Actor. Son of a Baptist minister, he was born near Collins, Covington County, Mississippi, his birth name was Carver Dana Andrews. He was the older brother of fellow actor Steve Forrest. He attended Sam Houston State Teacher's college in Texas where he studied business administration; in 1929, prior to graduating, he took a bookkeeping job with Gulf Oil. He left that job in 1931 and hitchhiked to California, hoping to find work as a singer/actor. He did all sorts of jobs in California including, driving a school bus, digging ditches, picking oranges, working as a grocery store stock boy and pumping gas in Van Nuys. His boss at the gas station gave him $50 a week for full time study, understanding that he would receive a five year share of his earnings as a performer. Meanwhile, he studied opera and entered the Pasadena Community Playhouse. He appeared in a number of plays there and drew the attention of Samuel Goldwin who offered him a movie contract. He soon began acting in non-starring roles in good quality films, "The Westerner" (1940), "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1942), and a starring role and the obsessed detective in "Laura" (1944), "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946), and "Where the Sidewalk Ends" (1950). His career faltered around 1950, possibly because of his addiction to alcohol. He and his brother, Steve Forrest, appeared in separate television episodes of "The Twilight Zone" from 1959 to 1963. The only movie they appeared in together was "Sealed Cargo" (1951). In 1969 he took a role as a university president in the daytime television soap opera Bright Promise at NBC. In 1971 he read in "The Los Angeles Times" that he was being fired from the show. He finally was able to control his addiction to alcohol, and in later years, did speaking tours for the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. He was President of the Screen Actors Guild from 1963 to 1965. He invested in real estate after retiring from films in 1960. He once said that he made more money from his real estate investments than he ever did as an actor. In the 1970s he played an airplane pilot in several motion pictures.