Gavin Lambert - Personal Life

Personal Life

Lambert was educated at Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where one of his professors was C. S. Lewis. At Oxford, he befriended filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, and they founded a short-lived but influential journal, Sequence, which he co-edited with Anderson. Lambert eventually left Oxford without obtaining a degree. From 1949 to 1955 he edited the periodical Sight and Sound, again with Anderson as a regular contributor. At about the same time Lambert was deeply involved in Britain's Free Cinema movement which called for more social realism in contemporary movies. He also wrote film criticism for The Sunday Times and The Guardian. In 1957 he moved to Hollywood, California, to work as a screenwriter and personal assistant to director Nicholas Ray, whose movie Bitter Victory (1957) he co-wrote. He claimed to be Ray's lover for a period of time.

Gavin Lambert became an American citizen in 1964. From 1974 to 1989, he chiefly stayed in Tangier, where he was a close friend of the writer and composer Paul Bowles. He spent the final years of his life in Los Angeles, where he died of pulmonary fibrosis on 17 July 2005. He left behind a brother, niece and nephew, and named Mart Crowley executor of his estate.

Gavin's father's half sister was Ivy Claudine Godber aka Claudine West (1890-1943), a screenwriter who won an oscar for her joint writing of the script of Mrs Miniver in 1942.

His papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.