Thread: Ian Carmichael RIP

brilliant in i,m alright jack

The guileless charm of Ian Carmichael
The School for Scoundrels actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89, elevated muddled decency and likability to an art form

By Peter Bradshaw

The Guardian
The guileless charm of Ian Carmichael | Peter Bradshaw | Film | guardian.co.uk

Ian Carmichael, who has died at the age of 89, was an actor with an incredible work ethic and appetite for the acting life: he filmed his last episodes of the period TV hospital drama The Royal just last year.

Before he became a TV regular with his performances as Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey, he had been established as one of Britain's biggest post-war box office stars with innocent, guileless roles in classic Boulting Brothers films such as Private's Progress (1956) and I'm All Right Jack (1959). My favourite Carmichael film is also one of my favourite British films, and perhaps favourite films full stop. It is that tremendous 1960 comedy School for Scoundrels, the last film by the great, troubled director Robert Hamer (who made Kind Hearts And Coronets).

Based on the Stephen Potter Lifemanship books, it tells the story of Henry Palfrey, a pleasant, personable and indeed rather comfortably off young fellow who due to his natural timidity and doormat-tendencies loses out in life, chiefly to a frightful, predatory rotter called Raymond Delauney. Palfrey enrols in Stephen Potter's top-secret academy for instruction in how to play the social game of one-upmanship by the unspoken, unwritten rules of the British class system. Carmichael plays Palfrey; Terry-Thomas is the awful Delauney and the lugubrious Alastair Sim plays Mr Potter himself.

Notoriously, Todd Phillips – the frat comedy director who created The Hangover – tried to re-make School for Scoundrels in 2006 with Billy Bob Thornton in the "Professor" role and Jon Heder in Ian Carmichael's clueless pupil part. This remake was terrible, but even now I think Phillips deserves some points for his sheer good taste in knowing about this gem and sincerely wanting to revive it.

The original 1960 School for Scoundrels had a bluer-than-blue-chip British cast. Aside from Carmichael, Sim and Terry-Thomas, there was Dennis Price as the slippery car dealer and John Le Mesurier as the icily disapproving head waiter. Janette Scott, who played April, the object of Palfrey's swooning love, was surely one of the most breathtakingly beautiful people ever to appear in any British film.

And Carmichael, though always in danger of being upstaged by all these male character actors in seedy and scoundrelly roles, always held his ground and made his muddled decency and likability into a comic force of its own. His crisis of conscience about Potter's sneaky tricks at the end of the film is a genuinely dramatic, tense moment.

Do they make actors like Ian Carmichael any more? It is a commonplace to say that drama schools and the world of drama itself – on stage and screens big and small – have no time for posh. Posh started to go out of style with John Osborne's Look Back In Anger. But in real life in 2010, posh is still there. Posh exists. The outrageously posh Boris Johnson – whose mannerisms have in fact been semi-consciously crafted in the comic tradition of Ian Carmichael – is mayor of London and David Cameron and various other Bullingdon alumni are poised to take over the running of the country. So perhaps we should be training actors to be posh to tackle this reality. There must be loads of younger actors who can easily do "patrician", though for the life of me I can only think of Julian Rhind-Tutt. Anyway, let's all pay tribute to Ian Carmichael by renting a DVD copy of School for Scoundrels.

Nice piece on Ian Carmichael (and John Dankworth) in The Last Word

BBC iPlayer - Last Word: 12/02/2010