Patricia Bosworth, the actress turned author known for her biographies of Diane Arbus, Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, died on Thursday at 86 from coronavirus-related pneumonia, the New York Times reports.
Bosworth, a California native, started her career as an actress in the late 1950s, appearing in stage productions of Inherit the Wind; Mary, Mary; and The Glass Menagerie; and in television series like The Edge of Night, Naked City, and The Patty Duke Show.
She switched careers to journalism in the 1960s, and published her first book, the biography Montgomery Clift, in 1978. Her biographies of Arbus, Brando, and Fonda would follow in the coming decades. A reviewer for Kirkus, writing about Jane Fonda (2011), called the book “as epic as the life she chronicles.” Bosworth also wrote two memoirs, Anything Your Little Heart Desires and The Men in My Life.
At Vanity Fair, Mark Rozzo remembered Bosworth as “a champion chatterbox, charmer, encourager, motivator, and, above all, truth-teller.”
“Patti’s biographies were relatively bantam-size in a genre that prizes the doorstop,” Rozzo wrote. “But they punched way above their weight in terms of authority and staying power, gems of lucidity and insight and class.”
And at the Los Angeles Times, Michele Willens wrote that Bosworth’s “skill lay in turning private explorations of public people into mysteries of a sort.”
“Patricia Bosworth’s energy, ebullience, and curiosity could not be stopped,” Willens wrote. “It would ultimately take a so-far-unstoppable virus to do the deed.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
