His iconic film was an unexpected hit in America but why DID this local hero never become a Hollywood superstar?

Published: 15:26, 26 July 2026 | Updated: 15:28, 26 July 2026 It was made with barely £200,000, shot in unglamorous Cumbernauld, featured – the peerless Chic Murray’s headmaster apart – a cast of unknowns, and was about a boy dethroned as his high school’s football centre-forward by a girl. Humiliated? Enraged? No: Gregory – played by the very tall, beyond gawky John Gordon Sinclair, scarce ten stone soaking wet – falls in love with her. Though who at the last, as his wee sister observes, will turn out to be Gregory’s girl? Gregory’s Girl is arguably the best Scottish film ever made – not least because it is so quintessentially Scottish – and still held in vast affection.  When a clip featured in the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony – directed by Danny Boyle – there was an immediate, communal sigh of recognition and joy. The film was an unexpected hit in America – revoiced in much softer Scots accents; its director jokes of this ‘Edinburgh version’ – grossed £25.8million, was widely double-billed in British cinemas with Chariots of Fire, and won a Bafta for Best Screenplay. Acclaimed, too, by critics of the calibre of Roger Ebert and Barry Norman: the latter included it in his 1992 book, 100 Best Films of the Century. And stood out, in its day, among high-school teen flicks – think Porky’s, or Risky Business – that were lewd, crude and exploitative. There are lovely unresolved teasers – the random in a penguin costume, in perennial search for the right classroom; the two lads determined to hitchhike to Caracas, assured women there outnumber men three to one – and, in the denouement, Gregory fetches up with another girl altogether, whom he takes to the chippy, flat-dances in the park as the Earth hurtles through space, and kisses chastely on the doorstep. In all, as critic Richard Skorman purred, the movie ‘does a good job of making light of the tender part in [Gregory’s] teenage psyche, and his friends and little sister in particular are quirky and lovable.  Bill Forsyth's Gregory’s Girl is arguably the best Scottish film ever made 'Unlike the film’s American counterparts, Gregory’s Girl is refreshingly free of mean-spirited characters and horny young studs bemoaning their virginity’. The film exquisitely sends up the agonies of hormone-awash male puberty – to say nothing of the dignified, quietly horrified girls who have to work around its general ridiculousness – without a hint of cruelty or humiliation. And, though not his first film, it made director Bill Forsyth’s name. An unassuming man from Knightswood in Glasgow – Mr Forsyth turns 80 on Wednesday – he had several more movies in him, of which 1983’s Local Hero is particularly cherished.  But he was marmalised in his brief, subsequent Hollywood career, and a perhaps ill-advised 1999 sequel – Gregory’s Two Girls, Sinclair reprising the role and now himself a teacher – was the last film he ever made. The year 1981 was a long time ago. Closer to Hitler’s war than we are to it. Most of the Gregory’s Girl cast are now comfortably in their sixties and, in a rare 2014 interview, Bill Forsyth sounded surprised he was still being asked about it. His dad worked in a local shipyard; at his secondary school, young Bill could hear the ding of hammers along the Clyde. He had hopes of becoming a writer but, on leaving school in 1964, spotted an ad for a lad in a tiny film operation – ‘basically a one man and a boy outfit.’ They made short sponsored films, the boss editing them in his home cutting room. ‘I had to do virtually everything he didn’t,’ says Mr Forsyth. ‘I had to learn how to run the projector and splice the shots together.’ He duly mastered all sorts of cinematic odd-jobs (‘assistant editor, assistant cameraman, assistant sound recordist…’) and eventually set up on his own, with two mates – a writer and a cameraman. Making information films, Highland travelogues with noble music… the perfect apprenticeship. Finally, after 15 years of film-making, Bill Forsyth wrote an outline for a feature film about a shy Scottish lad who falls for the female striker in his school football team. And duly scouted out thespian talent at the Glasgow Youth Theatre. And thus went supernova? No. The British Film Institute sneeringly denied funding: the idea was ‘too commercial.’  Dee Hepburn and John Gordon Sinclair in a scene from Gregory's Girl Yet so eager was his growing cast that Forsyth gouged together what down-the-back-of-the-sofa coin he could and somehow shot a film about a bunch of lads who steal a lorryload of stainless-steel kitchen sinks. It was Forsyth’s last chance. He’d wound up his production company. His car was up on bricks. ‘If we hadn’t made a go of it, my plan was just to disappear.’ And success came just in time. That Sinking Feeling – made with just a few thousand pounds – was the surprise hit of the 1979 Edinburgh Film Festival – and, twelve years ago and in dark irony, was released on DVD by the aforesaid British Film Institute. Now Forsyth could raise the money to make Gregory’s Girl, with many members of the same cast and with whom he had extraordinary rapport.  ‘They knew me well enough, and I knew them well enough, to find a way of telling them what I wanted,’ he says. ‘Their energy and their enthusiasm was what carried it.’ That Sinking Feeling had been shot in the gritty East End of Glasgow. But this new venture was about youth: why not film it in a new place? The choice of Cumbernauld – a North Lanarkshire ‘New Town’ thrown up by 1955 decree, and honoured in 1977 with a Silver Jubilee visit by the Queen – was inspired. Gregory’s Girl duly made stars of John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn (her footballing skills duly polished in sessions with national goalie Alan Rough) and Clare Grogan – who, deliciously, between shooting and the film’s premiere, also established herself as a pop star with the New Wave group Altered Images. There was one difficulty: just three months earlier, in an appalling incident while dancing at some gig at the Glasgow College of Technology, Grogan had been ‘glassed’ on the left side of her face. Mr Forsyth – firmly resisting executive pressure to recast the role – shot as much of Grogan in right profile as he could. Sinclair, Robert Buchanan, Billy Greenlees and Alan Love had already been stress-tested in That Sinking Feeling. And, somehow, from all this, was born the magic that is Gregory’s Girl: warm, witty and kind. It shouldn’t work. Scottish state schools in the early 1980s were still daunting places and, at the roughest, teachers resorted to near-industrial use of the belt. It was not uncommon for an entire class to be strapped for some perceived iniquity and it is difficult for a new generation to understand the draining dread of, daily, padding into an academy where teachers, on a whim, could – and did – physically attack you. Gregory’s Girl conveys nothing of this; but it does include scenes which, described on paper today, sound problematic. The film opens, after all, with lads engaged in voyeurism: their prey an unwitting young nurse. Yet the benevolence of Mr Forsyth’s script and direction as a whole – and, especially, the confident female characters – somehow eclipses such vulgarity. ‘Shooting was fun,’ John Gordon Sinclair shared with a London paper in 2015. ‘It never felt like work. You knew you were getting it right because you’d see Bill’s shoulders shaking with laughter behind the camera. I had to ask him to move out of my eyeline, because it would get quite distracting…’  Many consider 1984’s romantic comedy Comfort and Joy Forsyth’s real masterpiece. That may be objectively true; but Local Hero has a place in far more hearts. The essential plot, if anything, resonates still more today – a Big Oil baron with his greedy eye on the coastline of a small Highland community. Peter Capaldi, Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert in Local Hero Al Gore claimed that Local Hero was his favourite film There are some venerable storytelling tropes, like the wise old man living on the beach (Fulton Mackay); the casting, given recent Gregory’s Girl kudos, of a genuine Hollywood screen-idol, Burt Lancaster; and a delirious scene with the Northern Lights. Rikki Fulton has a wonderful nutty-professor scene, a very young Peter Capaldi is a delight throughout, some minor Gregory’s Girl players – David Anderson, Alex Norton – turn up again and John Gordon Sinclair has a delicious cameo as a spurned lad at the ceilidh. There are touches of Forsyth’s Lynchian whimsy – a motorbike that keeps hurtling through scenes without warning, a baby constantly popping up and, of course, Mark Knopfler’s sublime soundtrack. Sinclair, if you listen closely and watch the credits, turns out to be the demented biker. And the one conceit: Local Hero was actually shot on opposite sides of Scotland. The action is in ‘Ferness’ (Pennan, Aberdeenshire) but the beaches in Arisaig and Morar we readily accept.  Local Hero also boldly addresses questions of identity and choice. ‘Mac’ MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) is sent from Texas to scope out Ferness because his boss, Felix Happer (Lancaster) believes he is of Scots descent. In fact, his forebears were Hungarian. And, in the end, MacIntyre – all but in love with Ferness – fetches up back home in Houston, disconsolately spreading pebbles and seashells on a worksurface in a quiet moment of damnation… as someone rings what, thanks to Local Hero, is still the most famous phone-box in the world. ‘What makes this material really work,’ enthused Roger Ebert, ‘is the low-key approach of the writer-director, Bill Forsyth, who... has the patience to let his characters gradually reveal themselves to the camera. ‘He never hurries, and as a result, Local Hero never drags: nothing is more absorbing than human personalities, developed with love and humour…’ It’s ‘a funny movie,’ Janet Maslin reflected for the New York Times, ‘but it’s more apt to induce chuckles than knee-slapping. Like Gregory’s Girl, it demonstrates Mr Forsyth’s uncanny ability for making an audience sense that something magical is going on, even if that something isn’t easily explained.’ And, during his 2000 campaign for the Presidency, Al Gore – no less – told Oprah Winfrey and her viewers that Local Hero was his favourite film. It would have felt incredible, amidst such glories, that anything might go wrong for Bill Forsyth. And yet it did. His career, after 1984, took ever-odder turns; not least because he turned his back on the rich Scottish material that had made his name. Housekeeping, his 1987 adaptation of an American novel, won critical acclaim but by its release he had fallen out with Columbia Pictures and they did little to promote it. Breaking In (1989) featured Burt Reynolds but more rave reviews could not save a financial flop. Being Human (1994) starred Robin Williams and John Turturro (left) Being Human (1994) starred the imitable Robin Williams, but Warner Brothers insisted Forsyth lop 40 minutes off it, and Gregory’s Two Girls (1999) felt, in the words of one critic ‘disconcertingly out of time’ with the ‘unhappy distinction of being an Accidental Period Piece.’ He was still but 53, but Bill Forsyth has never directed another picture. He had made four wonderful films in half a decade – and scarcely a thing in the 40 years thereafter. ‘There is this myth,’ he reflected in 2009, ‘about me going to Hollywood and being torn to pieces, but it is a myth, and what happened to me could have happened to anyone in the system... once again what happened there was turned into this big event that it was not released.  'That’s what usually happens in the big studios, they make more movies than they have money to promote.’ But we will always have 1981, and Gregory’s Girl. ‘Love is what we are talking about,’ Barry Norman observed, ‘not sex.  'Gregory and his friends are not the randy, smart-ass, self-important teenagers of so many Hollywood films; they’re just a bunch of charming kids, growing up fast and slightly overawed by their own emotions… A film that wittily, affectionately, touchingly and more effectively than any other I can remember evokes the bittersweet growing pains of adolescence.’