Brittish Actors
June Barry was born in 1935 in Lancashire. Her film debut was in the Hammer thriller “Terror of the Tongs” in 1961. Virtually all her career has been in British television where her best known role was as June Forsyte in “The Forsyte Saga” in 1967, Her most recent appearance was in “The Bill”.
Betty Driver is best known to-day as Betty the barmaid in “Coronation Street”. At 91 years of age, she must be the oldest barmaid in the globe. Betty Driver had considerable success in British films of the 1930’s including “Boots, boots”, in 1934, “Penny Paradise, “Facing the Music” and “Let’s be Famous”. Betty Driver died in 2011.
“The Guardian” obituary:
Betty Driver, who has died aged 91, was a gutsy and durable comic actor who meant one thing to young audiences and quite another to those who could remember the second world war and the years immediately after it. To the youthful, she will be remembered as Betty Turpin (later Betty Williams), the barmaid, shoulder to cry on and wife of the policeman Cyril Turpin in Granada television’s Coronation Street, whose cast she joined in 1969.
To a much older audience, she will also be remembered for her appearances in repertory theatres and in stage revues; as the child star who took over from the popular singer Gracie Fields on a stage tour, doing some of her best-known numbers; and as the principal singer for a year with the leading dance orchestra leader of the time, Henry Hall, on his BBC radio programme, Henry Hall’s Guest Night. She sang for seven years with Hall, and with him and far more mature artists than herself entertained the troops during the war.
Driver was one of the pre-feminist female singer-comedians who made their mark with a perky, slightly rebellious manner in the tradition of Marie Lloyd and Cicely Courtneidge. There was little of the wilting English rose about the songs she sang or the parts she played, even if the bright edifice often concealed her own emotional pain. It helped that she was a large woman who once considered it a victory when she got her weight down to 13 stone.
Born in Leicester, she spent her childhood in Manchester. Her parents were a police inspector and a pianist mother, determined that her daughter should get a foothold in show business. Her husband was too weak a character to defend his daughter, eventually leaving the police force to run a nightclub in Manchester. In her memoir Betty: The Autobiography (2000), Driver wrote that she had been at the mercy of “an overbearing, ambitious, cruel and pushy mother whose insistence on putting me into show business at a young age effectively robbed me of my childhood … [Nellie Driver] was one of the most loathed women in the business.”
At the age of seven, Betty joined the Terence Byron repertory company and played with The Quaintesques, a group of men dressed as women who visited Manchester once a year. The star of this show, Billy Manders, had heard her in the audience loudly singing the choruses and invited her on to the stage. They brought the house down and she was given a bottle of toffees. Soon she was taken by her mother to perform in a police charity concert at Manchester Hippodrome, and was presented with a gold watch by the chief constable, which pleased her mother and father more than her.
When mother and daughter came to London at the end of her schooling – at her mother’s instigation – they did not find theatrical managements receptive. Tours of their offices produced no offers. Instead her mother decided to go straight to individual theatres.
Presenting themselves at the stage door of the Prince of Wales theatre in September 1934 changed their luck. Without a band rehearsal, Betty was allowed to go on stage and sing a number of her favourite songs, and was hired to appear as Gracie Fields’s double in Mr Tower of London. After her first performance, one journalist described her as “a little tomboy from Lancashire”. She was later hired for a long tour of Mr Tower of London when Fields moved on to other projects. Films, BBC broadcasts and appearances in the revues of the leading impresarios CB Cochran and Prince Littler followed.
It was not until she was 16 that, with the aid of her younger sister Freda, she rebelled against her mother’s view of her as a lucrative child star who should carry on singing in the style of Fields. Freda, who had never been as overawed by her mother as Betty and their father were, threw the songsheets her mother wanted Betty to sing on to the fire and substituted more modern and adult ones. Betty appeared in the cheeky It’s Foolish But It’s Fun at the London Coliseum, and did film work, notably in Ealing Studios comedies. She made Boots! Boots! (1934) with George Formby, Penny Paradise (1938), Let’s Be Famous (1939) and Facing the Music (1941). Her hit recordings started with Jubilee Baby (1934), and went on to include The Sailor With The Navy Blue Eyes, Macnamara’s Band, Pick The Petals Of A Daisy, Jubilee Baby and September In The Rain.
In her 20s, she had a breakdown and collapsed on stage in Birmingham. Her mother, in the wings as usual, threw water over her, and insisted she do the evening performance. When she blacked out again in the evening, her mother still maintained that she was “faking”.
There were other strains. Aided by her sister, she took control of her own financial affairs, only to find that instead of banking her earnings – which often reached the then impressive sum of £150 a week – her parents had spent it all on cars, drink and other luxuries for themselves and left none for her.
But she was still bankable. In 1952 the BBC gave her her own regular radio programme, A Date with Betty, broadcast live, and she married her South African husband, Wally Peterson. By then a household name, she appeared in several TV series and had her own roadshow. In 1953 she went to Australia, where she appeared in musical revue, then toured the Middle East and entertained British troops in Cyprus and Germany.
In 1958, she starred on stage in The Lovebirds, followed by a short break as a housewife in South Africa, which did not suit her. Back in Britain, she played in Pillar to Post, made cabaret appearances and did summer seasons, including the immensely popular What a Racket with Arthur Askey at Blackpool. Finding that her husband was not only a philanderer, but was spending her money freely, she separated from him after seven years of marriage. They were divorced 11 years later.
It was her switch to drama that led to her long association with Granada and Coronation Street. She appeared as Mrs Edgeley, the masterful canteen manager in the TV series Pardon the Expression (1965-66), a Coronation Street spin-off, which also included Arthur Lowe in his Coronation Street role of Leonard Swindley. At one point, she was required to throw him, and in doing so dislocated her hip and injured her back. She appeared with James Bolam in the Granada production of Love On the Dole (1968), Walter Greenwood’s story of poverty and unemployment in the 1930s, before making her first appearance in Coronation Street itself in June 1969.
By then Betty had virtually given up show business, discouraged by the damage done to her back. “I decided to retire, and with Freda, we ran a couple of hotels in Cheshire. It was there that Harry Kershaw, producer of Coronation Street, persuaded me to audition for Hilda Ogden – just think, I could have been wearing curlers for 30 years,” she recalled in her 80s. That came to nothing, but a few years later Kershaw stood in one of the bars, heard her talking to other customers and simply asked her, “How would you like to pull pints in the Rovers Return?” He told her that the barmaid character he had in mind for her to play would be called Betty Turpin, and would have her own “warm, homely, nice-to-everyone temperament”.
Betty Turpin, later Betty Williams, became one of the longest-serving characters in the soap, well-known for serving up her signature dish, Betty’s hotpot, in the Rovers Return – indeed, so well-known that a Lancashire pie manufacturer marketed a hotpot to Betty’s recipe. Cyril died in 1974, and in 1995 Betty married her wartime sweetheart, Billy Williams, only to be widowed again two years later. She appeared in more than 2,800 episodes of the show, the final one broadcast last May.
Driver took part in a Royal Variety Performance in 1989, and ten years later was appointed MBE. She kept faith with her northern roots by living near Altrincham, Cheshire, and collected paintings and antiques.
• Betty (Elizabeth Mary) Driver, actor and singer, born 20 May 1920; died 15 October 2011
The above “Guardian” obituary can be accessed online here.
The great character actor Jack Watson was born in Cambridgeshire in 1915. He began his career on radio in such BBC shows as “Nancock’s Half Hour” and “The Clitheroe Kid”. His film career did not begin until he was 45 when he made “Peeping Tom” for Michael Powell in 1960. He then became a very familiar face on film in such movies as “Konga”, “The Queen’s Guard”, “On the Beat”, “This Sporting Life”, “The Idol” with Jennifer Jones”, “Tobruk”in 1967 , which was made in Hollywood as was “The Devil’s Brigade” with William Holden. Back in Britain he made the excellent “The Strange Affair” with Michael York. He died in 1999.
“The Independent” obituary:THE CAREER of the tall and rugged actor Jack Watson embraced the music hall, radio, television and films. The older generation will recall him as part of a music-hall double act with his father Nosmo King, or as a radio comic and monologuist on such shows as Navy Mixture and Take It From Here. Coronation Street viewers will remember him as the man who finally won Elsie Tanner for keeps, and on the screen he was notable for playing tough and gruff men of action in such films as The Wild Geese and The Sea Wolves
“I shall never be a great actor,” he once stated, but his imposing physical prescence – he was an outdoor sports fanatic in real life and represented England in springboard diving championships – and his commitment to a role, often that of a villain or a serviceman, were convincing enough to earn him the offer of a Hollywood contract, which he refused. “The word `star’ does not mean a thing to me,” he said. “I prefer to think of myself as a dedicated human being.”
Watson was born in 1921 in Thorney, near Peterborough. His father Vernon Watson was a comedian who, wanting a more distinctive name, had become Nosmo King after he noticed a “No Smoking” sign in a theatre corridor. His mother, Barbara Hughes, was a Gaiety Girl and young Jack was introduced to the world of music halls at an early age. When he was 16, he was performing a double act on the variety stage with his father, playing a precocious teenager named Hubert Hubert. Their act was seen by cinemagoers in several Pathe Pictorial shorts between 1935 and 1939.
With the outbreak of the Second World War the super-fit Jack Watson became a physical training instructor in the Navy and appeared on the radio variety show Navy Mixture, displaying a flair for mimicking a range of accents. At war’s end he continued to do a solo act both in variety and on the radio. He made his feature film debut with a small role in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) but had his first prominent role in Michael Powell’s controversial thriller Peeping Tom (1960), playing the Chief Inspector investigating a series of brutal killings.
In the horror film Konga (1961) he was again a police inspector and delivered the film’s most memorable line when, after receiving a phone call, he informs his assistants, “There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets.” But his acting career really took off when later in 1961 he was cast in Coronation Street as Petty Officer Bill Gregory, who had an affair with Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix) which she broke off when she discovered he was married.
His character was to appear sporadically in the series over the next 23 years. Gregory returned when, his wife having died, he proposed to Elsie, but she instead married Alan Howard. In 1983 Gregory returned again to find Elsie now single and still living on the Street, and this time he persuaded her to go off with him to run a wine bar in the Algarve. (The couple’s final appearance on the show was on 4 January 1984.)
Watson also played the title role in a nine-part television adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s adventure story Redgauntlet (1970), and in a grittily realistic version of the Arthurian legends, Arthur of the Britons (1972- 73), he was Lludd, companion to Arthur (Oliver Tobias). Other television series in which Watson appeared included Z Cars, Upstairs Downstairs, All Creatures Great and Small, Minder, Casualty and Heartbeat. He won particular praise for his skilful portrayal of the flawed union official pretending to be a double agent in the mystery thriller Edge of Darkness (1985), written by Troy Kennedy Martin as a tribute to film noir and recipient of nine Bafta Award nominations.
Notable films in which he acted included Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1962), in which he was believable as the captain of a Rugby League team joined by an ex-miner, Richard Harris, and The Hill (1965), in which he was one of four soldiers who witness a murder committed by one of the officers at a military prison in the Middle East where they are serving time. He was also in the war films Tobruk (1966) and The Devil’s Brigade (1968) and three popular adventure yarns directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and co-starring Roger Moore, The Wild Geese (1977), North Sea Hijack (1979) and The Sea Wolves (1980).
I first met Jack Watson in 1970 when a new producer brought him in to act as chairman to my nostalgic radio panel game Sounds Familiar, writes Denis Gifford. He replaced Barry Took, who had hosted the first 100 or so shows. Watson, not yet the fine film actor he was to become, was himself a nostalgic figure from my younger days as a fan of the variety stage.
Unfortunately, right from the very first programme he seemed uncomfortable and ill at ease. He was incapable of any of the impromptu chit-chat that relaxed the ever-changing team of panellists. I put this down to early nervousness, but throughout the several series he compered he never improved one jot.
Was Watson perhaps the victim of his father’s strict training? He was certainly a fair enough straight man in the days when, as “Hubert”, he would interrupt his fancy-dressed blackface father with shouted demands from the orchestra pit, in the guise of the theatre manager. I remembered his earlier radio performances as a solo artist when, during the Second World War, as Petty Officer Jack Watson, he compered Navy Mixture. In this programme, which ran weekly from 1943, Watson revealed a hitherto unsuspected talent as an impressionist.
I began to write brief impressions into my linking scripts for Sounds Familiar, and they saved the day, especially when I arranged for a surprise guest to come in from Watson’s own past; Jimmy Clitheroe, for instance. In 1953 Watson had taken over as compere of Blackpool Night and little Jimmy played the regular character of a bad boy who caused trouble for Watson. When Jimmy came on our show, he too proved to be an awkward customer. He refused to appear as his adult self and insisted on playing his radio role of a 10-year-old kid. So we used one of his scripts from Blackpool Night which featured comedy dialogue with Watson.
Effects: Window smashing.
Jimmy: I smashed the cricket ball right through your window. You didn’t catch it did you?
Jack: No.
Jimmy: Oh good, I’m not out then!
This won laughter and applause, so, later in the series, when Nan Kenway, partner of the then ageing Douglas Young, popped up as our surprise guest, we arranged for her to bring along one of their old double-act scripts. She played the ancient Mrs Yatton and Watson did his impression of Douglas Young as the food-conscious pensioner, Mr Grice. The scene is the bar of The Startled Hare.
Nan: We rode on the tailboard of the van. There wasn’t much room on it.
Jack: Ah, I likes that.
Nan: Likes what?
Jack: Mushroom omelette! Very tasty, very sweet!
This nugget of nostalgia won even bigger laughter and applause than Kenway and Young ever managed.
Jack Watson, actor: born Thorney, Cambridgeshire 15 May 1921; married (one son, two daughters); died Bath 4 July 1999.
The above “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.
Article on Jack Watson in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:
Towering, stocky and serious looking, British character actor Jack Watson was a familiar face on screen for over forty years. He cropped up in comedy, thrillers and horror, but would mostly be remembered for his co-starring roles in a handful of memorable war and adventure pictures, which suited his physique perfectly.
Born Hubert Watson in Cambridge, on May 15th 1915, to showbiz parents (his music-hall comedian father Vernon went by the name ‘Nosmo King’ – get it?), Watson began in the Navy as a physical training instructor. Inheriting his father’s talents, Jack found work on BBC radio in such popular programmes as ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ and ‘Take it from Here’. Early television parts came when he had villainous roles in popular serials ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ and ‘Z-Cars’, series in which he would later return for further appearances.
Watson’s first notable film role was as a police inspector in Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’, after which he played Len Miller, the captain of Richard Harris’s rugby team, in Lindsay Anderson’s excellent drama ‘This Sporting Life’ (’63). Around this time, I fondly remember Jack from his physical role as the no-nonsense Jock McGrath, in Sidney Lumet’s brilliant but rather neglected military drama ‘The Hill’ (’65), with Sean Connery and Harry Andrews. Next, he was in John Frankenheimer’s realistic racing pic; ‘Grand Prix’ (’66), playing British team manager Jeff Jordan. After playing a sergeant major in the Rock Hudson starrer ‘Tobruk’ (’67), Watson had a decent role as Quince, a corrupt police officer, in ‘The Strange Affair’ (’68), with Michael York. Another military part followed when he was cast as one of William Holden’s rag-tag group in ‘The Devil’s Brigade’ (’68), a watchable but poor man’s ‘Dirty Dozen’.
A brief bit in the saucy Marty Feldman comedy ‘Every Home Should Have One’ (’70) was followed by the oft-filmed Scottish adventure ‘Kidnapped’ (’71), with Michael Caine and Trevor Howard. Another good role that year came in the Scottish P.O.W drama ‘The McKenzie Break’, playing a general aiding Brian Keith’s Captain Connor, in finding a group of escaped prisoners. Jack then played the wonderfully named Hamp Gurney, a dreary sailor in the equally dreary horror ‘Tower of Evil’ (’72). A couple of minor parts came next when he played an occultist in the Amicus anthology ‘From Beyond the Grave’ (’74), and then the chief engineer of a luxury liner threatened by a terrorist, in Richard Lester’s all-star thriller Juggernaut (‘74). Back in horror territory I enjoyed his unsmiling, ‘red-herring’ role in Pete Walker’s fun horror ‘Schizo’ (’76), after which he had a recurring part as the cowardly Morris, in the 1977 TV adventure series ‘Rob Roy’.
Watson was soon back on familiar ground when he co-starred in a trio of Roger Moore escapades; ‘The Wild Geese’ (1978), ‘The Sea Wolves’ and ‘North Sea Highjack’ (both ’80), all pretty good with ‘Wild Geese’ standing out as the most enjoyable. Watson’s last role of note was as union leader James Godbolt, in the superb 1985 mini-series ‘Edge of Darkness’, starring Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker. After a few more television appearances (‘Minder’ & ‘Heartbeat’), Watson retired from the screen in 1994.
A good, solid supporting presence in many a production, Jack Watson died in Somerset, England, on July 4th 1999, aged 84. With his well-worn face and muscular physique, Watson lent strong support in some fine military drama’s and a wrath of old-school adventures. A dependable supporting actor who often played parts that suited his looks, he certainly made ‘imposing’ look easy.
Favourite Movie: ‘The Hill’
Favourite Performance: ‘The Hill’
The above article can also be accessed online here.
Guy Rolfe was a very tall, lean-featured English actor who enjoyed a lengthy career on film both in Britain and in Hollywood. He was born in Kilburn, London in 1911. His screen debut was in 1937 in “Knight Without Armour”. He was particularily good at sneering villians and can be seen to good effect in “The Drum”, “Hungary Hill”,”The Spider and the Fly”, “Oddman Out”, “Ivanhoe” and “Mr Sardonicus” in 1962. At the age of 80 his acting career got a major lease of life with his portryal of Andre Toulan in the “Puppetmaster” movies which began for him in 1991 with “Puppetmaster 3 – Toulans Revenge” and continued until Puppet Master 5″ in 1994. Guy Rolfe died in London in 2003.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Among screen villains, one of the most hissable was Guy Rolfe, who has died aged 91. Often sporting a goatee-beard Rolfe, with his aquiline nose, gaunt and saturnine appearance, had something of the night about him. Although most of the roles he played were irredeemable baddies with little room for nuance, Rolfe was able to bring some dash and plausibility to them.
If he had not gone sinister in the 1950s, Rolfe might have continued in British films as another character actor playing staunch officers, kindly doctors and dependable policemen. He first shone in Robert Hamer’s atmospheric thriller The Spider And The Fly (1949) as a master thief turned spy.
He played a few romantic leads which might have been more convincingly taken by Stewart Granger or Dennis Price. In Prelude To Fame (1950), he was a philosophy professor who discovers an Italian boy who is a musical genius (Jeremy Spencer), only to regret the negative results of what fame has done to his protegé. Dance Little Lady (1952) saw him as a doctor falling for ballet dancer Mai Zetterling, whom he helps to walk again after an accident.
It was Hollywood, in the tradition of using British actors as well-spoken nasty types, which brought out Rolfe’s evil side. It started with him cast as the sinuous Prince John pitted against Robert Taylor’s Ivanhoe (1952). He had a lip-smacking moment when he condemned Elizabeth Taylor’s Rebecca as a witch who was to be burned at the stake.
Rolfe did not actually get to Hollywood because the epic was mostly shot at Boreham Wood Studios. But the following year, he capitalised on his new wickedness by getting cast as the cunning Ned Seymour in Young Bess, filmed at MGM’s Culver City Studios, and then browning-up as wily oriental characters in two examples of Hollywood exotica: King Of The Khyber Rifles in which Rolfe is Karram Khan, a rebel tribesman causing problems for British officer Tyrone Power, and Veils Of Bagdad as Kasseim, an evil vizier plotting against beefy Victor Mature.
Actually Rolfe was as British as they come. He was born in north London and after education at a state school, became a professional boxer and then a racing-car driver before deciding, aged 24, to take up acting. After provincial repertory came his walk-on film debut in Jacques Feyder’s Knight Without Armour (1937).
After the second world war, Rolfe was offered the role of the consumptive retired army officer who falls in love with a dying fellow patient (Jean Simmons) in Sanatorium, the last of the Somerset Maugham stories in Trio (1950), but ironically had to pull out when he himself contracted TB.
Rolfe, who was always elegantly dressed, and would often arrive at the studios in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, overcame his illness and continued to be in demand into his 80s, when he gathered a cult following of fans of schlocky slasher movies. This new lease of life came about in 1987, when the director Stuart Gordon tracked Rolfe down to Spain, where the actor had retired since the early 1970s, to appear in his film Dolls.
Gordon had remembered Rolfe from a low-budget William Castle shocker, Mr Sardonicus (1961). As Sardonicus, a decadent 19th-century aristocrat whose face has frozen into a hideous grin as a result of a frightening experience, Rolfe kidnaps Audrey Dalton to compel her surgeon lover, Ronald Lewis, to operate on his face.
In Dolls, Rolfe is benign in comparison as an aged doll-maker who lives with his wife in a gloomy mansion. In typical “old dark house” fashion, a number of strangers seek refuge from a storm. As the night progresses, the dolls come to life to take revenge on those who are mean and no longer children at heart.
The film led to his role as the insane puppeteer Andre Toulon, in a series of six Puppet Master movies, the last of which appeared in 1999. In this Rolfe managed to bring dignity and credibility to the thoroughly dislikable character who manipulates living dolls to do his bidding.
Rolfe is survived by his second wife, Margaret Allworthy.
· Guy (Edwin Arthur) Rolfe, actor, born December 27 1911; died October 19 2003
Earl Cameron was born in 1917 in Bermuda. He cam to Britain in 1939. His stage debut was in 1942 in the West End in “Chu Chin Chow”. In 1951 he won a major role in the film “Pool of London”. Other films include “Simba”, “The Hearts Within”, “Sapphire” and “Flame in the Streets” in 1961. Recent film appearances include “The Queen” and “Inception”. BFI profile on Earl Cameron can be accessed here.
Hazel O’Connor was born in 1955 in Coventry. Her father came from Galway. She was a major force in British music in the late 70’s and into the 1980’s. Her films include “Girls Come First” in 1975 and “Breaking Glass”. Her website can be accessed here.
Derek Thompson was born in Belfast in 1948. As a teenage he formed a singing duo with his twin sister. In 1977 he gave a brilliant performance as Harry Moon in the iconic series “Rock Follies”. In 1980 he was in the excellent “The Long Good Friday” and two years later had one of the leading roles in TV’s “Harry’s Game”. In 1986 he was one of the lead actors in “Casualty” and is still in the series to-day. He is an integral part of the show but sometimes one wishes that he diversified into other roles.
IMDB entry:
Derek Thompson was born on April 4, 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is an actor, known for Casualty (1986), The Long Good Friday (1980) and The Gentle Touch (1980). He is married to Dee Sadler. They have one child.
Peter Martyn was born in 1925 in London. His films include “Appointment with Venus” with David Niven and Glynis Johns in 1951, “Lady Godiva Rides Again” and “Orders are Orders”. He died in 1955 at the age of 30.
Bryan Forbes was born in 1926 in West Ham, London. After military service from 1945 until 1948 he began a career as a supporting actor in British films including 1955’s “The Colditz Story”. His other films as an actor include “The League of Gemtlemen” with Jack Hawkins and Kieron Moore and “Sea Devils” with Rock Hudson, Maxwell Reed and Yvonne de Carlo. He made his directorial debut in 1961 with “Whitsle Down the Wind” with Alan Bates and Hayley Mills. His other films as a director ing Rat”, “The Stepford Wives” and “The Slipper and the Rose”. He was married for a time to the Irish actress Constance Smith and then married to Nanette Newman. He died in May, 2013.
Dennis Barker’s “Guardian” obituary:
The director, actor and writer Bryan Forbes, who has died aged 86, was one of the most creative forces in the British film industry of the 1960s, and the Hollywood films he directed included the original version of The Stepford Wives (1974). In later life he turned to the writing of books, both fiction and memoirs.
The turning point for him in cinema was the formation of the independent company Beaver Films with his friend Richard Attenborough in 1958. For the screenplay of their first production, The Angry Silence (1960), Forbes received an Oscar nomination and a Bafta award. Attenborough played a factory worker shunned and persecuted for not joining a strike. His colleagues are shown as being manipulated by skulking professional agitators and to some it seemed more like a political statement than a human story about the crushing of an individual.
Forbes then wrote and/or directed a string of notable British productions. He both wrote and took the part of one of the disaffected officers turning to crime in The League of Gentlemen (1960), and directed Whistle Down the Wind (1961), about children who mistake a convict on the run for Jesus. He took a novel by Lynne Reid Banks as the basis for The L-Shaped Room, which he also directed, and one by Kingsley Amis for Only Two Can Play (both 1962). He provided the screenplay for and directed Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), concerning the sinister abduction of a child, and The Whisperers (1967), in which Edith Evans was outstanding as a lonely old woman.
For Hollywood, Forbes scripted and directed King Rat (1965), a thoughtful study of British and American soldiers in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. It was a critical success and did well commercially – except in America.
Other Hollywood work arrived, but in 1969 Forbes accepted the offer of the impresario Bernard Delfont, then with EMI, to run Elstree Film Studios, which the company had taken over. 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, one of which happened to be from my political novel Candidate of Promise. However, some EMI executives raised difficulties over Forbes both heading the studio and directing his own film, The Raging Moon (1971), starring his wife Nanette Newman as a woman paralysed from the waist down who finds love.
One success of the venture was the production of The Railway Children (1970), but most of the announced films – including Candidate of Promise – were never made. Forbes, who had a three-year contract, left after two years, complaining privately that for the first time in his life he had made powerful enemies. Delfont’s explanation to me was that Forbes lacked business and organisational skills: “My mistake was not to see that he was creative, but only creative.”
For The Stepford Wives, William Goldman provided a screenplay from the surreal novel by Ira Levin, with Newman as the figure who became the computerised fantasy of boorish men in a small American town. The final Hollywood film that Forbes directed was The Naked Face (1984), with Roger Moore as a psychiatrist who gets caught up with the Chicago mafia. His last screenwriting credit came with Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992).
Forbes was born John Clarke into a working-class home in West Ham, east London. His cultural horizons were extended when he was evacuated during the second world war to Cornwall and stayed in Porthleven with the Rev Canon Gotto, a cultivated cleric with an enormous library. Forbes said that Gotto and his wife “gave me a grounding I wouldn’t have had otherwise”.
Another mentor was the BBC radio producer Lionel Gamlin, who made him question master of the Junior Brains Trust, and advised adopting his stage name of Bryan Forbes. (The actor John Clark, who portrayed Just William on radio for the BBC, had already registered his name with Equity.) Though he got to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 17, Forbes thought he was seen as too short and too “working-class” to play juvenile leads. He worked in repertory theatre, and had just taken over a part in Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path when he was called up for second world war service, first in the Intelligence Corps and then the Combined Services Entertainment Unit.
A published collection of short stories, Truth Lies Sleeping (1951), pointed to his promise as a writer, but his initial course was to continue acting. Presciently, he wrote to a friend while at a repertory company: “One day I shall direct a film – preferably a film of one of my own scripts.” He also took supporting film roles when possible. His first film appearances had included Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Small Back Room, and the comedy Dear Mr Prohack (both 1949), the latter adapted from an Arnold Bennett novel.
In the early 1950s, he went to Hollywood with the actor who was briefly his first wife, Constance Smith. But it was not long before he returned to Britain and undertook the rewriting of scripts as well as acting. In 1954 he had a part in Guy Hamilton’s film of JB Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls and the following year he starred in the same director’s classic war film The Colditz Story, whose cast included John Mills and Lionel Jeffries. He met his second wife, Newman, while playing a man being run over by a train. They got married in 1955.
When he returned to writing books, it was with wry fiction about the tribulations suffered by the creative spirit in showbiz, The Distant Laughter (1972) and The Rewrite Man (1983). Ned’s Girl (1977) was a biography of Evans, and That Despicable Race (1980) concerned actors as a breed. Later novels were mostly about spies, though sometimes embraced comedy, as with Partly Cloudy (1995), about domestic disasters brought about by the clash of the generations during one traumatic weekend.
Forbes was a founder of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain; with Attenborough he helped form Capital Radio, the London station launched in 1973; and he served as president of the National Youth Theatre. He wrote with incomparable irony about the bizarre workings of the film industry in his two volumes of autobiography, Notes for a Life (1974) and A Divided Life (1992). In 2004 he was appointed CBE.
He is survived by Newman and their daughters, Emma and Sarah.
• Bryan Forbes (John Theobald Clarke), actor, director and writer, born 22 July 1926; died 8 May 2013
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.