[2] He was educated at Bristol Cathedral School and King's College, Cambridge, where he was to meet and form a lasting friendship with John Bird.

[2] Fortune's early work included contributions to Peter Cook's Establishment Club team[2] in 1962, and as a regular member of the cast of the BBC-TV satire show Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, both alongside Eleanor Bron and John Bird.

In 1971, with John Wells, he published the comic novel A Melon for Ecstasy, about a man who consummates his love affair with a tree.

In 1999, he starred with Warren Mitchell and Ken Campbell in Art at Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End.

[6][7] In Fortune's latter years, he featured in the Radio 4 sitcom Ed Reardon's Week, playing the head of a literary agency and as theatrical agent Mel Simons in a 2008 episode of New Tricks.