To some film fans, he was an actor of sublime talent. To others, he will be remembered as a writer and director of great insight and psychological power.
What is beyond doubt is that Bryan Forbes, who died this week aged 86, made some of the most intelligent, compelling and thoughtful films in British cinema.
Indeed, it is fair to say he played a role in the industry that possibly only his former business partner Richard Attenborough could rival.
Towering talent: Bryan Forbes with wife Nanette Newman and daughter Sarah in 1960His best-known films, many of them from the golden age of the black-and-white features in the late Fifties and early Sixties, are still often seen on TV, so enduring is their appeal.
The League Of Gentlemen and Whistle Down The Wind pushed the boundaries of cinema with their style and panache, and are as fresh today as when they were made more than half a century ago.
As with so many careers in films, his had its ups and downs: and the movies he made later in his life sometimes lacked the verve, wit and insight of earlier ones.
But had he been an American, he would have walked off with several Oscars — the Academy is notoriously parochial when recognising achievement — and it was something of a scandal that he was never knighted when so many lesser figures in the British movie industry were, in part due to their Left-wing sympathies.
Forbes had no silver spoon in his mouth, but got where he did on prodigious talent. He was born John Clarke in Stratford, East London, in 1926 and was drawn to acting from childhood.
At West Ham secondary school, as well as being a fan of West Ham United, he was said to be ‘the finest 14-year-old Shylock of his generation’.
It was on the advice of a BBC presenter that he changed his name to Bryan Forbes, and he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Like so many actors of the time, he honed his stage skills in the Army, entertaining the troops as part of the theatre troupe Stars in Battledress.
Almost as soon as he was out of uniform, in 1948, Forbes found his way on to the big screen in the classic The Small Back Room — playing the role of a soldier who dies shortly after being blown up by a small bomb.
Larger roles followed, in films that became part of the legend of the cinema of the Fifties. He acted as a clean-cut young officer in two classic prisoner-of-war films of their time, The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story.
However, it was as a writer that he made, arguably, his major contribution to the cinema.
He began with another war adventure, The Cockleshell Heroes, in 1955, when he was still only 28.
Based on a true story, it recounted the raid by Royal Marines paddling kayaks to the harbour in Bordeaux to try to blow up German ships.
Forbes understood his own potential as a writer and resented interference with his scripts by the studios which commissioned him, and their unerring ability to make them worse.
Bryan Forbes demonstrates just how a demonstration should go during production of The Madwomen of ChaillotSo in 1959, he and Richard Attenborough formed their own production company, Beaver Films.
This ushered in Forbes’s purple patch as actor and director, but especially as a writer. In the company’s first feature, The Angry Silence, he wrote a mould-breaking story about the poisonous effect of trade union power in a factory.
Starring Attenborough, the film depicts a man sent to Coventry for putting his family above his union.
At a time when the post-war national consensus made enormous concessions to union power, this was considered to be highly provocative.
The film confirmed Forbes’s genius as a writer, and the striking originality of his mind and his willingness to engage with difficult issues.
His next film, released in 1960, could not have been more different, and it still stands as one of the most superlative British comedies: The League Of Gentlemen.
With Jack Hawkins perfectly cast against type as the criminal mastermind, it’s the story of a group of former Army officers — almost all of them cashiered — whom Hawkins’s character summons together to pull off a daring bank raid.
They almost succeed, and the story is told with unforgettable excitement and attention to detail. Hawkins, who had starred in some of the most legendary films ever made, said it was his favourite.
Bryan Forbes, 78, collects his CBE for services to the Arts and the National Youth Theatre, in 2004Forbes’s wit in his script for The League Of Gentlemen rests in the exploitation of the unexpected. A former officer has run off with the mess funds. But another has been thrown out for unmentionable sexual deviancy and since earned a living as a conman, posing as a vicar.
But perhaps the best joke was Forbes writing a part for his demure, highly respectable wife as (effectively) a high-class courtesan.
Again, the originality and wit of the script still flashes with brilliance more than 50 years later. For a comedy, it radiated a class not seen since Kind Hearts And Coronets over a decade earlier, and hardly seen since.
Forbes acted in the film, too — as did his second wife, Nanette Newman, whom he married in 1955, having been divorced by the actress Constance Smith four years after their wedding.
By then, he was bursting to try his hand at directing a feature. His opportunity came in 1961 with Whistle Down The Wind, based on a novel by Mary Hayley Bell, wife of the actor John Mills.
However, it nearly didn’t happen. Another director had been agreed upon and the Mills family — whose daughter Hayley was to play the lead in the film — objected when Forbes was chosen as the replacement after their first choice withdrew.
However, the family were won round and, at just 35, Forbes had a stunning directorial debut with the film about three children who hide an escaped convict in a barn when he dupes them into believing he is Jesus Christ.
Forbes directed as though he had been doing it all his life. Nothing could better exemplify his instinctive understanding of the art of cinema.
In his work in the early Sixties, he made a point of striking out in different directions with each new film he made.
And because he had been on both sides of the camera he knew how to get the best from the actors he directed, and how to make a screenplay work.
It was in the Sixties, too, that Forbes went to Hollywood — where he wrote and directed King Rat, about life in a Far Eastern prisoner-of-war camp.
He wrote for some of the leading stars of American cinema, notably Katharine Hepburn in The Madwoman Of Chaillot. But the script he considered his best, for Attenborough’s Young Winston, was rejected, to his disappointment.
Conversely, in 1969 his supreme cinematic talent was recognised when he was appointed head of production at Elstree Studios.
The British film industry had had a disastrous decade, with cinema admissions collapsing due to the rise of TV.
The entertainment group EMI bought Elstree — seeing it as a vehicle to revive the industry.
Forbes announced a schedule of new releases, including The Railway Children, but the money they made was insufficient for his financiers. He resigned after two years and tried his luck in Hollywood once more.
There, in 1975, he made movie classic The Stepford Wives, which won him a new generation of admirers. He made other, less distinguished films in America, but in the Eighties turned his hand to the theatre.
Writing, though, remained his prime talent. After the Elstree debacle he produced two volumes of an autobiography and then embarked on a long career as a novelist, and also ran a bookshop.
Forbes was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the Seventies, which he said made him feel as if he had ‘been given a death sentence’.
He claimed that, with the help of his wife, he was able to control it by cutting gluten from his diet. More recently, however, he said that doctors had eventually admitted he had been misdiagnosed.
He and Nanette Newman were happily married for nearly 58 years, their elder daughter Sarah becoming a journalist and the younger, Emma, a TV presenter. In later life, Forbes’s leading interest was the garden of his Surrey home.
He was a modest, serious man of enormous charm and one of the most versatile and accomplished men ever to work in British cinema.
Last year, in an interview in the Mail, he was asked what the order of service at his funeral might be.
He replied: ‘I’m not very religious, so I’d be happy for family and friends to remember my good bits, scatter my ashes in the garden and plant a tree in my memory.’
Perhaps that wish will now come true, and the ten acres that he and his wife nurtured from a wilderness into a thing of beauty will become his final resting place.
