My father fell in love with my mother Eve on the island of Rhodes when she was part of the Guns of Navarone production team. He was 45 and she was 20. They were married three years later and she was by far the most influential and happiest part of his English experience. "When I met him, he was angry and distant and some said cold, and [after he married Eve] he became open and friendly and happy," said Eileen Wood, his long-time assistant.  

By the end of the 1960s, my father had in a loose sense become part of the British cultural "establishment". He was President of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, a governor of the British Film Institute and a member of the committee appointed by Jennie Lee, the Minister of Arts, to establish the National Film School. He dined at Downing Street. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, a member of the Garrick Club, and in 1970 was made an Honorary CBE (his friends joked that it stood for "Carl Becomes English"). As well as writing screenplays, he produced British films like Born Free with its cast of lions, The Mouse that Roared, which starred Peter Sellers in three roles, and The Virgin Soldiers, an adaptation of the Leslie Thomas novel.  

He only moved us back to America to live after the British film industry was destroyed by the Wilson government's taxation policies in the mid-1970s. It must have felt like a kind of triumph to be welcomed back by the industry that had rejected him, though by then both he and Los Angeles had changed a great deal, perhaps more than he expected or realised.  

It was not long after he moved us to all to Los Angeles that he took my mother, my sister (the historian Amanda Foreman) and me to dinner at a popular Hollywood hangout called Dan Tana's. As we walked in, I saw John Wayne sitting in one of the booths on the left. The tall, craggy star and my father recognised each other instantly. Wayne waved and my father took us to his table. "Hello Duke," he said, "I want you to meet my English children." I shook his enormous hand, thrilled, and then stood there as they chatted, oblivious to the fact that an unlikely reconciliation was taking place that perhaps marked for my father a symbolic ending to his experience of blacklist and exile.  

This was the first time they had spoken since a nasty confrontation in Hollywood some 20 years before. I was too star-struck to remember that only five years before I had seen Wayne on television in London, yelling at a beleaguered BBC interviewer about "Carl Foreman and his rotten old High Noon". Wayne, a crude anti-communist and super-patriot (though unlike my father he avoided military service during the Second World War because of a bad knee), liked publicly to claim credit for driving my father out of the US. Indeed, in a 1971 Playboy interview, Wayne said, "I'll never regret having helped run Foreman out of the country." In fact, Wayne had played a relatively minor role in the process that forced my father into exile and therefore brought about the birth of his "English children".