Bryan Forbes

Early life

Forbes was born John Theobald Clarke on 22 July 1926 Stratford, West Ham, London. His father was a salesman and he grew up at 43 Cranmer Road, Forest Gate, where he was a pupil at West Ham Secondary School. During the Second World War he was evacuated twice, first to Lincolnshire – where he attended Horncastle Grammar School – and then to Porthleven in Cornwall, where he was looked after by the vicar Canon Edward Thornton Gotto and his wife. A schoolfriend at West Ham was artist Albert Herbert. Lionel Gamlin of the BBC took him on as the host of Junior Brains Trust, and invented Clarke's pseudonym of Bryan Forbes.

Career

Actor and screenwriter

Forbes trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from age 17, but completed only three terms. He completed four years of military service in the Intelligence Corps and Combined Forces Entertainment Unit, during which time he started to write short stories. After completing his military service in 1948, following British Equity rules, he was obliged to change his name to avoid confusion with actor John Clark. Forbes began to act, appearing on stage and playing numerous supporting roles in British films, in particular An Inspector Calls (1954) and The Colditz Story (1955).

He published a short story collection in the early 1950s, which induced producer "Cubby" Broccoli to offer him screenwriting work on The Black Knight (1954). He received his first credit for Second World War film The Cockleshell Heroes (1955),

In 1959, he formed a production company, Beaver Films, with his frequent collaborator Richard Attenborough. by Forbes in which Attenborough took the lead role, and the two men shared production responsibilities.

Film director

Forbes's directorial debut came with Whistle Down the Wind (1961), again produced by Attenborough, a critically acclaimed film about three northern children who conceal a criminal in their barn, believing him to be a reincarnated Jesus Christ. It was the basis for a 1996 musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Comments Phil Wickham: "It feels like half a new wave film – a mid-point between the innovation of the Woodfall Films and the mainstream of the British film industry."

Forbes wrote and directed Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), and the same year he wrote the third screen adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel Of Human Bondage. In 1965, he went to Hollywood to make King Rat, a successful prisoner-of-war story. He followed this with The Wrong Box (1966) and The Whisperers (1967), the latter featuring Edith Evans. A caper film, Deadfall (1968), starred Michael Caine.

Head of EMI Films

Forbes was offered a three picture deal by Bernard Delfont who had just bought the film studio Associated British (soon to become EMI Films). Forbes refused, criticising Associated British; he wrote Delfont a paper about the state of the studio and how it should be run. Delfont hired him to be managing director at £30,000 a year.

Dennis Barker, in his obituary of Forbes for The Guardian, states, 'This amounted virtually to an attempt to revive the ailing British film industry by instituting a traditional studio system with a whole slate of films in play.'

Under Forbes's leadership, the studio produced The Railway Children (1970), The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971) and The Go-Between (1971), all successful. His tenure, though, was marked by financial problems and failed projects, and he resigned in 1971. Forbes had full autonomy over the films he made as long as they were below a certain amount but later said "I lacked power in the one area where it really matters - distribution."

Coinciding with his time at EMI Films, he resumed directorial work with The Raging Moon (1971), starring his wife, Nanette Newman, and Malcolm McDowell.

In 1994 Forbes claimed the 18 films he made at EMI for £4 million overall returned £18 million of profit to the studio, with only two of the films making a loss. (Forbes got 5% of the profit.)

Later career

From the early 1970s, Forbes divided his energies between cinema, television, theatre, and writing. In 1972 he started work on the documentary Elton John and Bernie Taupin Say Goodbye Norma Jean and Other Things (1973), which chronicled the life of the young Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Taking a full year to complete, the project gave a behind-the-scenes look at the writing and recording of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Besides footage of John's 1973 Hollywood Bowl concert, the film included interviews with John, Taupin, and band members, including Nigel Olsson and Dee Murray, as well as John's mother, Sheila, DJM label chief Dick James, and James's son, Stephen. (Some of the concert footage was later licensed for the Eagle Vision Classic Albums series Goodbye Yellow Brick Road documentary.) During filming, Forbes formed a close friendship with John and Taupin, which led to other collaborations with them, including photography on the Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album sleeves. ITV broadcast the documentary in the UK on 4 December 1973, and it was later briefly issued on VHS. It was shown in the U.S. on ABC.

Forbes returned to Hollywood to direct The Stepford Wives (1975), based on Ira Levin's novel of the same name. Forbes clashed with screenwriter William Goldman over casting decisions and changes to the film's ending made by Forbes, causing Goldman to drop out of the project (while retaining the screenplay credit). Despite its notoriety, The Stepford Wives received mixed reviews and performed weakly at the box office. His subsequent films as a director were less successful: The Slipper and the Rose (1976), with David Frost as executive producer; International Velvet (1978), intended as a continuation of National Velvet (1944), with Newman in the same role as Elizabeth Taylor in the earlier film; Better Late than Never (1983); and The Naked Face (1984). His final film as a screenwriter was Chaplin in 1992.

He served as president of the National Youth Theatre, Writers' Guild of Great Britain and the Beatrix Potter Society.

For a time Forbes owned a bookshop in Virginia Water, Surrey.

Author

Forbes wrote two volumes of autobiography and several successful novels, the last of which, The Soldier's Story, was published in 2012. He was a regular contributor to The Spectator magazine.

Awards and honours

Forbes's 1960 screenplay, The Angry Silence, won a BAFTA award, and was nominated for an Oscar. Only Two Can Play won Best British Comedy Screenplay of the Writers Guild of Great Britain in 1962. Hopscotch won the Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium of the Writers Guild of America in 1980.

Forbes's directorial debut, Whistle Down the Wind, was nominated for several BAFTA awards, including Best Film from any Source and Best British Film in 1962. Four of his other films were also nominated for BAFTA awards: The League of Gentlemen (1960), Only Two Can Play (1962), Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and King Rat (1965).

In 2004, Forbes was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the arts. In 2006, he received the Dilys Powell Award for outstanding contribution to cinema of the London Film Critics' Circle Awards. In May 2007, he was the recipient of a BAFTA tribute, celebrating his 'outstanding achievement in filmmaking'.

Personal life

In 1951 he married Irish actress Constance Smith, and the couple travelled to Hollywood in the early 1950s. who is married to actor John Standing; and television presenter Emma Forbes.

Forbes was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1975, while working on The Slipper and the Rose; he remained in remission, which he attributed to cutting out gluten and taking vitamins and oil of primrose, together with Newman's care. However, he revealed in a 2012 interview that it had been a misdiagnosis. He continued his acting, directing and screenwriting career into the early 1990s, and was still publishing novels in the 2010s.

He lived in Virginia Water, Surrey where he ran a bookshop in the 1960s. The shop never made a profit, but he thought "it was 'right' to have a bookshop in his local village". Forbes died at his home in Virginia Water on 8 May 2013 at the age of 86, following a long illness. His wife survives him.

Journalist and former Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona, a friend of the Forbes family, said: "Bryan Forbes was a titan of cinema, known and loved by people around the world in the film and theatre industries, and known in other fields, including politics. He is simply irreplaceable and it is wholly apt that he died surrounded by his family." Film critic Mark Kermode wrote: "Once had the fan-boyish pleasure of telling Bryan Forbes how much I loved [The] Stepford Wives. He was charming and self-effacing. A great loss."

Filmography

As director and writer

As actor

As head of EMI films

• And Soon the Darkness (1970)
• The Breaking of Bumbo (1970)
• Hoffman (1970)
• Eyewitness (1970)
• The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
• Spring and Port Wine (1970)
• The Railway Children (1970)
• A Fine and Private Place (1970) (abandoned)
• The Go-Between (1971)
• Mr. Forbush and the Penguins (1971)
• The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971)
• The Raging Moon (1971)
• Dulcima (1971)

Select writings

Novels

• Truth Lies Sleeping and other stories (1950)
• The Distant Laughter (1972)
• Slipper and the Rose (1976)
• International Velvet (1978)
• Familiar Strangers (1979), published as Stranger in the USA in 1980
• The Rewrite Man (1983)
• The Endless Game (1986)
• A Song At Twilight (1989)
• The Twisted Playground (1993)
• Partly Cloudy (1995)
• Quicksand (1996)
• The Memory of All That (1999)
• The Choice (2007)
• The Soldier's Story (2012)

Non fiction

• Notes for a Life (1974)
• Ned's Girl: The Life of Edith Evans (1977)
• That Despicable Race: A History of the British Acting Tradition (1980)
• A Divided Life (1992)

References

;General sources

References

1. "Bryan Forbes: Renaissance man".
2. Batty D. [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/08/bryan-forbes-dies Bryan Forbes, acclaimed film director, dies aged 86] {{Webarchive. link. (27 June 2018 . ''The Guardian''. 8 May 2013. Retrieved 9 May 2013)
3. (12 June 2004). "Director Bryan Forbes made CBE". [[BBC]].
4. "Forbes, Bryan [real name John Theobald Clarke] (1926–2013)".
5. (15 July 1999). "Passed/Failed: An Education in the Life of Bryan Forbes, Film".
6. (9 May 2013). "Bryan Forbes".
7. Macdonald R. [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/jun/11/art Albert Herbert: A visionary artist, he found a path from abstraction to religious imagery via etching]. ''The Guardian''. 11 June 2008. Retrieved 9 May 2013
8. Vagg, Stephen. (8 December 2025). "Forgotten British Film Moguls: Cubby Broccoli and Irving Allen".
9. "BAFTA {{!}} Film in 1961".
10. Vagg, Stephen. (11 July 2025). "Forgotten British Film Studios: The Rank Organisation, 1961".
11. British Film Institute: [http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/491680 Profile at screenline.org] {{Webarchive. link. (17 May 2006 . Retrieved 9 May 2013)
12. Phil Wickham [http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/440753 ''The L-Shaped Room'' profile at screenonline.org] {{Webarchive. link. (23 June 2012)
13. Vagg, Stephen. (24 January 2025). "Forgotten British Moguls – Nat Cohen Part Four: Cohen vs Bryan Forbes (1969-71)".
14. link. (14 November 2023)
15. Alexander Walker ''National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties'', London: Harrap, 1985, p. 114
16. Vagg, Stephen. (10 October 2021). "Cold Streaks: The Studio Stewardship of Bryan Forbes at EMI".
17. Fowler, Roy. (9 August 1994). "Interview with Bryan Forbes".
18. [http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/491680/credits.html "Forbes, Bryan (1926–[2013]) – Film and TV credits"], BFI screenonline
19. Barnes, M. [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/stepford-wives-director-bryan-forbes-dies-519645 "'Stepford Wives' director Bryan Forbes dies at 86"], ''The Hollywood Reporter''. 8 May 2013. Retrieved 9 May 2013
20. "The Museum of Broadcast Communications – Encyclopedia of Television". museum.tv.
21. Bill Bryson, ''The Road to Little Dribbling'' (New York: Anchor Books/Penguin Random House, 2015), p. 82.
22. Barker, D. [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/09/bryan-forbes-obituary Bryan Forbes: film director, actor and writer]. ''The Guardian''. 9 May 2013. Retrieved 9 May 2013
23. British Academy of Film and Television Arts: [http://static.bafta.org/files/bryanforbes-tribute-87.pdf A tribute to Bryan Forbes CBE: 25 May 2007] {{webarchive. link. (15 August 2011 . Retrieved 9 May 2013)
24. [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/10046665/Bryan-Forbes.html Bryan Forbes] {{Webarchive. link. (8 July 2018 . ''The Telegraph''. 9 May 2013. Retrieved 9 May 2013)
25. James Wyatt. (September 2023). "Virginia Water in the 1960s". community-life.co.uk.