Bryan Forbes (director, writer, actor)

Equally at home writing scripts or books, directing, or acting, Bryan Forbes has been a fixture in the British film industry for six decades. Born in London in 1926 and educated at the legendary Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts, Forbes served in the British military during WWII. He became an actor after the war, appearing as a supporting performer in such films as Michael Powell’s The Small Back Room and Guy Hamilton’s The Colditz Story. In the 1950s, Forbes moved into screenwriting, supplying the scripts for Jose Ferrer’s Cockleshell Heroes and Basil Dearden’s The League Of Gentlemen. In 1960, he received an Academy Award nomination for scripting Guy Green’s The Angry Silence, which centered on the struggle between union workers and management in a factory.

The film’s controversy—Forbes, admittedly, leaned right and did not portray the workers in a positive light—opened the door for his directing debut, 1961’s Whistle Down The Wind, in which children harbor a criminal they believe to be a reincarnation of Jesus. Decades later, Andrew Lloyd Weber turned it into a play. After partnering with friend Richard Attenborough, Forbes followed with such efforts as 1962’s The L-Shaped Room, with Oscar-nominated Leslie Caron as an unwed pregnant woman who moves into a low-rent apartment building; Séance On A Wet Afternoon (1964), in which Oscar-nominated Kim Stanley played a phony psychic who hatches a kidnap plot with her husband; the 1964 version of Of Human Bondage, with Kim Novak and Laurence Harvey; and The Whisperers with Dame Edith Evans, another Oscar nominee for a Forbes-helmed role, as an elderly woman grappling with emotional distress.

Other films from Forbes include The Wrong Box, an all-star, darkly comic adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story; King Rat, the WWII saga with George Segal; the first celluloid rendition of The Stepford Wives; and The Slipper And The Rose, a musical version of the Cinderella story. Forbes also wrote the film Hopscotch and was one of the writers on pal Attenborough’s Chaplin.

• Belle De Jour
• Citizen Kane
• Grand Illusion
• Great Expectations
• Forbidden Games
• Singin' In The Rain
• Some Like It Hot
• The Third Man
• Umberto D.
• Whistle Down The Wind