Harold Ramis, Ghostbusters to Groundhog Day - a career in clips

Harold Ramis in 2009. Photograph: Jim Prisching/AP

Stripes (1981)

Ramis cut his teeth in the Chicago-based Second City improv troupe, where he met and worked with the likes of John Belushi and Bill Murray, before moving on with them to the National Lampoon Show in New York. Ramis had a hand in the script for Animal House, and in the wake of its huge commercial success got his first substantial acting role alongside Murray in Stripes, a screwy, anti-authoritarian comedy set mostly in a US army unit in West Germany. Ramis plays Murray’s pal Ziskey.

Caddyshack (1980)

Ghostbusters (1984)

This particular generation in American comedy reached its climax with Ghostbusters, which Ramis didn’t direct but was handed the key role of science nerd Egon Spengler. Ramis’s deadpan delivery worked well with Murray’s sarcasm and Dan Aykroyd’s childlike excitability: who else could make the line “I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought” sound so witty?

Groundhog Day (1993)

Ramis directed only sporadically during the 80s,with National Lampoon’s Vacation and Club Paradise his only, middling, credits. However, that would change in 1993 with the release of Groundhog Day, an almost perfectly realised romantic comedy that harnessed Murray’s comic gifts to a more orthodox plot structure. It did, however, boast a brilliant gimmick - the permanent repetition of the same day - which gave the film its distinctive flair. Ramis also coaxed a career high performance from Andie MacDowell.

Multiplicity (1996)

Analyse This (1999)

Despite this reverse, Ramis hit the motherlode again in 1999 with Analyze This, a mafioso-shrink comedy starring Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. (Guess who plays the mafioso, and who the shrink…) It came at a propitious time: The Sopranos, with its similar gangster in therapy theme, had premiered earlier that year, and De Niro and Crystal expertly dealt with the material. A sequel, Analyze That, followed three years later.

Year One (2009)

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At the same time, Ramis was establishing himself as a director of similarly flavoured comedies, heavy on crazed stunts and fuelled by wafting clouds of marijuana smoke. Caddyshack, in which he cast his old mucker Murray, brought together other key names of the era, including Chevy Chase and Rodney Dangerfield in a chaotic farce set in a golf club. Like Animal House, its aim was to put one over on the rich and snooty. If Dangerfield shouting “we’re all going to get laid!” counts as doing this, then it achieved it. Groundhog Day having elevated him to the comedy-directing firmament, Ramis had his pick of projects. After the limp Saturday Night Live adaptation Stuart Saves His Family (presumably a hangover from his pre-Groundhog Day time - Ramis went for another gimmick based comedy: the Michael Keaton starring Multiplicity. It had what then passed for cutting edge special effects - Keaton clones himself to try and help his work-life balance. Ramis once again cast MacDowell, but the film was not a hit. Ramis never quite hit the same heights again: Bedazzled, in 2000, was overcooked, and The Ice Harvest failed to set the box office on fire. However, Ramis emerged as an elder statesmen to a new comedy generation - the Judd Apatow/Michael Cera axis - and the pair came together to help Ramis’ final film, Year One, into production. Cera was cast alongside Jack Black as a couple of cavemen who accidentally find themselves in at the dawning of a new, monotheistic religion - later to become Judaism - helping the Hebrews overcome their enemies. It was a modest hit, though perhaps not the film for which Ramis would want to be remembered.