Gavin Lambert
Gavin Lambert | |
---|---|
Born | 23 July 1924 |
Died | 17 July 2005 | (aged 80)
Nationality | British and American |
Education | biographer |
Employer(s) | The Guardian and The Sunday Times |
Gavin Lambert (23 July 1924 – 17 July 2005) was a British-born
Personal life
Lambert was educated at
Gavin Lambert became an American citizen in 1964. From 1974 to 1989, he chiefly stayed in Tangier, where he was a close friend of the writer and composer Paul Bowles. He spent the final years of his life in Los Angeles, where he died of pulmonary fibrosis on 17 July 2005. He left behind a brother, niece and nephew, and named Mart Crowley executor of his estate.
Gavin's father's half-sister was Ivy Claudine Godber aka Claudine West (1890-1943), a screenwriter who won an Oscar for her joint writing of the script of Mrs. Miniver in 1942.
His papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
Writing achievements
Screenplays
Lambert became a notable screenwriter of the Hollywood studio era. In 1954, while still living in England, he wrote his first screenplay, Another Sky, about the sexual awakening of a prim English woman in North Africa. In 1955, he also directed Another Sky in Morocco. This was followed in 1958 by the Hollywood screenplay, Bitter Victory and in 1960 by Sons and Lovers. The latter, for which Lambert gained an Academy Award nomination, is based on a novel by D. H. Lawrence. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) adapted a novella by Tennessee Williams on the affairs of an older actress with a young Italian gigolo. As, from the 1920s through the late 1960s, homosexuality was rarely portrayed on the screen, gay screenwriters like Lambert learned to express their personal sensibilities discreetly between the lines of a film. "The important thing to remember about 'gay influence' in movies," observed Gavin Lambert, "is that it was obviously never direct. It was all subliminal. It couldn't be direct because the mass audience would say, Hey, no way."
But then, in 1965, Lambert adapted his own Hollywood insider novel
Biographies and non-fiction
Lambert was also a biographer and novelist, who focused his efforts on biographies of gay and lesbian figures in Hollywood.
According to screenwriter and writer Joseph McBride, he was "a keenly observant, wryly witty chronicler of Hollywood's social mores and artistic achievements." He wrote biographies on Hollywood figures such as On Cukor (1972) on film director George Cukor and Norma Shearer: A Life (1990) on the Canadian actress Norma Shearer. His book, Nazimova: A Biography (1997) was the first full-scale account of the private life and acting career of lesbian actress Alla Nazimova. He was the author of the memoir Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000) (whose title echoed that of Anderson's own work, About John Ford).
He also wrote the book GWTW: The Making of Gone with the Wind (Little, Brown and Company, 1973). Working as a Hollywood screenwriter, Lambert was able to interview and gain personal remembrances of most of the cast and crew involved with the film, including dismissed director George Cukor and star Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara).[4]
His final biography, Natalie Wood: A Life (2004) supplied an insider's look at actress Natalie Wood and chronicled everything concerning her life, since Lambert was a friend of Wood for sixteen years. The book was praised by Natalie Wood's daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, as "a wonderful biography on my Mom. It will be the definitive biography on my mother." Lambert's biography includes Wood's relationship with Elvis Presley, and interviews with the people who knew Wood best, such as Robert Wagner, Warren Beatty, Tony Curtis, Paul Mazursky, Tab Hunter and Leslie Caron. In his book, Lambert controversially claimed that Wood frequently dated gay and bisexual men, including director Nicholas Ray and actors Nick Adams, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Tab Hunter, and Scott Marlowe. Lambert said that Wood supported homosexual playwright Mart Crowley (a later lover of Lambert's) in a manner that made it possible for him to write his play, The Boys in the Band (1968). Lambert's final book was The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood (2004).
Novels and short stories
Lambert also wrote seven novels primarily with Hollywood settings, among them The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life (1959), a collection of seven short stories that portray a bevy of tinsel-town lowlifes, Inside Daisy Clover (1963), The Goodbye People (1971) about Hollywood's beautiful people, and Running Time (1982), a portrait of an indefatigable woman from child starlet to screen goddess, but also a unique life history of the American film industry. Other works of fiction included Norman's Letter (1966), which received the Thomas R. Coward Memorial Award for Fiction, A Case for the Angels (1968), and In the Night All Cats Are Grey (1976). In 1996, Lambert wrote the introduction to 3 Plays, a collection of works by his longtime friend, Mart Crowley.
References
- ^ a b Robinson, David (20 July 2005). "Gavin Lambert: Incorrigibly witty Hollywood writer". The Independent. Retrieved 16 September 2009.[dead link]
- ^ "Penelope Houston, 1927-2015". Sight & Sound. 27 October 2015. Retrieved 28 October 2015.
- ^ a b Robinson, David (29 April 2013). "Gavin Lambert". The Independent. Retrieved 28 October 2015.
- ^ Lambert, Gavin (1976) [1973]. GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind (mass market paperback ed.). New York: Bantam Books. p. 53.
Further reading
- Waxman, Sharon (19 July 2005). "Gavin Lambert, 80, Writer Who Chronicled Hollywood Life, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 October 2015.
External links
- Advocate obituary 20 July 2005
- David Thomson, "Mainly about Gavin"[permanent dead link]
- 'My Friend Paul Bowles' by Gavin Lambert
- Recent photo Archived 4 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine
- Gavin Lambert's only directorial effort "Another Sky"
- Gavin Lambert at IMDb
- Gavin Lambert at the BFI's Screenonline