Oliver Muirhead
Oliver Muirhead is an actor.
There is a job in American film and television called the Englishman, and Muirhead has held it for decades. He is a character actor with a speciality so precise it is written into his description: pompous country gentlemen, and the American variations on them, butlers, colonels, officials, men in a club chair who disapprove of you.
The evidence is in the casting. A British Colonel in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. A butler in Alvin and the Chipmunks. Mr. Greene in Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. Neville Chamberlain in An American Carol. Nigel in She's Out of Control. Mr. Monteleone in Unhappily Ever After. Comedy after comedy hiring the accent to be the straight man, or the obstacle, or the punchline.
The voice work runs alongside it: animated series including P.J. Sparkles and Spider-Man, Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys, and a solid run in video games, among them Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Dead to Rights, The Hobbit and Eragon. Games have a permanent appetite for exactly the kind of authority his voice suggests.
Two things sit outside the pattern. He directed a musical pantomime, A Christmas Held Captive, in 1986. And in the 2011 romance Like Crazy he plays Bernard Gardner, a straight dramatic part in a serious film, which is the one credit that suggests the comedies have been asking him for less than he can do.
Movies (10)
TV (4)
Where to start with Oliver Muirhead
His best-written part is the odd one out. Like Crazy is a small, improvised transatlantic romance and he plays it entirely straight, with no jokes attached, which after two decades of colonels and butlers is startling. Start there if you want to see the actor.
Start with Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me if you want to see the job. It is the definitive version of the thing he gets hired for, and it is very funny.
The rest is spotting. An American Carol casts him as Neville Chamberlain, which is the joke doing itself. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties and Alvin and the Chipmunks are family films where he supplies the English texture. National Treasure: Book of Secrets and She's Out of Control fill in the two ends of the career, nearly twenty years apart, doing recognisably the same thing.