HOLLYWOOD, June 26, 1984 -- Screenwriter-producer Carl Foreman, who earned five Academy Award nominations for such films as "High Noon," "The Guns of Navarone" and "Champion" but was forced to flee Hollywood during the blacklist era of the 1950s, died of brain cancer today at his Beverly Hills home. He was 69.
His most celebrated script, perhaps, was for "The Bridge on the River Kwai," which won an Academy Award for best screenplay, but Mr. Foreman was not credited because he wrote it anonymously while still under the stigma of the blacklist.
Mr. Foreman, a former law student, journalist and sideshow barker, was an ascending writer with a long string of credits when he was subpoenaed, with several other Hollywood figures, by the House Un-American Activities Committee to the Los Angeles hearings in 1951.
After refusing to state if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, he was pressured into selling an interest he held in Stanley Kramer Productions, and moved to England.
While with the Kramer company, Mr. Foreman had received two of his five Academy Award writing nominations for "Champion," with Kirk Douglas, and "The Men," Marlon Brando's first film.
At the time of his appearance before the congressional committee, he had been involved in his most ambitious film project as writer and producer of "High Noon," with Gary Cooper.
Mr. Foreman said the committee changed the direction of his career. "If that hadn't happened," he said in a 1968 interview, "I was moving toward being a director. That's where the fun is."
But blackballed as a writer in America, he began writing and producing pictures from Britain--"The Sleeping Tiger," "Bridge on the River Kwai," "The Key," "The Guns of Navarone," "Born Free," "The Mouse That Roared" and several others.
Sir Winston Churchill's enthusiasm for "Navarone" led to a meeting between Mr. Foreman and the former British prime minister. Out of that session came "Young Winston," a movie of Churchill's early years and the last of Mr. Foreman's Oscar nominations.
Mr. Foreman become president of Britain's Writers Guild and served from 1965 to 1971 as governor of the British Film Institute. In 1970 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
After returning to America, where he formed a company called, appropriately, High Noon, he produced "The Virgin Soldiers," "Living Free," a sequel to "Born Free," and more recently "Force 10 From Navarone" and "The Day the World Ended."
He is survived by his wife, Evelyn; his mother, Fanny, and three children.
