Penelope Gilliatt

• 1. Introduction

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  Penelope Gilliatt was born Penelope Ann Douglass Conner on the 25th of March 1932, and she died on the 9th of May 1993. The English writer worked as a novelist, a short story writer, a screenwriter and a film critic. She held all four roles at a serious level, and one of them ended abruptly over a single magazine profile. How did a critic come to share one prominent job with a rival, taking turns by the season? What did her prose do that left readers so divided? And what became of a screenplay she wrote, then walked away from?

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• 2. Two Critics, One Chair

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  In 1961, Gilliatt began reviewing film and theatre for The Observer in London. She stayed there until 1967 and wrote numerous reviews in that time.

  That same year, she started a column at The New Yorker under an unusual arrangement. She alternated with Pauline Kael as the magazine's chief film critic, and each woman held the post for six months at a time. Gilliatt's stretch ran from late spring to early fall. Kael wrote the column for the remainder of the year.

  The magazine gained two very different sensibilities within a single year, and the contrast between them was a significant draw for readers. Gilliatt filled her seasons with a style that would later divide her audience.

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• 3. A Grandiose Eye

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  Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, Jeanne Moreau and Woody Allen were among Gilliatt's favourite filmmakers. She wrote profiles of many directors, and these names stood out among them.

  Her reviews leaned on visual metaphors and imagery. She described scenes in close detail, in a style that was characteristically grand. She also took pride in knowing actors and directors personally, and she often wove those acquaintances into her reviews of their films.

  Readers did not agree about the result. Many enjoyed her colourful, detailed writing. Others found the style distracting and unnecessary for criticism, and they felt she described a film too completely. The profile form she favoured would eventually bring her trouble.

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• 4. The Greene Profile

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  In 1979, Gilliatt's career as a film critic for The New Yorker came to an end because of a profile of Graham Greene. The piece contained passages taken without credit from an article about Greene by the novelist Michael Meshaw. Meshaw's article had run in The Nation two years earlier.

  The magazine's fact-checker had warned the editor, William Shawn, about the plagiarism. Shawn published the profile regardless.

  Greene himself was unimpressed once it appeared. He called Gilliatt's “so-called Profile” of him “inaccurate” and said it came from a “rather wild imagination.”

  She lost the film column, but she did not lose the magazine, because she kept publishing fiction in its pages.

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• 5. Sunday Bloody Sunday

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  The director John Schlesinger approached Gilliatt to collaborate on a script, partly because of her debut novel One by One. The film, Sunday Bloody Sunday, appeared in 1971. It was an accepting treatment of homosexuality, based on a personal story of Schlesinger's own.

  Gilliatt wrote the first draft and then left the project to take a job at The New Yorker. In her absence, David Sherwin and Schlesinger extensively revised the script.

  Even so, the screenplay carried her name to a run of honours. She won Best Screenplay awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, from the Writers Guild of America, USA, and from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. The Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay came with a BAFTA nomination as well.

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• 6. Ships and Suffragettes

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  Hexham gets several pages of its own in Mortal Matters, the 1983 novel that Gilliatt set largely in Northumberland and Newcastle. The book is much concerned with shipbuilding and suffragettes, and it mentions numerous Newcastle locations by name.

  Her other novels include One by One in 1965 and A State of Change in 1967. The Cutting Edge followed in 1978, and A Woman of Singular Occupation came out in 1988.

  Mortal Matters is also a celebration of the North East's achievements. It honours the vessels Mauretania and Charles Parsons' Turbinia. It praises the Torrens, a ship built in Sunderland, on which Joseph Conrad served for two years from 1891.

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• 7. Collected Works

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  Unholy Fools: Wits, Comics, Disturbers of the Peace: Film & Theater, published in 1973, gathered some of Gilliatt's film and theatre writing for the first time. Its pieces came from The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, Queen, Harper's & Queen, The New Yorker, The Observer, The Spectator and Vogue. Three-Quarter Face: Reports & Reflections followed in 1980. It collected her New Yorker articles, along with her Vogue article on Nabokov.

  She also devoted whole books to two French directors. Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews appeared in 1975, and Jacques Tati came out in 1976.

  Her short stories filled many collections. What's It Like Out? and Other Stories came out in the UK in 1968 and appeared in the US as Come Back If It Doesn't Get Better in 1969. Nobody's Business arrived in 1972, Splendid Lives in 1977 and Quotations from Other Lives in 1982. They Sleep Without Dreaming came out in 1985, followed by 22 Stories in 1986.

  In 1990 she published two more books: Lingo, another story collection, and To Wit: Skin and Bones of Comedy, a book about comedy.

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• 8. Marriages and Companions

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  Both of Gilliatt's parents came from Newcastle upon Tyne, though she herself was born in London. Her father, Cyril Conner, was a barrister, and her mother was Marie Stephanie Douglass. They divorced not long after their daughter was born.

  She grew up in Northumberland in an upper-middle class household. Her father left his legal practice to serve as the BBC's director in the north east from 1938 to 1941. She kept a lifelong love of the Roman Wall country. She attended Queen's College in London and then won a scholarship to Bennington College in Vermont.

  In 1954, she married the neurologist Roger Gilliatt. He was best man at Anthony Armstrong-Jones's 1960 wedding to Princess Margaret, and she kept his surname after their divorce.

  From 1963 to 1968, she was married to the playwright John Osborne. They lived at 31 Chester Square in central London, in a house designed by Sir Hugh Casson. Their only child, a daughter named Nolan, was later disowned by Osborne.

  After the divorce, Gilliatt was romantically involved with Mike Nichols and Edmund Wilson. Vincent Canby, the film critic of The New York Times, was her companion for many years. She died from alcoholism.

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