Ian Carmichael

From Kingston-Upon-Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, UK • 1920 - 2010

Ian Gillett Carmichael (18 June 1920 – 5 February 2010) was an English actor who worked prolifically on stage, screen and radio in a career that spanned seventy years. Born in Kingston upon Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but his studies—and the early stages of his career—were curtailed by the Second World War. After his demobilisation he returned to acting and found success, initially in revue and sketch productions. In 1955 Carmichael was noticed by the film producers John and Roy Boulting, who cast him in five of their films as one of the major players. The first was the 1956 film Private's Progress, a satire on the British Army; he received critical and popular praise for the role, including from the American market. In many of his roles he played a likeable, often accident-prone, innocent. In the mid-1960s he played Bertie Wooster in adaptations of the works of P. G. Wodehouse in The World of Wooster for BBC Television, for which he received mostly positive reviews, including from Wodehouse. In the early 1970s he played another upper-class literary character, Lord Peter Wimsey, the amateur but talented investigator created by Dorothy L. Sayers. Much of Carmichael's success came through a disciplined approach to training and rehearsing for a role. He learned much about the craft and technique of humour while appearing with the comic actor Leo Franklyn. Although Carmichael tired of being typecast as the affable but bumbling upper-class Englishman, his craft ensured that while audiences laughed at his antics, he retained their affection; Dennis Barker, in Carmichael's obituary in The Guardian, wrote that he "could play fool parts in a way that did not cut the characters completely off from human sympathy: a certain dignity was always maintained". (Via Wikipedia)