Steeped in the essence of Hollywood, writer Jill Schary Robinson told many tales of movie making’s golden era. The Los Angeles-born daughter of MGM studio head Dore Schary, she grew up alongside the likes of Jane Fonda (a lifelong friend), Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. She started her writing career in advertising, before working as a journalist in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1963 she published
With a Cast of Thousands, a name-dropping memoir, before writing for
Cosmopolitan and other outlets. In 1974 she released a second memoir,
Bed/Time/Story, an account of addiction later filmed for television, and followed it with her debut novel, the well-received
Perdido. She moved to London in the 1980s, where she wrote a column for the
Daily Telegraph and published two more novels. A third memoir
Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found, came out in 1999 and described her recovery from a seizure which wiped out her memories of her husband and the previous decade.
Go Find Out, an anthology of her work, was published in 2021; her final novel was published in 2023. Robinson died on July 20 aged 88. — Agencies
