I wasn't." Who knows. The book certainly doesn't reveal anything of that time which isn't already known and she never says how she felt about the criminal underworld she was on the periphery of.
Although she skirts over the reality of those relationships, she's very candid about her own active and varied sex life. She's matter-of-fact about the many affairs she had throughout both her first and second marriages, and about her five abortions, three before she was 21, the last when she was 42 and her marriage to Ronnie Knight was on the rocks. The baby, she knew, wasn't his.
Whatever about Windsor's sense of loyalty, it's clear she married the most spectacularly disloyal men. Her first two husbands both sold their stories to the tabloids, Knight even spoke of her of laundering money for him. Her father, from whom she had been estranged for thirty years, sold the story of their reunion. When her second marriage collapsed, her husband left her with debts that amounted to one million pounds.
"Scott told me that he doesn't think there's any soul searching in the book and he's right, but it doesn't mean I haven't sorted things out in my head." On the day we met, she had re-paid the final instalment of her million-pound bank debt and was enjoying the idea that from now on all the EastEnders money is hers. "Scott worries about money all the time," she says, but, with the experience of a lifetime of financial fluctuations, she reassures him that it'll be all right. Her contract ends in May, and when her screen-husband, Mike Reid, leaves the series, she doesn't know in which direction the script will take her. She accepts her popularity in the part probably helped her to get her MBE this summer.
As Peggy, she has had some meaty storylines - the most powerful when her character developed breast cancer. She pitched the idea to the programme's makers: "I thought the connection would work, what with me being known for my bust for all these years". It did. At her book signings, she has been gratified that the most prominent badge on the fans' lapels is the distinctive pink ribbon used by breast cancer charities. It's not something that even she could have imagined in her Carry On Doctor days.
All of Me, My Extraordinary Life by Barbara Windsor is published by Headline (£18.99 in UK)