“I was working at Vogue during the day, and at night I would work on these scenes for novel, in no particular sequence,” she said. The book focused on a married couple whose great-grandparents were pioneers. Her first novel, Run River, was published in 1963. It’s performance, the only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.”Īfter graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, she won a Vogue essay contest, whose first prize was a job at the magazine’s New York office. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. “I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer,” she told The Paris Review in 1978. “I wanted to be an actress. She had an early love for reading and writing, describing herself as a shy, bookish child. Wrote Roger Ebert of the film, “ Up Close & Personal is so different from the facts of Savitch’s life that if Didion and Dunne still have their first draft, they probably could sell it as a completely different movie.”ĭidion was born Dec. Regarding the book’s ending, in which Savitch drowned in a car accident ( Golden Girl also said that the NBC News anchor had a cocaine problem), then-Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg asked, “What’s going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted?”ĭunne, who had worked with Didion on the script for eight years, recounted the difficulty of the experience in his 1997 book, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. The couple (and Frank Pierson) wrote a 1976 version of A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand as an innocent singer and Kris Kristofferson as a has-been rock star.ĭidion and Dunne also adapted Alanna Nash’s 1988 book Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch, but the movie, Up Close & Personal (1996), starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer, bore little resemblance to the source material after the filmmakers changed the real-life story to make it more upbeat. And … so we learned.”ĭidion wrote several screenplays with Dunne, including the Al Pacino starrer The Panic in Needle Park (1971), about a group of heroin addicts on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which they adapted from a James Mills novel Play It as It Lays (1972), based on her book of the same name (the harrowing film starred Tuesday Weld as a Hollywood actress becoming unglued) and True Confessions (1981), starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall as brothers (a priest and a detective, respectively). Added Dunne: “Some drunk actor was having a fight with his girlfriend, and he threw a script at her. “The first script, we actually … we stole the script,” Didion told The New York Times in 1987. (His brother, author and producer Dominick Dunne, was in Hollywood at the time.) They married in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles that year to become screenwriters. The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, sold in excess of a million copies and spent more than 24 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.ĭidion met Dunne in New York when he was a staff writer at Time and she worked at Vogue. She was 87.ĭidion, whose best-selling masterpiece The Year of Magical Thinking documented her struggle to cope with the sudden 2003 death of Dunne and was adapted as a one-woman Broadway play, died Thursday at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson’s, Didion’s publisher, Knopf, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Joan Didion, the intensely personal journalist and author who teamed with her late husband John Gregory Dunne to write the screenplays for such films as The Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions, has died.
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