Patricia Bosworth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Patricia Bosworth, B.A., (b. April 24, 1933) is an American journalist and biographer and former faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
Bosworth is the daughter of Bartley Crum, who was known as one of the six lawyers who defended the Hollywood Ten against the "Communist peril" at the start of the Cold War in 1947. Both her brother and her father committed suicide, as the author relates in her book, Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story (1998).
Bosworth has written many book reviews for The New York Times and is the author of biographies on Montgomery Clift (1978), Diane Arbus (1984) and Marlon Brando (2000). She is also a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, Senior editor of McCall's and managing editor of Harper's Bazaar.
She profiled film historian Lawrence J. Quirk for the April 1998 issue of Vanity Fair and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione for the February 2005 issue of the same magazine.
Her book, Montgomery Clift: A Biography tells the story of the actor, whose introverted style of acting influenced James Dean and many other performers. In researching her book, the author had total access to Clift's family and many persons who knew the actor and worked with him.
Bosworth's biography, Diane Arbus deals with the life of the famous photographer, which culminated in suicide in 1971, and examines her controversial, technically innovative pictures of dwarfs, nudists and drag queens that won her a reputation as "a photographer of freaks."
According to Publishers Weekly, Bosworth's biography on Marlon Brando "offers a vivid reminder of the personal and professional highlights of Brando's life." It is "an informative biography of Brando that, because of the limited format of the Penguin Lives series, hints at but cannot do justice to the great unruliness of Brando's career and life. She provides a fine, detailed sketch of his New York days when he took acting classes with 'Harry Belafonte, Elaine Stritch, Gene Saks, Shelley Winters, Rod Steiger and Kim Stanley,' and presents a great portrait of the craziness on the set of Last Tango in Paris (co-star Maria Schneider announced that they got along 'because we're both bisexual')", but in only 228 pages, the author "can't approach the complexity of her earlier work."
Patricia Bosworth is currently completing a biography of Jane Fonda.
