Bryan Forbes — Notes for a Life
The Story of a Screenwriter, Actor, Director and Novelist
Watching a 1970s TV interview with Alfred Hitchcock by fellow film director Bryan Forbes, I was struck not only by Forbes’ wide jacket lapels, but also by his nervousness when confronted by the director of Pyscho: a nervousness he covered well by his practised eloquence, and the casual lighting of a cigarette. After ten minutes or so, with Hitchcock given room to tell his often witty and dead-pan stories, Bryan Forbes had turned what might have been an awkward encounter between star and fan into an enlightening masterpiece. But then enlightening masterpieces is what Forbes did.
In the foreword to his 1974 autobiography, Notes for a Life, Bryan Forbes writes:
“ To write at all is a sort of arrogance, and to attempt an autobiography before the age of fifty bloats the conceit…[with]…My career as a professional writer could well have been blunted at an early age, for the ghost of Palinurus, in the portly shape of Cyril Connolly, has walked my battlements since the first appearance of The Unquiet Grave [ a literary work by Connolly] in the, alas, now defunct Horizon. This book and the same author’s Enemies of Promise [a critical and autobiographical work from 1944] are required reading for any aspiring young author…[and]…describe in dauntingly…
