Anne Edwards facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Anne Edwards
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Edwards in 2013
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| Born | August 20, 1927 Port Chester, New York, US |
| Died | January 20, 2024 (aged 96) Beverly Hills, California |
| Occupation | Author, biographer |
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| Children |
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Anne Edwards (August 20, 1927 – January 20, 2024) was an American writer best known for her biographies, including those of celebrities such as Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Margaret Mitchell, Ronald Reagan, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Temple and royalty including Matriarch Queen Mary of Teck, Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret, Princess Diana and Countess Sonya Tolstoy.
Life and career
A child performer on stage and radio, she began her writing career as a junior writer at MGM in 1944 and became a noted Hollywood screenwriter and television writer in the late 1940s and early 1950s during which time she attended UCLA and SMU. She lived in the UK and Europe from the mid-1950s until 1972. After returning to the United States in 1973, she lived in Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut before returning to Beverly Hills, California, where she resided until the end of her life.
Her early film credits include Quantez starring Fred MacMurray and Dorothy Malone; A Question of ... starring Julie London and Anthony Steele; and co-writing the first draft of the screenplay for the film Funny Girl (1968) starring Barbra Streisand. She wrote her first novel, the best-selling The Survivors, in 1968 and subsequently wrote eight novels, sixteen biographies, three children's books, two memoirs (one with her late husband—composer-musicologist-pianist Stephen Citron) and an autobiography. Her biography of Ronald Reagan -- Early Reagan: The Rise to Power -- was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
She was a past president of the Authors Guild and served on its board of directors. Her collection of literary manuscripts, papers, and related materials is now part of the Special Collections Department of the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA, where she has taught writing.
In the mid-1970s, Edwards was hired by the Zanuck-Brown Company to write a story that could be adapted as a film sequel to Gone with the Wind. She produced a meticulously researched novel, which in the end was not used for the sequel and was itself never published. It was through working on this novel that she decided to write her biography of Margaret Mitchell.
In an interview for Publishers Weekly, Edwards said, "An idea hits me, then I develop the story or, in the case of a biography, think of a person who exemplifies that theme. Vivien [Leigh], Judy [Garland] and Sonya [Tolstoy] were vastly interesting people and symbolic of certain things: Judy, the exploitation of a woman; Vivien, somebody who suffered from manic-depression; Sonya, an intelligent woman subjugated to a man who used her, drained her, made a villain of her."
See also
In Spanish: Anne Edwards para niños
