Frederick Forsyth, a British author of thrillers who frequently made the bestseller lists, sold 70 million books and saw his novels “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File” and “The Dogs of War,” among others, adapted into films, died on Monday at his home in Jordans, England. He was 86 years old. The New York Times confirmed Forsyth’s death, which his literary representative, Jonathan Lloyd, said “followed a short illness.”
“The Day of the Jackal” was adapted into a 1973 film directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Edward Fox and Michael Lonsdale. Fox played the professional assassin known only as the “Jackal” who is hired to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle in the summer of 1963. The film was a critical and box office success, and was also turned into a series in 2024 starring Eddie Redmayne.
Roger Ebert said of the feature version: “I wasn’t prepared for how good it really is: It’s not just a suspense classic, but a beautifully executed example of filmmaking. It’s put together like a fine watch. The screenplay meticulously assembles an incredible array of material, and then Zinnemann choreographs it so that the story — complicated as it is — unfolds in almost documentary starkness.”
(The film was the inspiration for Michael Caton-Jones’ “The Jackal” (1997), starring Richard Gere, Bruce Willis, Sidney Poitier and Jack Black. The later movie concerns an assassin nicknamed the Jackal who wants to assassinate a highly significant target, but otherwise shares little with the original story. Forsyth refused to allow his name to be used in connection with it, and director Zinnemann fought with the studio to ensure that the new film did not share the first film’s title.)
Forsyth’s 1972 novel “The Odessa File” was adapted into the 1974 film of the same name directed by Ronald Neame and starring Jon Voight, Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell. Voight played a young German journalist who stumbles upon the existence of a secret organization of ex-S.S. members called ODESSA; he goes undercover and discovers a plot to send biochemical warheads to Egypt to use against Israel. Andrew Lloyd Webber did the score.
“The Dogs of War” was adapted into the 1980 film starring Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger as members of a small, international unit of mercenaries privately hired to depose the president of the fictional African Republic of Zangaro so a British tycoon can mine a huge platinum deposit there.
The British-made Cold War spy thriller “The Fourth Protocol” (1987), adapted from the novel by Forsyth, starred Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan. The latter plays a KGB major whose unsanctioned mission in the U.K. is to assemble and detonate an atomic device so that it will appear to be a nuclear accident at a British military base. The aim is to strain British-US relations and strengthen the anti-nuclear movement ahead of an election so the Soviet Union can gain the upper hand.
Forsyth’s more recent novel, 2013’s “The Kill List,” was at one time in development as a feature, with Lem Dobbs doing the adaptation and Rupert Sanders set to direct, but the project was never realized.
Forsyth’s 1999 effort “The Phantom of Manhattan,” a sequel to “The Phantom of the Opera,” was intended as a departure from his usual work; the author told Larry King in 2000, “I had done mercenaries, assassins, Nazis, murderers, terrorists, special forces soldiers, fighter pilots, you name it, and I got to think, could I actually write about the human heart?” But while this novel did not achieve the same success as his others, and Forsyth subsequently returned to writing contemporary thrillers, “The Phantom of Manhattan” served as the basis, at least in part, for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2010 romantic musical “Love Never Dies.”
Forsyth also received story credit on a number of TV movies made either in the U.S. or the U.K., including “Cry of the Innocent” (1980) and “Code Name: Wolverine (1996); he received story credit and an executive producer credit on TV movies including “Just Another Secret” (1989), “The Price of the Bride” (1990), “A Little Piece of Sunshine” (1990), “Death Has a Bad Reputation” (1990), “Pride and Extreme Prejudice” (1990) and “A Casualty of War” (1990). The 2005 Hallmark Channel TV movie “Icon” was based on his novel of the same name, and the TNT TV movie “Avenger” (2006), starring Sam Elliott, Timothy Hutton and James Cromwell, was based on Forsyth’s novel of the same name.
Frederick Forsyth was born in Ashford, Kent, and attended the University of Granada, Spain.
At the age of 19, he became the youngest pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving from 1956-58, but then decided on a career as a journalist as “it was the only job that might enable me to travel and keep more or less my own hours.” After three years as a provincial reporter, he joined Reuters and spent the next four years in Europe, first working in London and Paris from 1961-63, and then as bureau chief in East Berlin from 1963-64.
In 1965 he joined the BBC and was sent to Biafra to cover the war raging in Nigeria. What he saw of this brutal and cynical conflict made it difficult for him to toe the editorial line of the BBC’s coverage so he resigned and turned freelance, later emerging to publish his highly controversial first book, the nonfiction work “The Biafra Story.”
In 1969 he decided to use his experience as a Reuters reporter in France as the basis for a thriller. Within 35 days he’d completed “The Day of the Jackal,” which has sold some 10 million copies.
Forsyth’s autobiography, “The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue,” was published in September 2015, when he disclosed that he had been working for Britain’s MI6 for more than two decades, starting when he was asked to provide information about the Biafran War.
The BBC said, “Fans have long suspected that Forsyth, 77, acclaimed for his highly realistic spy novels, may have been involved with British intelligence.”
The author told the BBC that he was not paid for the information he provided. “The zeitgeist was different… the Cold War was very much on.”
Despite becoming an established author with the success of “The Day of the Jackal,” which earned Forsyth a three-book publishing deal, he undertook missions to Rhodesia, South Africa and, at the height of the Cold War, East Germany.
Forsyth was twice married, the first time to model Carole Cunningham.
His second wife Sandy Molloy, whom he married in 1994, died in 2024. He is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Frederick Stuart and Shane Richard.
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