After working with Patrick McGoohan on Danger Man, McGoohan and Tomblin decided to set up a company to make their own series, The Prisoner, with story editor George Markstein.[1] Tomblin was producer of the series, and wrote and directed several episodes.
Tomblin often maintained multi-film working relationships with directors. He worked with Richard Donner on The Omen, Superman and those parts of Superman II directed by Donner. With Richard Attenborough, Tomblin worked on Attenborough's major multinational productions A Bridge Too Far, Gandhi, Cry Freedom and Chaplin. For Gandhi, Tomblin supervised the reconstruction of Gandhi's funeral in Delhi, to which the general public were invited, involving the direction of 250,000 extras.[1] With Sydney Pollack, Tomblin worked on Out of Africa and Havana.
Tomblin had four children,[1] including Lisa Tomblin,[5] a film make-up department chief hairdresser, and Jane Tomblin, a production designer.
Filmography
IMDb lists around 200 unique credits for Tomblin,[6] but in 1982 he himself estimated he had already worked on around 500 films. Tomblin told an interviewer for a programme broadcast in 1984: "I only know that because I've just worked on a George Lucas film called Return Of The Jedi, and to get permission to work in the States I had to write down every film I'd been on. I got to 478 and then decided that was probably enough to convince them that I had a reasonable amount of experience."[7]