Playing the archetypal silly ass was the sometimes reluctant business of the stage, film and television actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89. In the public mind he became the best-known postwar example of a characteristic British type - the personally appealing blithering idiot who somehow survives, and sometimes even gets the girl. One of his most characteristic and memorable sorties in this field was his portrayal of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim – the anti-hero James Dixon, who savaged the pretensions of academia, as Amis had himself sometimes clashed with academia when he was a lecturer at Swansea. Appearing in John and Roy Boulting's 1957 film, he was able to suggest an unruly but amiable spirit at the end of its tether, his great horsey teeth exposed in the strained grimace that often greeted disaster.
Carmichael made several more hugely popular comedy films with the Boultings in the second half of the 1950s, including Private's Progress, Brothers In Law and I'm All Right Jack, but always wanted to do more straight roles. The nearest he came to it was his Lord Peter Wimsey in the television series based on Dorothy L Sayers's amateur detective (1972-75), a role he felt very happy in. Laurence Olivier once offered him a part in a Graham Greene play that he had in mind for television, but, like other possible projects, it came to nothing.
Late in Carmichael's career, when he had semi-retired back to his native Yorkshire, the Boultings told him that they wondered if they had done their best for his talents in the five-film deal they made with him near the start of his film career: perhaps they should not virtually have confined him to the playing of twerps. The light comedy producer Michael Mills used him early in his career, and years later made The World of Wooster (1965-67) with him. As PG Wodehouse's silly ass Bertie Wooster, Carmichael was constantly saved from disaster by his manservant Jeeves, played by Dennis Price, a formula so effective that Mills doubted whether Carmichael could have played straight parts without provoking laughs.
What made Carmichael notable was 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, so that any pathos did not become bathos. He was at the opposite pole to Norman Wisdom, whose conscious pathos irritated some people. Carmichael once said waspishly of Wisdom's ragged-urchin persona that any character he played was unbelievable because no girl, except a film starlet under orders, would ever settle for him. It was not a limitation from which the handsome, cricket-loving Carmichael suffered.
He was born in Hull, the son of an optician in the family's smart silversmith's and jeweller's shop in the centre of the city. His mother's father was a lay preacher who had wanted to become an actor, but neither parent had stage ambitions. His father was disappointed when the boy hated school at Scarborough college (so much so that he vowed never to set foot in the place again) and hated it a little less at Bromsgrove school, Worcestershire, where he distinguished himself by hitting his own wicket during a cricket match so that he could get back to two girls he was entertaining in the bushes.
However, his father swallowed his disappointment and financed him to go to Rada, in London. In his first year he played the robot in Karel and Joseph Capek's surreal play, RUR, at the People's Palace, Stepney, east London, and, more significantly, toured the regions for a few weeks in a tour of a Herbert Farjeon revue, Nine Sharp. Then war broke out and Carmichael joined the 22nd Dragoons, a recently formed tank regiment at Whitby. There he met Jean Pyman (Pym) Maclean: they married in 1943 and had two daughters. Nine years after Pym's death in 1983, he married the novelist Kate Fenton.
Carmichael was mentioned in despatches, but his war was distinguished chiefly by a staff job behind a desk, arranging entertainment, in the course of which he found he was good at the detail of administration. He admitted in a BFI interview at the National Film Theatre in 2002 that he had always had to bear the cross of initially finding Frankie Howerd "death-defyingly unfunny" when auditioning him in Germany, though had the sense to defer to a colleague's better judgment. However, he recognised the talent of the comic magician Tommy Cooper and helped him get a break.
After demobilisation, Carmichael did a lot of work for the revived BBC television service at Alexandra Palace, north London – directing and producing as well as performing. A tour of the operetta The Lilac Domino in 1949 brought him into contact with the comedian Leo Franklyn, from whom he learnt the "ABC of comedy... all the tricks of the trade". Carmichael then made his name in The Lyric Revue (1951-52) and The Globe Revue (1952-53) in the West End. For the latter he devised the comic business for a sketch in which, as an ultra-respectable little man, he had to undress on a beach and get into his swimming costume, protected from exposing himself only by panicky use of his raincoat and bowler hat. When the Boulting Brothers saw this sketch, it set them thinking. When they got round to seeing Simon and Laura, Alan Melville's play about the tensions and sentimentalities of a marriage of actors, in which Carmichael played a frantic TV producer trying to prevent the combative pair from ruining his show, they insisted he play the same part in the film version they were planning at the time. Later they told his agent they wanted to make him a film star and offered him the five-film deal. To sweeten the prospect, they sent him two comic novels, Alan Hackney's Private's Progress (the film of which followed in 1956) and Henry Cecil's Brothers in Law (1957).
Out of this deal came the films that made Carmichael a national symbol of the muddling-through Englishman. In I'm All Right Jack (1959), he played the decent but slightly daft young executive, Stanley Windrush, while Peter Sellers appeared as the pompous shop steward – an even-handed cinematic satire on both management and trade unions. Later he even portrayed one of the cricket-mad buffoons fighting back against Balkans devilry (originally made famous by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) in the 1979 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
By then, Carmichael had admitted to being a would-be Peter Pan who hated the thought of ageing, and said he was growing too old to go on playing the sort of parts that had made him famous. He had always expressed a dislike of London. Some friends took this with a pinch of salt in view of his handsome house in Hampstead but, with his two daughters now grown up, he bought a house on the North Yorkshire moors, which he remembered visiting on day trips as a boy. It was also near Whitby, where he had met his first wife.
Such sentiment was part of his character and appeal. He continued to be available for work that took his fancy, such as narrating the television series The Wind in the Willows (1984-88), but was the victim of ill-health, and appeared ever more rarely as the portrayer of an English type now likely to provoke more irritation than laughter. Nonetheless, there were still roles for him in the nostalgic drama series always in demand for Sunday-evening television: the 1950s Scottish laird Sir James Menzies in Strathblair (1992-93), Lord Cumnor in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1999), and the hospital secretary TJ Middleditch in The Royal, from 2003 onwards. The last two episodes in which he appeared are due to be screened later this year.
He was appointed OBE in 2003, and is survived by Kate and his daughters.
• Ian Gillett Carmichael, actor, born 18 June 1920; died 5 February 2010
