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.