"Bryan Forbes, who has died aged 86, was responsible, as producer, director or scriptwriter, for some of the most arresting British films of the 1960s and 1970s. His first great success was The Angry Silence (1960), made on a shoestring by Beaver Films, a company which Forbes had set up with Richard Attenborough. It was an honest and compelling account of a worker who refuses to join a political strike, finds himself sent to Coventry by his mates, and loses an eye in a fight; Forbes’s script brought him an Oscar nomination and won a Bafta. As though to prove his versatility, Forbes next scripted The League of Gentlemen (1961), a comedy originally intended for Cary Grant. Instead Jack Hawkins played the retired colonel who collects together a band of crooked ex-soldiers who — under the name of Cooperative Removals Ltd — steal £1 million from a City bank. Forbes himself had a part in the film as a piano-playing gigolo, and his screenplay was widely praised for catching the right comic tone. He made his debut as a director in the same year with Whistle Down the Wind. The story, scripted by Keith Waterhouse from the novel by Mary Hayley Bell, concerned some Lancashire children who mistake an escaped murderer (Alan Bates) for Jesus Christ — such being his exclamation when first discovered. It was a venture which could easily have been in bad taste, but Forbes managed to tell the strange tale without mawkishness. Meanwhile, his script of Only Two Can Play (1962), from Kingsley Amis’s novel That Uncertain Feeling, showed that he retained his comic touch. Though his subsequent films were of uneven quality, Forbes had a consistent talent for creating fat parts for distinguished actresses. Three of them — Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room (1962), Kim Stanley in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and Edith Evans in The Whisperers (1967) — were nominated for Oscars. Forbes always placed great emphasis on his actors. “Everything should be subordinate to the performance”, he said. “That’s why I’m not highly regarded in the more esoteric cinema magazines.” His first Hollywood film came in 1965, when Columbia invited him to write and direct King Rat (1965), from James Clavell’s novel about his experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese in Singapore’s Changi jail. Though some critics complained that moral judgment was too blithely weighted in favour of the title character (an American corporal, played by George Segal, who has the whole camp in his grip in the manner of a Chicago gangster), it would prove one of Forbes’s most powerful films. Yet his next effort, The Wrong Box (1966), from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, proved a costly, star-studded flop undermined by whimsy. When John Huston walked out of the production of The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), from Jean Giraudoux’s play, Forbes was brought in as replacement director. An inveterate “stargazer”, he delighted in the opportunity to direct Katharine Hepburn and Yul Brynner, Danny Kaye, Donald Pleasence and Richard Chamberlain, all in the same film. And the cameraman was Claude Renoir. The filming coincided with les événements in Paris. “I suppose that to dine alone in Paris with Katharine Hepburn during a French Revolution, in a private room in the hotel where Oscar Wilde died,” Forbes breathlessly recorded, “must rate three stars in any personal Michelin.” The film, though, was rewarded with rather fewer stars. His greatest opportunity came in 1969 when, at the age of only 43, he was appointed chief of production and managing director of Associated British Picture Corporation, then recently acquired by EMI. This gave him control of Elstree studios and of the production slate that constituted a large slice of the British film industry. Seen as “the great white hope” of British cinema, Forbes swept in with ringing words and reassuring deeds calculated to endear him to critics and unions alike. “I want,” he announced, “to encourage the film of ideas which is also entertaining, which is adult, which does not pander to the lowest common denominator and which does not depend on violence or sex for its transient excitement.” At the same time he called for a truce in labour relations and, as an earnest of his good faith, abolished clocking-in and promised an end to redundancies. He also announced that 15 feature films would be made in the next 18 months at a cost of £10 to £15 million, a programme which he described as “the most ambitious attempt to revitalise the British film industry in 20 years”. In fact, Forbes was condemned to operate on a meagre £4 million “revolving” fund which, as he complained, “never revolved”. It did not help, either, that the first three productions under his aegis — And Soon the Darkness; Hoffman (with Peter Sellers); and The Man Who Haunted Himself (all 1970) — were flops. Attacking “the pornography of violence”, Forbes pledged himself to foster family entertainments, and gave the go-ahead to two successes: The Railway Children (1970) and Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971). The Go-Between (1970) was also well-received, though The Raging Moon (1970), which he himself scripted and directed, was considered by some to be self-indulgent and a misuse of the time that should have been devoted to managerial functions. This would not have mattered had he achieved the single blockbuster that in Hollywood regularly bails out underperformers. But he did not. On the Buses (1971) was commercially successful enough, but hardly advanced the reputation of British cinema; while Dulcima (also 1971), from an HE Bates story, appeared to some critics to be more like Cold Comfort Farm than genuine melodrama. By then financial wrangles were undermining Forbes’s position. His real difficulty was that as both head of production and managing director, he had divided loyalties. Artists always want more money, but management must keep them on a tight rein. No one person, perhaps, could have reconciled these conflicting demands, and in May — a year before his contract was due to expire — it was announced that Forbes had resigned . He would never again be quite such a force in British cinema. Bryan Forbes had been born John Theobald Clarke in the East End of London on July 22 1926, and until the age of 13 was brought up at Forest Gate. His father was employed for 40 years as a salesman for the London Letter File Company in the Farringdon Road. He was formally educated at West Ham Secondary School, but actually at the local cinemas. “If the Splendide was my village church,” he wrote, “the Queens at the top of Woodgrange Road was my Westminster Abbey.” During the Second World War he had the distinction of being twice evacuated — first to Lincolnshire, where he attended Horncastle Grammar School, and then to Cornwall, where he was entrusted to the care of the Rev Canon “What-Ho” Gotto and his wife, who gave him a sense of direction and purpose. John Clarke made his debut with the school dramatic society and was described, somewhat ambivalently, as “probably the finest 14-year-old Shylock of his generation”. Flushed with this success, he fired off letters to famous actors, and to others who might forward his career. Only Lionel Gamlin, at the BBC, replied, and in 1942 made his protégé (now back in London) question master of Junior Brains Trust. He also renamed him Bryan Forbes. The fledgling actor next won a scholarship to Rada. “Accent, Forbes,” Sir Kenneth Barnes, the principal, told him. “Get rid of your Cockney accent or you’ll never amount to much.” But as soon as Forbes landed the role of Richard in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! at Rugby he left Rada and subsequently played in Envy My Simplicity at Brighton. Thanks to the advocacy of Joan Greenwood, soon afterwards he appeared in Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green at Worthing. When Terence Rattigan arranged for Forbes to have a part in his long-running success Flare Path, it seemed that the young actor was on his way. Even his call-up in 1943 proved only a temporary interruption. After initial training Forbes was drafted into the Army Theatre Unit, with which he toured the Middle East. He passed his 20th birthday as a sergeant in charge of a production of James Bridie’s It Depends What You Mean in Germany." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/10046665/Bryan-Forbes.html
