[1] Carpenter originally attended medical school in Montreal, but left aged 17 to join the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a war correspondent.

[3] He moved to Britain and sang with Ted Heath and His Music in the 1940s and starred in the BBC Radio serial Riders of the Range (1949–1953) as the cowboy Jeff Arnold, where he shared the billing with his dog, Rustler (played by Percy Edwards).

[4] As a movie actor he "made over three dozen British films in the post-war decades, most of them 'B' pictures, such as Diplomatic Passport (1954) and One Jump Ahead (1955), to which he brought an easy, likeable authority that seemed more difficult for British actors to achieve".

[5] During 1955-1956, he starred in his only television programme, Sailor of Fortune with Lorne Greene.

During rehearsals for the play The First Fish by Frank Tarloff at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, with a cast that included Moira Lister, Louie Ramsay and Ray Barrett, Carpenter arrived at the theatre and asked to be helped to a dressing room as he felt unwell.