Biography

Penelope Gilliatt

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Penelope Gilliatt was born on March 25, 1932 in London, England, UK. She was a writer, known for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), Contrasts (1967) and Centre Play (1973). She was married to John Osborne and Dr. Roger William Gilliatt. She died on May 9, 1993 in London, England, UK.

Although she is the sole credited writer on "Sunday, Bloody Sunday", several people have suggested that others were involved. Two writers, David Sherwin and Ken Levison, are given a non-specific acknowledgment in the end credits of the film, and Sherwin has several times said that he did a full rewrite on the script. When the film opened in London in 1971, the review in "The Times" newspaper mentioned this alleged contribution; there was an immediate retraction after a complaint by Penelope Gilliatt, who was always most insistent that she alone wrote the film. After her death, director John Schlesinger was extremely vituperative about her, according to his biographer William Mann, who also claims there was extensive rewriting.
It was reported that the cause of her relatively early death was chronic alcoholism.
A profile of novelist Graham Greene which she wrote for "The New Yorker" so incensed its subject that he demanded (and received) an apology, a very rare thing in that magazine's history.
After Graham Greene's complaint about her, "The New Yorker" removed her from the post of its film critic (one she shared with Pauline Kael) and would only publish short fiction by her.
For a time, she lived with director Mike Nichols.

"Bonnie and Clyde" could look like a celebration of gangster glamor only to a man with a head full of shavings.
[on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)]: "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" is about greed and feminine hysteria, and about how people behave in a panic, which, in this picture, is always badly. Every comic convention has been turned sour. Slipping on a banana skin breaks bones, and it is the pain of their enemies that makes the characters laugh. The title is a hoax. It should be "We're Lousy, Lousy, Lousy, Lousy People".
[on Ronald Colman]: He is the only actor I can think of who could make a toothbrush look as though it were a cigarette-holder.

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