NICHOLAS Evans, the former head boy of Bromsgrove School who hit the big time in the 1990s when his novel The Horse Whisperer was turned into a blockbuster film starring Robert Redford, has died of a heart attack at the age of 72.

This began in July 1950, when he was born in Bromsgrove, the son of a company sales director, and veered between astonishing triumph and life threatening disaster until it ended at his home, a 14th-century manor house in Totnes, Devon

A friend from his childhood and schooldays, Matthew Horton, recalled: “Nick was an outstanding sportsman at school gaining caps in cricket, rugby and hockey. He then went on to Oxford, achieving a First in Law. He really could have achieved anything he wanted to. He was a lovely man, modest with it and I have great memories of our childhood together.”

After graduating, Evans began as a reporter for the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Evening Chronicle before moving to London Weekend Television where he worked on Weekend World and The London Programme and was executive producer of The South Bank Show from 1982 to 1984.

As number two to Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show, he produced many of the flagship programmes of the television arts series, including profiles of Patricia Highsmith, John Le Carré, Laurence Olivier, Francis Bacon and the film director David Lean, who became a friend.

After a film project fell through, Evans found himself £65,000 in debt and diagnosed with a stomach melanoma.

He then begun writing a novel based on a story that he had been told by a Devon blacksmith, who used the term “horse whisperer” to describe someone with a gift for communicating with horses.

Evans travelled to America to meet men who did this, astutely deciding the story needed a western setting. He explained: “If you set a book in postwar or contemporary Britain, something shrinks. It becomes parochial.”

He gave the manuscript of the book, half-finished to an agent who took it to the 1994 Frankfurt book fair, where it instigated a bidding war.

Dell bought the American rights for $3.15m, Bantam got UK rights for $537,000 and translation deals in Germany and Italy netted another million dollars. The film rights went to Robert Redford for another $3m because Evans saw Redford in the role of his hero, Tom Booker.

The Horse Whisperer shot to the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list, was ranked No 15 for the year and remains one of the bestselling novels of all time.

From the heights, Nicholas Evans’ life suddenly plunged. Several family members - including him and his wife - were famously poisoned in 2008 after accidentally eating deadly webcap mushrooms, which they had gathered while on holiday in Scotland.

They all had to have kidney dialysis to recover from the poison, with Evans requiring a transplant in 2011 using a kidney donated by his daughter. At the time of the poisoning, he had almost finished his fifth novel, The Brave, about a family’s hidden secrets. Evans’ body eventually rejected the replacement kidney and he had to return to dialysis.

Nicholas Evans is survived by Charlotte, their children, Finlay and Lauren, a son, Max, from his first marriage, and by Harry, his son from a relationship with the television producer Jane Hewland.