Bryan Forbes, ‘Stepford Wives’ Director, Dies at 86
Margalit Fox
Mr. Forbes had a string of screenwriting credits and was also an actor and an author, but he was best remembered for the film that endures as an artifact of high camp and even as a quasi-feminist document.
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Bryan Forbes, an English film director best known for “The Stepford Wives,” the 1975 Hollywood thriller about women transformed into docile electronic incarnations of themselves, has died at his home in Surrey, England. He was 86.

His death was announced to European news agencies by a family spokesman, who did not say when Mr. Forbes died.

Mr. Forbes had lived with multiple sclerosis since the mid-1970s; he attributed his long remission to a gluten-free diet and the support of his wife, the actress Nanette Newman.

Based on Ira Levin’s 1972 novel, “The Stepford Wives” starred Katharine Ross as Joanna, a young wife who moves to a bucolic suburb only to discover that its women are growing mysteriously, robotically submissive. The film also starred Paula Prentiss as Joanna’s friend Bobbie.

In interviews Mr. Forbes said that the movie’s producer, Edgar J. Scherick, expressly wanted a foreign director’s perspective on American suburbia. (The film was shot primarily in Connecticut.) In hiring Mr. Forbes, he also engaged Ms. Newman, who played the small but memorable role of the Stepford wife Carol.

After Carol suffers a literal breakdown, she utters one of the movie’s most emblematic lines — “I’ll just die if I don’t get this recipe!” — over and over in endless short circuit.

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