John Brabourne

John Ulick Knatchbull, the seventh Baron Brabourne, was born in 1924 and educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford.

He succeeded the title when his brother, Norton, was killed in action in 1943. During the war John Brabourne served as an officer in the Coldstream Guards in France.

He married Patricia Mountbatten, daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten, in 1946.

Brabourne began his film career as a production manager on such movies as Pursuit of the Graf Spee (1956) (1956) and he later co-produced the wartime drama Sink the Bismarck! (1960) with Richard Goodwin. Three years later he and Goodwin set up a consortium to introduce Pay-TV, a cable service whose subscribers would buy films, opera and the arts on meter. The scheme eventually failed and Brabourne and his partners decided to wind up the operation with £1 million losses. "We were years ahead of our time," he said.

A director of Thames Television, Euston Films and Thorn EMI, John Brabourne's entrepreneurial skills were crucial to creating some major successes in the British cinema. In the sixties he produced two celebrated Shakespeare adaptations, the film of Othello (1965) starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith and Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet (1968).

Brabourne went on to produce a series of box office hits including Up the Junction (1968), The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) starring Albert Finney, Death on the Nile (1978) with Peter Ustinov, The Mirror Crack'd (1980) with Elizabeth Taylor, Evil Under the Sun (1982) (1982) again with Ustinov, and Little Dorrit (1987) starring Alec Guinness. He always described himself as a "creative producer". "I've always been very involved with the directors," he said. "I set out to become a director myself but changed my mind. The things that interested me were the story, which is number one for me, the script, which is certainly number two, and the third really important factor is the editing. I found that, although I like to work with actors, I don't really have a feeling for directing.

He also produced a film version of August Strindberg's The Dance of Death (1969), starring Olivier.

In 1979 he was lucky to escape with his life when he was one of the seven people on board Earl Mountbatten's small fishing boat the Shadow V, in the harbour of Mullaghmore Bay, County Sligo, when it was blown up by a bomb planted beneath the steering wheel and remotely set off by the Provisional IRA. Mountbatten, Brabourne's mother, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, his 14-year-old son Nicholas and a local boy working as crew were killed, and Brabourne, his wife and another son, Tim, were all badly injured.

Awarded the CBE (Commander of the order of the British Empire) in 1993.

Member of the House of Lords until the reforms of 1999.