Her best-known film roles include My Teenage Daughter (1956), Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), for which she was nominated for a BAFTA Award, Ice Cold in Alex (1958), No Trees in the Street (1959), Victim (1961) and The Tamarind Seed (1974).

[4] Syms was educated at convent schools before deciding to become an actress and attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1954.

This led to two offers, one to make a film for Herbert Wilcox, My Teenage Daughter, another to sign a long-term contract with Associated British.

The film is thought to have broadened the debate that led to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private in the United Kingdom.

[10] Syms travelled to Ireland to play opposite Patrick McGoohan as the wife of a condemned man in The Quare Fellow.

Other comedies followed, such as The Big Job (1965), but it was for drama that she won acclaim, including The Tamarind Seed (1974) with Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif, for which she was nominated for a British Film Academy award.

In 1970, Syms changed direction playing Beatrice opposite Julian Glover's Benedick in a production of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

[12] The Prospect Theatre Company production, directed by Tony Richardson, was first presented at the Edinburgh International Festival and subsequently toured the United Kingdom.

Syms featured in the husband-and-wife TV comedy My Good Woman from 1972 to 1974[13] and on the weekly BBC programme Movie Quiz as one of two team captains.

[3] In 2010, Syms took part in the BBC's The Young Ones, a series in which six celebrities in their seventies and eighties attempt to overcome some of the problems of ageing by harking back to the 1970s.

Her sister Joan married Norman Webb, the Cambridge-educated statistician who invented the Television Audience Measurement system, and was later a chief executive of Gallup.

[23] Syms was a longtime supporter of the Stars Foundation for Cerebral Palsy, serving on its board as an officer for 16 years until 2020, with singer Vera Lynn.

[citation needed] In the last year of her life, Syms lived at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in London.

[16][24] In the words of Filmink magazine: I don’t think any actress in English speaking cinema of this era had such a variety of love interests as Sylvia Syms.

And she was highly adept playing "smouldering hot lava of emotion and sensuality under an outwardly straight-laced and sensible facade" that made her – and this is meant with nothing but the greatest respect to the recently departed – sexy as hell.