School for Scoundrels actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89. Photograph: Duffy/Getty Images
Ian Carmichael, who has died at the age of 89, was each actor with some incredible work ethic and appetite as being the acting life: he filmed his last episodes of the period TV hospital theatrical piece 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’session biggest post-war box office stars through innocent, ingenuous roles in classic Boulting Brothers films such as Private’s Progress (1956) and I’m All Right Jack (1959). My favourite Carmichael thin skin is also one of my favourite British films, and by chance favourite films abounding stop. It is that tremendous 1960 comedy School for Scoundrels, the last thin skin 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 the sooner comfortably off young fellow who due to his legitimate timidity and doormat-tendencies loses out in animated existence, 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 genial game of one-upmanship by the unspoken, traditional 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 through Billy Bob Thornton in the “Professor” role and Jon Heder in Ian Carmichael’s clueless pupil interest. This remake was extreme, but even now I think Phillips deserves some points for his sheer good taste in knowing about this precious stone 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 highest servitor. Janette Scott, who played April, the object of Palfrey’s swooning love, was surely one of the most breathtakingly beautiful commonalty ever to appear in any British film.
And Carmichael, granting 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 have. 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 disclosed of style with John Osborne’sitting 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 choose 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 vouchsafe “patrician”, notwithstanding that despite the life of me I can only think of Julian Rhind-Tutt. Anyway, let’session all pay tribute to Ian Carmichael by renting a DVD copy of School for Scoundrels.
