Alan Charles Langley Hackney (10 September 1924, Manchester – 15 May 2009, Hertfordshire) was an English novelist and screenwriter.
[2] After demobilisation he proceeded to New College, Oxford, where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics under the tutelage of Isaiah Berlin.
A further two children meant that he had to travel to write[citation needed] and he had spells in Canada, Italy (with the RAI TV series K 2 +1, directed by Luciano Emmer, starring the Kessler Sisters and Johnny Dorelli), and Hollywood as well as working for British television and continuing to contribute to Punch.
His best-remembered films are Two-Way Stretch (1960), starring Peter Sellers, and You Must Be Joking (1965), directed by Michael Winner.
[4] His success writing for the television series The Adventures of Robin Hood and the 1960 film Sword of Sherwood Forest enabled him to buy an Edwardian house in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire where he spent the rest of his life, first with his wife, Peggy until she died in 1995 and then later with the Canadian film producer Daisy de Bellefeuille, whom he nursed through a long illness until her death in 2006.