ANNE EDWARDS

August 20, 1927 - January 20, 2024 Anne Edwards, the American author, died in Beverly Hills, California on Saturday, January 20, 2024. She was 96 years old.

Edwards was best known for her biographies of celebrities including Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Maria Callas, Margaret Mitchell, Ronald Reagan and Barbra Streisand and of royalty including Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor, The Royal Sisters and Princess Diana.

Born in Port Chester, New York, her immediate family moved west during the depression where her "Uncle Dave" Chasen was a comedian and restauranteur, having opened the iconic Chasen's restaurant in 1936. She attended UCLA and SMU. She started her career as a junior writer at MGM in 1944 and became a Hollywood screenwriter and television writer during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

She moved to Europe in the mid-50s, and lived in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and France, all of which had large Hollywood expat communities at the time. In 1973, she returned to the United States, first residing on the East Coast before returning to Beverly Hills, California, where she remained until the end of her life.

Her film credits include co-writing the first draft of the screenplay for Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand. Her first novel was the best-selling The Survivors, published the same year (1968). A later novel, Haunted Summer, about Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, was made into a film in 1988, starring Laura Dern. She authored eight novels, sixteen biographies, three children's books, two memoirs (one with her late husband, Stephen Citron) and an autobiography.

She was a past President of the Authors Guild and served on its Board of Directors, and a member of the Writer's Guild of America. 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 taught writing.

In the mid-1970s, Edwards was hired by the Zanuck-Brown Company to write a story that could be adapted as the film sequel to Gone with the Wind. She produced a meticulously researched novel, which in the end was not used due to a conflict between the Zanuck-Brown Company and the Mitchell estate and remains unpublished to this day. It was through this work that she ultimately wrote her biography of Margaret Mitchell.

She is survived by her daughter, Catherine Edwards Sadler and son-in-law, Judd Grill of Los Angeles and her son, Michael Edwards of Washington D.C., as well as grandchildren, Maxwell, Casey and Hillary, and great-grandchildren, Henry, Eleanor and Oliver.