Patricia Bosworth

Patricia Bosworth, born Patricia Crum on April 24, 1933, in Oakland, California, was an American actress, journalist, biographer, and memoirist who died on April 2, 2020. She was the daughter of attorney Bartley Crum and novelist Anna Gertrude Bosworth. At age 13, she adopted her mother's maiden name as her surname, intending to pursue a career as an actress. Her father was a politically prominent figure who served as a confidant to Wendell Willkie during the 1940 presidential election, sat on the 1945 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine, and was among the six lawyers who defended the Hollywood Ten during the Red Scare of 1947. The professional consequences of the Blacklist led the family to relocate from California to New York in late 1948.

Bosworth was educated at Miss Burke's School and the Convent of the Sacred Heart in California before the family's move. In New York she attended the Chapin School, and she later studied at the Ecole International in Geneva, Switzerland. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1955 with a major in dance and writing. While still a student there, she began modeling for the John Robert Powers Agency and was hired by Diane and Allan Arbus to pose for a Greyhound bus company magazine advertisement.

Following her graduation, Bosworth joined the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where she studied under Lee Strasberg. Arthur Penn cast her as the lead in her first professional production, a pre-Broadway tryout of James Leo Herlihy's Blue Denim. Her Broadway career spanned from 1955 to 1961 and included five productions. She appeared in the comedy Small War on Murray Hill, directed by Garson Kanin, and in the comedy Howie, in which she played a fast-talking teenager modeled on the young Nora Ephron, written by Phoebe Ephron. In the drama The Sin of Pat Muldoon she played Elaine Stritch's sister. She also appeared in Inherit the Wind and in Jean Kerr's comedy Mary, Mary, for which she understudied from 1961 to 1965 before being cast as the lead for the final portion of the play's run.

During the same period, Bosworth toured in The Glass Menagerie, playing Laura opposite Helen Hayes as Amanda, and appeared in Remains to be Seen alongside Tommy Sands. She worked regularly in television, with credits including Naked City, Kraft Theater, The Secret Storm, Young Dr. Malone, and The Patty Duke Show. On film, she appeared in Four Boys and a Gun as James Franciscus's wife and can be seen in Bert Stern's 1960 documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day, which documented the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Her most prominent film role was Sister Simone, the young companion to Audrey Hepburn's character Sister Luke, in Fred Zinnemann's The Nun's Story (1959), a box-office success that received multiple Academy Award nominations.

In the mid-1960s, Bosworth transitioned from acting to journalism. She published Broadway-focused features and interviews in New York magazine and The New York Times, and worked at Magazine Management Company alongside Mario Puzo during the period when he was drafting The Godfather. She served as senior editor of McCall's from 1969 to 1972 and as managing editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1972 to 1974. Bob Guccione hired her as executive editor of Viva from 1974 to 1976. She contributed book reviews and arts writing to The New York Times, Time Life, and other national publications throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and wrote a monthly arts and entertainment column for Working Woman magazine. Bosworth was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair beginning in 1984 under Tina Brown and continued in that role, with interruptions, until the end of her life under Graydon Carter. She also served as an editor at Mirabella from 1993 to 1995. Her 1999 Vanity Fair profile of Elia Kazan, which examined his reflections on the Hollywood Blacklist, earned her the Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York.

As an author, Bosworth wrote biographies of Montgomery Clift (1978), Diane Arbus (1984), Marlon Brando (2000), and Jane Fonda (2011). Her biography of Clift drew on her personal access to his family, as her father had been Clift's lawyer in the late 1940s. Her biography of Arbus, which examined both the photographer's artistic legacy and the circumstances of her 1971 suicide, was critically acclaimed and became the inspiration for Steven Shainberg's 2006 film Fur, starring Nicole Kidman. Bosworth was a faculty member at Columbia University's school of journalism and at Barnard College.