The Stage

Ian Wallace

Published Tuesday 1 December 2009 at 13:20 by Michael Quinn

Ian Wallace was one of the great crossover artists long before the term was invented. Despite having no formal training in singing and unable to read music, he was a bass-baritone of distinction, notably performing with Glyndebourne and Scottish Opera from 1948 into the seventies.

The son of a Liberal MP, he read law at Cambridge, where he indulged his passion for performing. During the war he served in the Royal Artillery, before tuberculosis of the spine ended his military career. During a two-year spell in hospital he devised a one-man show to lift his spirits and those of other patients.

He made his professional debut with Glasgow’s Little Park Theatre and went on to work on BBC schools broadcasts and with the Citizens Theatre. His London debut came in 1945 in the musical The Forrigan Reel, directed by Alastair Sim at Sadler’s Wells. The following year he sang with the short-lived New London Opera Company, before joining Glyndebourne in 1948. A natural stage presence, a gift for comedy and a lyrical, high-sitting voice found its expressive niche in Rossini, Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan. He scored a West End hit in Fanny at the Drury Lane, alongside Robert Morley in 1956.

From the sixties onwards, Wallace was a regular fixture on television. He played straight dramatic roles in the BBC’s Sunday Night Theatre, William Tell and Porterhouse Blue, and in the long-running Scottish soap Take the High Road, as well as in variety shows, including The Good Old Days, Sykes and Victoria Wood - As Seen on TV. He found considerable success in revue, taking 4 to the Bar into London’s Criterion Theatre in 1960, before becoming a household name with his recording of Flanders and Swann’s Mud.

In 1967 he joined the radio quiz show My Music as one of four regular panellists, staying with its transfer to television and appearing in all 500 episodes before it ended in 1994. He published two volumes of memoirs and was awarded an OBE in 1983.

Born on July 10, 1919 in London, he died on October 12, aged 90, and is survived by his wife of 61 years, a son and daughter.