Celebrity Biographies
Joan Didion
His books “Play It as it Lays” and “The Year of Magical Thinking” are considered classics of American Literature. Joan Didion –one of the greats of New Journalism– also wrote titles for the screen such as “Panic in Needle Park” and “A Star Is Born” (1976). The writer herself passed away on December 23, 2021, as a result of Parkinson’s disease, at the age of 87.
Born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, Joan Didion became a voracious reader as a child, when she had to borrow her mother’s library card to check out adult books. She graduated in English from the University of Berkeley (California). An admirer of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad , both were a great influence on her works. She started working at Vogue after winning an essay contest, the prize of which was being recruited by the publication.
She published her first novel, Troubled River , in 1963. A year later, Joan Didion married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne . She with him began to write scripts, first for a chapter of the Enigma series , which was followed by Panic in Needle Park , a film about heroin addicts who frequent a New York park, starring Al Pacino . Both also signed the adaptation of Joan Didion ‘s play Play It As Lays , directed by Frank Perry, the 1976 version of A Star Is Born , which had Barbra Streisand andKris Kristofferson , and Up Close and Personal , which featured Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford . “Writing scripts is something I’m good at, like cooking,” she said in an interview. “But it has little to do with the writing of essays and novels, because they do not contemplate the figure of the reader. They are not expected to be read, they are a tool at the director’s service.”
Didion and Dunne settled in a luxurious house in Malibu, where they gave a job as a carpenter to a very young Harrison Ford . In 2003, misfortune struck Joan Didion , as she lost her husband, due to a heart attack, on December 30. Only eight months later, Quintana Roo, her daughter, died of pneumonia. “She was adopted. They gave her to me to take care of her and I failed,” Joan Didion stated . She fired both of them in two books, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ (2005) and ‘Blue Nights’ (2011).
Her nephew, the actor and director Griffin Dunne (remembered for Jo, what a night! , by Martin Scorsese ), filmed her in the documentary Joan Didion: The center will give way , from 2017. “The bad thing is that no one will survive me” , she said in one of the sequences, lamenting the loss of her husband and daughter.