Born in Rochester, New York in 1941—his father was an elephant trainer for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus—Forster attended college at the University of Rochester as a history and psychology major with plans of going on to eventually become a lawyer. In the hopes of impressing a fellow student that he wanted to talk to, he auditioned for the school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” landed a part in the chorus and soon caught the acting bug for good. (He also lucked out with the student, June Provenzano, and the two were married from 1966 to 1975). After graduation, he did some theater work in Rochester and eventually made his way to Hollywood.

Unlike a lot of starting actors, who start off in obscurity and work their way up to more notable parts, Forster kicked off his film career on as high of a note as one could imagine—a film directed by John Huston and co-starring two of the biggest actors in the world at the time, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Based on the novel of the same name by Carson McCullers, “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967) was a strange psychological drama about repressed sexuality set on an Army base in the South in which Forster played a young soldier who became the object of erotic fixation for both his commanding officer and the officer’s wife. Although the film has undergone a critical appraisal in recent years, both for Huston’s offbeat handling of the material and the way that it dealt with subject matter that would have been utterly taboo for a film just a few years earlier, it was poorly received by critics and tanked at the box office when it came out.

Perhaps if the film had succeeded, Forster might have been launched towards conventional movie stardom. While he worked steadily, his career path veered off in odder directions. He was the star of “Medium Cool,” Haskell Wexler’s groundbreaking and critically acclaimed 1969 drama in which he played a disaffected news cameraman who soon becomes radicalized and eventually finds himself caught up in the middle of the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For the next couple of decades, he bounced back and forth between guest shots on any number of television shows, occasional supporting parts in studio projects like “The Don is Dead” (1973) and “The Black Hole” (1979), Disney’s bizarre attempt to cash in on the success of “Star Wars,” and bigger parts in cheaper B-movies. And yet, no matter what the part, Forster brought a sense of solid professionalism to his work that often stood out against the silliness of the likes of "Alligator" (1980) or the immortal “The Kinky Coaches and the Pom-Pom Pussycats” (1981).