Alastair Sim began life as the academic he was often to play on screen.
Briefly in the family business of tailoring, he was soon involved in
teaching poetic drama, later teaching elocution in his native Edinburgh.
In his late twenties he came to London, and friends, seeing him perform
in amateur productions, urged him to turn professional. So it was that
he made his London West End stage debut at 29. Sim came to the fore
with the three popular Inspector Hornleigh comedy thrillers made between
1938 and 1941, they also marked the first major association between
himself and the filmmaking partnership of Frank
Launder and Sidney Gilliat,
later to give him several of his best roles.
Launder and Gilliat were responsible for making Sim an actor the post-war
British public would pay to see when, though fourth-billed, he stole
all the notices in their scary comedy-thriller Green
for Danger. Now billed above the title, Sim was the bescarfed author
of blood-and-thunder comics in Ealing's
Hue and Cry,
and the fake medium in the Launder/Gilliat London
Belongs to Me. Next occupied with bringing a successful stage farce,
The Happiest Days
of Your Life, to the screen, the latter filmmakers rightly preserved
Margaret Rutherford from the original production,
but executed a master-stroke in bringing in Sim as her opposite number,
head teachers both. When it came to making a new version of Charles
Dickens' A Christmas
Carol, there was really only one candidate for the lead. Sim remains
an imperishable Scrooge, convincing whether in a state of panic over
the visitation of ghosts, or expressing childlike glee when converted
to the joys of the season.
Sim frequently had audiences eating out of his hand for the next decade,
he became a novelist trying to commit a jailworthy offence to inherit
money in Laughter
in Paradise, doubled as the headmistress and her bookie brother
in The Belles of
St Trinian's, dominated An
Inspector Calls as the mysterious title character and was brilliant
as one of the world's least likely assassins in The
Green Man. There were no Sim appearances in 1957 and 1958 for filmgoers
to savour, apart from the briefest of guest spots as the now-imprisoned
headmistress in the first St Trinian's sequel. At the end of the decade,
he supported Ian Carmichael in a couple,
Left, Right and Centre
and School for Scoundrels.
He was more genuinely benevolent in his few remaining film roles, but
was much missed amid the coarser comedy surging through British film-making
of the 1960s and 1970s. He died from cancer a few weeks short of his
76th birthday.
