Career: Upon leaving the army in 1948, Forbes quickly landed a leading role in The Gathering Storm at St Martin's Theatre. He went on to play a number of supporting roles in films, including An Inspector Calls (1954) and The Colditz Story (1955), but he increasingly devoted his time to writing and directing. He wrote The Cockleshell Heroes (1955) and I Was Monty's Double (1958), and directed Whistle Down the Wind (1961), The L-Shaped Room (1962), and The Stepford Wives (1975). He was in charge of film production at Elstree Studios in the early 1970s and gave the greenlight to The Railway Children (1970), The Go-Between (1970) and On the Buses (1971). He served as president of the National Youth Theatre, Writers' Guild of Great Britain and the Beatrix Potter Society. He was also a successful novelist. He died on May 8, 2013 at the age of 86.

Career: Attenborough's film debut was 1942's In Which We Serve, playing a cowardly sailor; in real life, he served with the RAF's Film Unit, sustaining permanent ear damage in the process. He became a post-war star thanks to hits such as Brighton Rock (1947),The Great Escape (1963), and I'm All Right Jack (1959). He and Bryan Forbes formed a production company in the early 1960s, which made films including The Angry Silence (1960) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961). Attenborough directed his first film, Oh! What a Lovely War, in 1969, won an Oscar for Gandhi in 1982, and also directed the acclaimed movies A Bridge Too Far (1977), Chaplin (1992) and Shadowlands (1993). He returned to acting in the 1990s to appear in Jurassic Park (1993), Miracle on 34th Street (1994), and Elizabeth (1998). He was knighted in 1976 and made a life peer in 1993. He died on August 24, 2014, at the age of 90.

Career: Alexander quickly established himself as a character actor and went on to appear in more than 300 films, TV movies and series episodes. He mostly had bit parts and fame did not come to him until later in life when he landed the role of lovable rogue and would-be tycoon Charlie Hungerford in Bergerac in 1981. He played the part for 10 years and it made him a household name. After Bergerac, he starred alongside Rik Mayall in The New Statesman. He died on May 28, 2009 at the age of 86.