John Gregory Dunne - Life and Career

Life and Career

Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He was the son of Dorothy Frances (née Burns) and Richard Edwin Dunne, a hospital chief of staff and prominent heart surgeon. His Irish Catholic family was wealthy; his maternal grandfather, Dominick Francis Burns, founded the Park Street Trust Company.

He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He attended the Portsmouth Priory School and graduated from Princeton University in 1954, where he was member of the Tiger Inn, and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He credited the political essayist Noel Parmentel with being his mentor in many ways.

He met Joan Didion in New York in the 1950s, where she was an editor at Vogue. In a 2005 interview Didion recalled, "We amused each other and I thought he was smart. He knew a lot of stuff that I didn't know, like politics and history - I had managed to go through school without learning much except a lot of poems." Having invited her to travel up to Connecticut one weekend in 1963 to visit his family, New England Irish Catholic, with six children, Didion said she "liked the set-up, liked being there, and liked him." He married Didion on January 30, 1964, at Mission San Juan Bautista in California. He was 31 and she 29. They moved to a remote house on the California coast as Didion thought about a follow-up to her first novel, Run, River, and Dunne worked on a book about the California grape pickers' strike, and they wrote a joint by-lined column for the Saturday Evening Post magazine. Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state.

Dunne and Didion gradually picked up writing work from book publishers and magazines, travelled together on journalism assignments, and established a working pattern that served for the next 40 years, a constant advising, consulting and editing collaboration. Critically acclaimed bestselling books followed for both - including for Dunne, The Studio, his non-fiction account of 20th Century Fox, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He was the author of a further non-fiction book about Hollywood, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.

As a literary critic and essayist, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends and Crooning.

He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr..

He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.

He died in Manhattan, New York of a heart attack, in December 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.

He was father to Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).

His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill. It won the National Book Award.