Julie Payne

July 10, 1940 - June 7, 2019 Beloved mother and wife, Julie Payne, passed away at 78 years old on June 7 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A lifelong Los Angeleno, Payne was born to actors John Payne and Anne Shirley and raised in Beverly Hills. After her parents divorced, she lived for a brief time in France with Shirley and her second husband, blacklisted screenwriter Adrian Scott, before returning to Beverly Hills to live with her mother at the home of Shirley's third husband, screenwriter Charles Lederer, where she came of age in the company of Lederer's friends and associates, Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Lew and Edie Wasserman and Doris Day. Endowed with a photographic memory, a forensic mind and a passion for literature and history, Payne, as a girl, showed the precocious ability to read and retain most every work in Lederer's library, but loving above all else the books she read about Los Angeles's strangest murders. Though her interests were in legal research and interior design, it was as an actress that she first began to work, appearing in small parts in film and television, including "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," The Manchurian Candidate and The Best of Everything. She married actor Skip Ward in 1964; they divorced in 1965. Payne met screenwriter Robert Towne in 1969, and they married in 1977. Their daughter, Katharine, was born in 1978. In 1999, Payne reconnected with her high school sweetheart, Steve Luckman, beginning again the love story that would last to the end of her life. Payne will be remembered for the vastness of her intellect and knowledge, her love of entertaining, and her uncompromising devotion to her friends and family.