Penelope Gilliatt

Early Life and Education

Penelope Ann Douglass Gilliatt was born on March 25, 1932, in London, England, into a professional family; her father was a barrister. She spent part of her childhood in Northumberland, in the north of England, an experience that would surface occasionally in the settings and sensibilities of her fiction. She was educated at Queen's College, London, a well-regarded independent school for girls, before crossing the Atlantic to attend Bennington College in Vermont, one of the small, progressive liberal arts colleges in the United States known for fostering creative and independent thinking among women students. She later studied at Cambridge University in England, which further sharpened the literary and critical faculties that would define her professional life.

This unusual, transatlantic educational path—rare for a British woman of her generation and class—gave Gilliatt a dual fluency in British and American cultural idioms. It also exposed her early to both the traditions of English letters and the freer, more experimental currents of American arts education, a combination that would later serve her well as a critic straddling two national cinema and literary cultures.

Career Beginnings

Gilliatt began her professional life in journalism in London, working for publications including Vogue and the Evening Standard, where she wrote features and criticism. Her sharp, literate prose and evident intelligence quickly distinguished her among a generation of British women entering journalism and letters in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period when such professional avenues remained difficult for women to access on equal terms with men.

She went on to work at The Observer as a film critic, developing the incisive, stylistically distinctive voice that would eventually bring her to international attention. Her writing combined rigorous intellectual analysis with a novelist's eye for character, atmosphere, and telling detail—qualities that set her apart from more conventional film journalism of the period.

The New Yorker Years

In 1968, Gilliatt was hired by The New Yorker magazine to share film criticism duties with the formidable Pauline Kael, an arrangement whereby the two critics alternated reviewing responsibilities, each writing for roughly six months of the year. This was an unusual and demanding position: Gilliatt was tasked with matching Kael's passionate, often polemical criticism with her own more elliptical, allusive, and literary style. Over more than a decade, from 1968 to 1979, Gilliatt's reviews became known for their erudition, wit, and unpredictable turns of phrase, often drawing on literary and historical references beyond the ordinary scope of film journalism.

Her tenure at The New Yorker placed her at the center of American film culture during a pivotal era—the emergence of the New Hollywood generation of directors, the flourishing of European art cinema in the U.S. market, and vigorous public debates over cinema's cultural status. Alongside Kael, Gilliatt helped elevate film criticism to a form of serious literary and cultural commentary, respected within highbrow intellectual circles that had once regarded cinema with suspicion.

However, Gilliatt's career at the magazine was eventually overshadowed by controversy: in the late 1970s, she was accused of plagiarism after passages in one of her profiles closely resembled previously published material, and separately, her escalating struggles with alcoholism increasingly affected her reliability and professional standing. She left The New Yorker in 1979, a painful end to what had been one of the most prominent critical perches in American media.

Screenwriting and Sunday Bloody Sunday

Beyond criticism, Gilliatt was an accomplished creative writer in her own right. Her most celebrated achievement in this vein was the original screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), directed by John Schlesinger and starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch, and Murray Head. The film told the story of a bisexual love triangle in contemporary London with unusual candor and emotional nuance for its time, and it became one of the landmark British films of the early 1970s in its frank, humane treatment of sexuality and relationships.

Gilliatt's screenplay earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, cementing her reputation as a writer capable of translating psychological subtlety into cinematic form. The film remains a touchstone of British cinema for its era-defining depiction of fluid sexual identity, years before mainstream cinema would broadly embrace similar themes.

Literary Career: Fiction, Biography, and Plays

Gilliatt was also a prolific author of fiction. She published several novels, including One by One (1965), A State of Change (1967), The Cutting Edge (1978), and Mortal Matters (1983), as well as short-story collections such as Come Back If It Doesn't Get Better (1968) and Splendid Lives (1978). Her fiction was noted for its precise, often ironic prose style and its attention to the emotional undercurrents of ordinary lives, sometimes compared to the work of contemporaries exploring similarly understated social terrain.

She also wrote for the stage and contributed profiles and critical studies to The New Yorker and other publications, including a well-regarded biographical study of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati, entitled Jacques Tati (1976), which reflected her deep engagement with European art cinema. She additionally wrote profiles of major cultural figures, showcasing her range as a journalist capable of moving between fiction, criticism, and long-form nonfiction.

Personal Life

Gilliatt was married twice. Her first marriage was to physician Roger Gilliatt, from whom she took the surname by which she became known professionally; the marriage ended in divorce. She later married the director John Osborne is incorrect—her second husband was in fact the theatre and film figure to whom she remained married for a shorter period before divorcing again. (Some sources note her marriage to John Osborne's contemporaries in British theatre circles, though details of her personal relationships were less publicly documented than her professional career.) She had one daughter, Nolan Gilliatt, from her first marriage.

Her personal life in later years was marked by increasing struggles with alcohol dependency, which colleagues and biographers have connected to the professional setbacks she experienced in the late 1970s, including her departure from The New Yorker amid the plagiarism controversy. Friends and obituarists nonetheless emphasized her personal warmth, wit, and formidable intelligence, which persisted despite these difficulties.

Awards and Recognition

Gilliatt's most significant formal recognition came through her Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and a corresponding BAFTA nomination. She was also honored within literary and journalistic circles for her criticism and fiction, and her work at The New Yorker is frequently cited in retrospectives of American film criticism's golden age.

Legacy and Historical Impact

Penelope Gilliatt's legacy rests on several pillars: her role as a pioneering woman film critic at one of America's most prestigious magazines during a transformative period in cinema history; her authorship of one of British cinema's most emotionally daring and influential screenplays; and her broader body of fiction, which, while less remembered today, contributed to the mid-century landscape of British literary realism.

Her partnership—and implicit critical rivalry—with Pauline Kael at The New Yorker is often cited in histories of film criticism as exemplifying two contrasting critical sensibilities: Kael's visceral, confrontational style versus Gilliatt's more literary, oblique approach. Their coexistence at the magazine for over a decade helped establish film criticism as a serious literary art form within American journalism.

Though her later career was clouded by controversy and personal struggle, Gilliatt's contributions—particularly the enduring critical and cultural stature of Sunday Bloody Sunday—secure her a lasting place in the history of both cinema and journalism. Retrospective assessments, including detailed examinations by film historians such as those published in the Columbia Journalism Review, have sought to reappraise her critical legacy with more nuance, acknowledging both her genuine talents and the professional difficulties that marked her final years.

Death

Penelope Gilliatt died on May 9, 1993, in London at the age of 61. Her death was reported prominently in major American and British newspapers, which reflected on her dual legacy as a celebrated screenwriter and novelist and as one of the defining film critics of the New Hollywood era, despite the professional and personal difficulties that marked the final chapter of her career.