Anne Edwards


Anne Edwards is an American author best known for her biographies of celebrities that include Princess Diana, Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Margaret Mitchell, Ronald Reagan, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Temple and Countess Sonya Tolstoy.

Life and career

She attended University of California, Los Angeles and Southern Methodist University. 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 during the late 1940s and early 1950s. 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 currently resides. Her film credits include co-writing the first draft of the screenplay for the film Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand. She wrote her first novel, the best-selling The Survivors, in 1968 and subsequently has written eight novels, sixteen biographies, three children's books, two memoirs and an autobiography.
She is a past president of the Authors Guild and currently serves 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 , Judy and Sonya 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."

Biographies