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: 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.