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Ian Carmichael
Feb. 6th, 2010 12:24 pmWell, I see that the actor Ian Carmichael has died, full of years. For me, as for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
brisingamen, he is the one, the only, dramatic embodiment of Lord Peter Wimsey. Edward P. may be all very well in his way, but the role was already taken before he came along.
Now, there will always be those who say that Ian Carmichael looked nothing like Peter Wimsey. Let's take a look at them side-by-side, shall we?
Not ringers, to be sure, but I don't think they appear all that unalike, do you?
Now, you may wonder, since Wimsey is a fictional character, how comes there to be a photograph of him? Well, I'll tell you. The name on that gentleman's ID was Roy Ridley, but he was Peter Wimsey nonetheless. When Dorothy L. Sayers was casting the play of Busman's Honeymoon, she exclaimed in despair that she had found in him the perfect Lord Peter - "height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything" - if only he had been an actor, and not the chaplain of Balliol College, Oxford.
What Sayers had entirely forgotten, but her letters testify to, was that she had seen him once before, over twenty years earlier when they were both undergraduates. He was reading a poem at the Oxford degree ceremony, and she'd been totally enchanted by him then, too. Barbara Reynolds in her biography of Sayers tells the story and presents the evidence that his appearance and manner stuck in Sayers' mind and were the basis for those aspects of Wimsey when she created him a few years later.
Those BBC adaptations of Sayers novels - including her masterworks, The Nine Tailors and Murder Must Advertise, and thankfully leaving out the self-indulgent Harriet Vane* - were my introduction to Sayers' work in the mid 70s. I only read the novels later. Fortunately I quickly recognized that the novels were better, but I still like the adaptations. The supporting casts were also good, and drew heavily upon the stock company of British TV drama actors of the day. Several of them had been in The Prisoner (including Chief Inspector Parker, his wife Lady Mary, the dreaded Helen, Duchess of Denver, from Clouds of Witness, and Major Milligan from Murder Must Advertise), and Mr. Tallboy in Advertise was Paul Darrow, who went on to fame as Avon in Blakes 7.
I didn't see much of Ian Carmichael's other work, though I have seen a few of his 1950s comedy films, of which the most comprehensible, if not the best, was the anemic adaptation of Lucky Jim, which is still worth watching ... because it stars Ian Carmichael.
*All right, Gaudy Night is good, but that's because it's mostly just Harriet, and not so much about Harriet-and-Peter, a deadly combination, like Brad and Toni.
brisingamen, he is the one, the only, dramatic embodiment of Lord Peter Wimsey. Edward P. may be all very well in his way, but the role was already taken before he came along.Now, there will always be those who say that Ian Carmichael looked nothing like Peter Wimsey. Let's take a look at them side-by-side, shall we?
Not ringers, to be sure, but I don't think they appear all that unalike, do you?
Now, you may wonder, since Wimsey is a fictional character, how comes there to be a photograph of him? Well, I'll tell you. The name on that gentleman's ID was Roy Ridley, but he was Peter Wimsey nonetheless. When Dorothy L. Sayers was casting the play of Busman's Honeymoon, she exclaimed in despair that she had found in him the perfect Lord Peter - "height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything" - if only he had been an actor, and not the chaplain of Balliol College, Oxford.
What Sayers had entirely forgotten, but her letters testify to, was that she had seen him once before, over twenty years earlier when they were both undergraduates. He was reading a poem at the Oxford degree ceremony, and she'd been totally enchanted by him then, too. Barbara Reynolds in her biography of Sayers tells the story and presents the evidence that his appearance and manner stuck in Sayers' mind and were the basis for those aspects of Wimsey when she created him a few years later.
Those BBC adaptations of Sayers novels - including her masterworks, The Nine Tailors and Murder Must Advertise, and thankfully leaving out the self-indulgent Harriet Vane* - were my introduction to Sayers' work in the mid 70s. I only read the novels later. Fortunately I quickly recognized that the novels were better, but I still like the adaptations. The supporting casts were also good, and drew heavily upon the stock company of British TV drama actors of the day. Several of them had been in The Prisoner (including Chief Inspector Parker, his wife Lady Mary, the dreaded Helen, Duchess of Denver, from Clouds of Witness, and Major Milligan from Murder Must Advertise), and Mr. Tallboy in Advertise was Paul Darrow, who went on to fame as Avon in Blakes 7.
I didn't see much of Ian Carmichael's other work, though I have seen a few of his 1950s comedy films, of which the most comprehensible, if not the best, was the anemic adaptation of Lucky Jim, which is still worth watching ... because it stars Ian Carmichael.
*All right, Gaudy Night is good, but that's because it's mostly just Harriet, and not so much about Harriet-and-Peter, a deadly combination, like Brad and Toni.
