Ian Carmichael

Ian Gillett Carmichael OBE (18 June 1920 – 5 February 2010) was an English film, stage, television and radio actor.

Quotes

National Film Theatre interview (8 December 2002)

From "Features: Interviews: Ian Carmichael", British Film Institute

• [Robert] Hamer was an alcoholic. And Hal Chester, the little volatile American producer of School for Scoundrels, looked after him like a child. He picked him up in the morning and took him to the studio, he looked after him at lunchtime, he took him home at night. And everything was hunky dory. He was compos mentis and played well [until] the last fortnight of shooting. It was a night shoot outside the Camelia room ... [a]nd I got down there and he was stoned out of his mind. He was absolutely rolling around, couldn't do a thing. So I'm afraid he had to be removed, and the producer directed that night. Then after that, for the last three weeks, another director came in who never got a credit, a man called Cyril Frankel, who I was in the army with, strangely. He directed the last three weeks. Of course, you've always got to remember that everything is shot out of sequence so the last three weeks doesn't necessarily mean the last fifteen minutes of the film. You can't see the join.

• [On the early end of a Broadway run] So I went over there and, I'm delighted to say, the play flopped [audience laughter]. I hated New York. I loathed it. I sent Michael [Mills] a telegram after the notice went up at the end of the first week. It said "Boeing Boeing coming off next week. Am at your full disposal." He told me later that telegram arrived on his desk at Television Centre while he was holding a conference as to who should play Bertie [Wooster] as I wasn't available.
  • Carmichael was cast in The World of Wooster for BBC Television with Dennis Price as Jeeves.

• Q: Who were your comedic or revue influences?
  IC: I adored Jack Buchanan and Fred Astaire. Cary Grant roles are ones I would love to have played but I was never given any.

About Carmichael

• He had great zest for life, and a lot of style - he belonged to an age of elegance.
  • Anne Reid "Actor Ian Carmichael dies at 89", BBC News (6 February 2010)

• He had that love of life and love of people; he gathered people around him like other people gather butterflies or postage stamps.
  • Neil Durden-Smith "Actor Ian Carmichael dies at 89", BBC News (6 February 2010)