Actor & Writer Patricia Bosworth Dead From Covid-19 at 86

Patricia Bosworth, who acted alongside the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Patty Duke in the 1950s and 1960s before becoming a celebrated celebrity journalist and biographer, died on Thursday of complications from covid-19. She was 86.

The Hollywood Reporter says Bosworth’s death was announced by the Actors Studio, which she joined after graduating art school in 1955. Bosworth studied acting under the famed Lee Strasberg, considered the “father of method acting,” and made appearances on a number of television shows in the 1950s, including Kraft Theatre and Young Dr. Malone. In 1959, she appeared alongside Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story, and made her last appearance as an actor on The Patty Duke Show in 1963.

By the 1960s, Bosworth pivoted toward writing, and racked up bylines focusing on celebrity journalism in New York magazine, the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair, where she worked from 1984 until 1991, and then again from 1997 until her death. Bosworth also wrote a number of celebrity biographies, notably, for Montgomery Clift, Diane Arbus, Jane Fonda, and Marlon Brando.

Bosworth also wrote two memoirs, chronicling a childhood rife with familial suicide and an adulthood marked by glamour and celebrity. She is survived by two stepchildren, five step-grandchildren, and a partner, Douglas Schwalb.