Born Robert Carrier McMahon in Tarrytown, New York, the third son of an Irish descended wealthy property lawyer father, while his mother was the Franco-German daughter of a millionaire. After his parents went bankrupt in the 1930s Great Depression, they maintained their own lifestyle through removing the servants and preparing their own elaborate dinner parties.
Educated in New York City, Robert took part-time art courses, and trained to become an actor. He eventually took a place in the Broadway revue of New Faces, before touring Europe with a rep company, singing the juvenile lead in American musicals. After returning to America, Robert often stayed at weekends with his beloved French grandmother in upstate New York, and she taught him to cook, making biscuits and butter-frying fish caught in a nearby stream.
Post World War II
Carrier volunteered to serve in the United States Army during World War II , as an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services, a wartime forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Speaking fluent French and understanding German thanks to his parentage, Carrier arrived in England in 1943, and served in Paris post D-Day as a cryptographer in General Charles de Gaulle's headquarters.
Thanks to his Gaullist connections, Carrier choose to remain in Paris as a civilian after the cessation of hostilities, dropping the patronymic surname McMahon: "It (Robert Carrier) sounds good in French and it looks well visually." Carrier initially working for a US forces radio station and a Gaullist newspaper/magazine Spectacle, set up to support de Gaulle's RTF party in its failed bid for post-war power.
After a theatrical magazine he was editing and part owned was shut down in 1949, he moved to St. Tropez to work in a friends restaurant called Chez Fifine's, where he found relief from a bout of depression. Starting to write about food as ration-restricted Europe got used to flavour again, Carrier moved to Rome, Italy to improve his cookery repertoire, and undertake work as a cowboy in an Italian musical revue.
After a friend invited him to Great Britain for the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, he decided to relocate to London working in the developing industry of public relations marketing various food products, including: stock cubes, cornflour, New Zealand apples - a vegetarian dog food. With Oliver Lawson-Dick, Carrier wrote The Vanishing City, an historical perspective of London illustrated with reproductions of old engravings.
Cookery career
In 1957 Carrier wrote his first article on food, which he sold to Harper's Bazaar editor Eileen Dickson. He was soon writing regularly for the magazine before becoming a contributor to Vogue and then writing a weekly column for the colour supplement of the Sunday Times. This column brought him celebrity, which he used to promote his first and lavishly illustrated cookery book Great Dishes of the World in 1963, which although priced at the present day equivalent of around £100, sold 11 million copies.
Assured of publicity, Carrier opened the eponymous restaurant Carriers' in 1959 in Camden Passage, Islington; and then developed an international chain of cookshops, with the first in Harrods in 1967. His development of wipe-clean recipe cards were bought by housewives, and being more specific and easier to follow than the recipes of Elizabeth David, and made it easily possible to prepare food that would fully satisfy the eye and palate of any dinner guests.
In 1971, he saw a full-page advertisement in Country Life for Hintlesham Hall near Ipswich, Suffolk and bought it, unsurveyed, for £32,000. He planned to renovate it slowly as a country retreat but, realising its vulnerability and near dereliction with rotten floors and ceilings, he decided to save it all immediately. He employed 60 people to restore the house and opened it as a hotel and restaurant in August 1972. He also revived the Hintlesham Festival.
A few years later, Carrier met a woman who lived near his Paris apartment. He thought her a remarkable cook but a poor business woman; so, when she got into financial difficulties over non-payment of tax, he offered to set her up as a cookery teacher at Hintlesham if she would learn to speak English. He invested about £300,000 converting the 16th century outbuildings into a modern school. The school had a double auditorium and two classrooms each with 12 cooking stations. The woman never learned English so he ran the school himself. He presented beginners' and intermediate courses. The mornings were devoted to generic cooking skills and, in the afternoons, students cooked recipes from the Hintlesham Hall restaurant menu. The school attracted people from throughout the anglophone world, but Carrier was disappointed to find that many were attracted more by his celebrity than by an interest in cookery. He found the repetitive work onerous and dull.
In the late 1970s, Carrier began presenting a television series Carrier's Kitchen based on the cooking cards from his Sunday Times articles. After the plain British fair of Fanny Cradock presented in black and white, Carrier in colour television format introduced luxurious Continental cooking to a nation in which ingredients such as garlic and spaghetti were treated with deep suspicion. With a highly theatrical and camp style, and a penchant for superlatives ("Gooorgeous Adooorable Faaabulous!"), he attracted viewers as much for his drawling American vowels and shameless self-promotion, and resultantly became the first celebrity chef on British television. His later followed this with three other series, titled Food, Wine and Friends, The Gourmet Vegetarian and Carrier's Caribbean. From this greater publicity, flowed a substantial magazine partwork published weekly by Marshall Cavendish between 1981 and 1983.
Retirement
By the early 1980s, Carrier's television style was considered kitch and too old-fashioned, and his food too complex. Ejected from his television show and bored of the celebrity culture, Carrier closed the Michelin two starred Hintlesham Hall in 1982, and sold it the following year to English hotelier Ruth Watson and her husband. After closing the also Michelin two starred Camden Passage restaurant, Carrier took a short stay in New York, and from 1984 went to live in France and at his restored villa in Morocco, regularly accompanied by his friend Oliver Lawson-Dick.
On January 19, 1983, Carrier was the subject of the United Kingdom television show This Is Your Life. He became popular in the United States in the 1980s, writing a weekly European food column for a popular US magazine. In 1984 he became the face of the British restaurant industry, arguing vigorously and vocally for changes to the licensing laws. His efforts were rewarded by appointment as honorary OBE.
Having lived in Marrakesh for several months of each year since the 1970s, Carrier used his Moroccan experiences as the basis for another cookbook in 1987, which further funded his retirement. His 1999 rewrite of Great Dishes of the World didn't sell, because he replaced rich and calorific Carrier classics with modern pared-down Nouvelle Cuisine.
By 1994 Carrier had returned to London, realising that most of his friends were in Great Britain from looking at where the postage stamps on the Christmas cards had originated. He also returned to television with GMTV, proclaiming the virtues of economical and vegetarian eating. Having sold his villa in Morocco, he owned a property in Provence where he spent his time painting pictures, tended by good friend Liz Glaze after the death of Oliver Lawson-Dick. Having been admitted to hospital that morning in the South of France, Carrier's death was announced by Liz Glaze on the afternoon of the June 27, 2006 to the Press Association.
