Biography

A former Hollywood agent and writer who was blacklisted in the 1950s. Like other Americans, he went to England, where he found extensive journalistic work and won some celebrity with his novel, "Weekend In Dinlock". A frequent film and television critic for various magazines, he began getting screen-writing credits in the 1990s.

He was once Peter Lorre's agent, and sometimes claimed that Lorre was one actor who could be as frightening in real life as he was on the screen.

In London, he had a four year affair with Doris Lessing which thus influenced his writing career.

In a career that stretched for decades, Sigal wrote more than a half a dozen novels and memoirs; worked as a Fleet Street journalist in London; became the soul mate of Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing; took acid trips with radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing; wrote scores of newspaper commentaries, columns and book reviews; taught long-form journalism at USC; and wrote screenplays with his wife, including the film "Frida.".

Son of two labor organizers, he had a eventful childhood. As an UCLA student, he was a journalist for the paper edited by Frank Mankiewicz and knew Bob Halderman.