Ian Carmichael: The archetypal Englishman who snubbed the dollar

He recalled how he'd been nervous around the-then 83-year-old veteran – a performer who he'd always admired for his deftness as a comic actor.

Ian Carmichael himself couldn't see what all the fuss was about. We all met at the opening night of the 10th Bradford Film Festival, in March 2004, where Carmichael was to receive a lifetime achievement award.

On accepting the award from the late Anthony Minghella, another fan, Ian joked that the only reason he was getting the honour was that all his contemporaries were dead.

He himself had been more or less officially retired since the early '80s. Now and then he took a job to relieve boredom and to get out from under the feet of his wife, novelist Kate Fenton.

Thus it was that he and Kate travelled from their home on the North York Moors to Bradford where the festival was presenting a retrospective of his films, many of them comic gems from the Boulting Brothers.

Ian was flattered and grateful but he told me more than once that while he was appreciative of the garlands with which we showered him, the career wasn't something he dwelt on. It was, he said, all so long ago.

During an on-stage interview, I quizzed him over a decision he made in the Fifties to turn down a plum role in a big American production. Ian was on a foreign holiday with his family. Despite his agent's exhortations, he refused to return to England to take the part.

I suggested he may have made an error and that the film could have provided a springboard to American movies, mega pay cheques and international fame. Ian shrugged it off.

I persevered, completely ignoring the fact that he wasn't remotely bothered by the offer. He hadn't been then; nor was he five decades later.

"I think you're making a bit much of this, old chap," he said with some testiness. I backed down and we moved on to other things.

Over dinner that night, he elaborated and said he had never really been entirely content as a movie star. In the mid '60s, when film work dried up and he moved into television, playing a delightfully daffy Bertie Wooster to Dennis Price's imperturbable Jeeves, he said he'd never been happier. Such witty work would have been denied him if he'd taken the Yankee dollar and played second fiddle to lesser Stateside talent.

Ian's halcyon period as a British film star lasted just five years. In films like School for Scoundrels and I'm All Right, Jack he carved a niche, playing "the same old bumbling, accident-prone clot", as he put it.

He was relieved to get out via TV, Wooster and, later still, Lord Peter Wimsey. Hollywood eluded him. Or, rather, he eluded Hollywood. It wasn't the life he wanted... but what a different life it might have been.