Gavin Lambert

Gavin Lambert (23 July 1924 – 17 July 2005) was an English screenwriter, film critic, novelist and biographer. Described as "an incisive observer of life in Hollywood,"^[1] his writing was mainly fiction and nonfiction about the film industry, particularly from a queer lens. Early in his career, he was an editor for the influential journals Sequence and Sight and Sound, and a critic for The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

Lambert's screenwriting work earned him two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, for Sons and Lovers (1960) and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977).

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.

Lambert was educated at Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where one of his professors was C. S. Lewis.^[2] At Oxford, he befriended Penelope Houston and filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, and they founded a short-lived but influential journal, Sequence, which was originally edited by Houston.^[3] The magazine, which lasted for only 15 issues, moved to London after the fifth issue, and Lambert and Anderson took over as co-editors.^[4] Lambert eventually left Oxford without obtaining a degree.^[2]

From 1949 to 1956 he edited the journal Sight and Sound, again with Anderson as a regular contributor. At about the same time Lambert was deeply involved in Britain's Free Cinema movement which called for more social realism in contemporary movies. He also wrote film criticism for The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

In late 1955, he moved to Hollywood, California, to work as a personal assistant to director Nicholas Ray and worked on the script (uncredited) for Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956). Later, he co-wrote the screenplay for Ray's film Bitter Victory (1957). According to the critic David Robinson, Lambert was Ray's lover for a time.^[4]

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 Inside Daisy Clover (1963) for the screen. Clover, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, which tells the cautionary tale of a teenage movie star involved in the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and her unhappy marriage to a closeted gay leading man. However, in the film version, he was not fully identified as gay because, at Redford's request, the husband he played was changed from homosexual to appear as though he might be bisexual. From this time on, Lambert and Wood became lifelong friends.

Another of Lambert's screenplays was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), based on a novel by Hannah Green, which describes in layman's terms a teenager's battle with schizophrenia. Later, the author also wrote the scripts for some TV movies such as Second Serve (1986) on transgender tennis player Renée Richards and Liberace: Behind the Music (1988) on gay performer Liberace. In 1997, he contributed to Stephen Frears's film A Personal History of British Cinema. He was heavily quoted in William J. Mann's book, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969.

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).^[5]

His final biography, Natalie Wood: A Life (2004) contains numerous errors of fact. For instance, on page nine, Lambert misstates that Wood's mother "met and married" her first husband Alexander Tatuloff in 1928. Legal records show that Wood's mother married Tatuloff on 31 August 1925.^[6] On page four, Lambert misstates that Wood's mother was born in 1912. Legal records show that Wood's mother was actually born on 26 January 1908.^[6] According to Suzanne Finstad, Lambert's error-ridden book was written "to try to repudiate" her own 2001 publication, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood.^[7]

Lambert's final book was The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood (2004).

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 Goodby 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.

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.

His papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

• Waxman, Sharon (19 July 2005). "Gavin Lambert, 80, Writer Who Chronicled Hollywood Life, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 October 2015.

• Advocate obituary 20 July 2005
• David Thomson, "Mainly about Gavin"^{[permanent dead link]}
• 'My Friend Paul Bowles' by Gavin Lambert Archived 13 July 2019 at the Wayback Machine
• 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