Mike Connolly

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Mike Connolly (1914 - November 18, 1966) was an American magazine reporter and primarily a Hollywood columnist.

A Chicago native, Connolly attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was the Daily Illini's city editor in 1937 and 1938. From 1951 to 1966, he was a well-known gossip columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, a daily entertainment newspaper dealing with film and television productions.

I'll cry to-morrow, the 1955 autobiography of actress Lillian Roth, was written in collaboration with Mike Connolly and Gerold Frank.

Connolly was described by Newsweek as "probably the most influential columnist inside the movie colony," the one writer "who gets the pick of trade items, the industry rumors, the policy and casting switches." Indeed, he was a witness to and participant in over a decade of sometimes tumultuous Hollywood history, and he was privy to most of Hollywood's secrets during those years.

The author was also known for his 1937-38 crusade against prostitution in Champaign, Illinois, and later for his battle against communism in Hollywood. According to his biographer Val Holley, these campaigns were attempts by Connolly, who was a homosexual, to feel part of the mainstream.

He died from a kidney malfunction following open-heart surgery on November 18, 1966.

[edit] Biography

Val Holley, Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip (2003).