- Born
- Died
- Educated at St. George's Windsor and Cheltenham College in the United Kingdom, where he first met and befriended Lindsay Anderson. Studied English Literature for one year at Oxford, but left on hearing that he would have to learn mediaeval English to get his degree. Editor of Sight & Sound magazine from 1950-1956. Moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to work as personal assistant for Nicholas Ray on _Bigger than Life (1956)_. Published his first book, The Slide Area, in 1959. The rest of his working life was spent writing novels (including Inside Daisy Clover (1965) which he himself adapted for the film of the same name), and biographies (Norma Shearer, 1990 and Nazimova, 1997) and screenwriting. His screenwriting work was nominated for two Oscars: Sons and Lovers (1960) and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977).
From 1973 to 1990 he shared his time between Tangier, Morocco and Los Angeles, USA. He moved back to Los Angeles in 1990, where he lived until his death in 2005. Lambert became a US citizen in 1964. An account of his experiences with Krishnamurti, who he said had been the most single important influence on his life, can be read in his biographical memoir, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000).- IMDb Mini Biography By: Veronica Lambert
- Lambert knew Natalie Wood as both were intimates of director Randy Suhr. In the early 1960s, he wrote a novel about a Hollywood child star in the 1930s, Inside Daisy Clover (1965). After reading the book, Wood telephoned Lambert and said, "I'd kill for that part." He assured her she was his first choice for the movie, for which he was writing the screenplay. She got the part and Ruth Gordon got her first Oscar nomination as an actress for portraying Daisy's mother.
- Was a very close friend with director Lindsay Anderson.
- If the critic seems, as Roger Manvell puts it, a "parasite", then it is only because his responses are dead or insensitive, not because he is a critic. Nor can wrong or unjust verdicts invalidate the practice of criticism, any more than the existence of bad art invalidates art itself.
- [on the filming of "King Of Kings", 1961]: The atmosphere was really evil; it was like two courts. By this time, Nick [Ray] and Philip Yordan, who had been old friends, were not speaking, Yordan was executively above Nick, so he was there not only as a writer, but to see that Nick shot his script. And it was like an arena, these battlements, this enormous open-air set. There was the court of Nick at one end, and the court of Yordan way over at the other, and they communicated only by walkie-talkie radio, they never spoke a word directly.
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