Joan Juliet Buck
| Joan Juliet Buck | |
|---|---|
 Study for a portrait of Joan Juliet Buck by Reginald Gray. Paris 1980s(graphite on canvas) |
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| Born | Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | writer/editor/actor |
Joan Juliet Buck is an American writer, social critic, and actress. She was the editor in chief of French Vogue from 1994 to 2001.
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[edit] Background
Buck is the only child of Jules Buck (1917–2001), an American film producer, who moved his family to Europe in 1952 "in protest against political repression" in the United States.[1][2] Her mother was the former Joyce Ruth Getz (aka Joyce Gates, died 1996), a model and actress.[3] John Huston, for whom her father worked as a cameraman, was the best man at her parents' 1945 wedding.
As a child, Buck was cast as a Scots waif in the Walt Disney film Greyfriars Bobby.
[edit] Career
Dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College to work at Glamour magazine as a book reviewer in 1968, she became the features editor of British Vogue at the age of 23, then a correspondent for Women's Wear Daily in London and Rome.[4] Later Buck was an associate editor of the London Observer. A contributing editor to American Vogue since 1980 and also Vanity Fair, her profiles and essays appeared in The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review. As movie critic for American Vogue (1990–1994), she served on the New York Film Festival selection Committee. From 1994 to 2001 she was editor-in-chief of French Vogue, where she doubled the circulation and produced thematic year-end issues on cinema, art, music, and quantum physics.
She has appeared in numerous documentaries, among them James Kent's "Fashion Victim, the Killing of Gianni Versace", Mark Kidel's "Paris Whorehouse", and "Architecture of the Imagination". Buck narrated James Crump's 2007 documentary " Black, White, and Gray", about art collector Sam Wagstaff and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Buck appeares in Nora Ephron's movie Julie and Julia (2009) as Madame Elisabeth Brassart, head of the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.[5][6][7]
In 2008, she joined Liz Smith, Peggy Noonan, Joni Evans, Mary Wells Lawrence, Lesley Stahl, Whoopi Goldberg, Candice Bergen, and others in founding wowowow.com, a website for women.
[edit] Novels
Buck's novels about multicultural expatriates are The Only Place To Be (Random House, 1982) and Daughter Of The Swan (Weidenfeld, 1987). She was one of a long line of writers commissioned to adapt D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel. Her version was singled out by DM Thomas as "faithful and intelligent", but the film has never been made.[8]
[edit] Marriage
Buck married, in 1977, John Heilpern, a journalist and writer; they divorced in the 1980s.[9]
[edit] Controversies
For its March 2011 issue, American Vogue commissioned a profile of Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by Joan Juliet Buck. Buck described Asma al-Assad as "glamorous, young and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,"[10] she also noted that "in Syria, power is hereditary." The article mentioned substantial "shadow zones" in the country's social and political affairs, and quoted the U.S. State Department web site: "The Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors."[11]
Joan Juliet Buck's Vogue article caused a furor. Publications and web sites including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic attacked it as an ill-timed "puff piece" that ignored human rights abuses under the Ba'athist regime in Syria.[12][13] An article by Stephen McGinty in The Scotsman examined the Vogue piece point by point, and noted that it "has plenty of lines that now viewed through the sharp lens of current events, appear deeply ironic."[14]
Anti-government demonstrations began in Syria in March 2011.[15] In a speech on March 30, 2011, Bashar al-Assad blamed "conspirators" for an extraordinary wave of dissent against his authoritarian rule, and did not offer any concessions to the protestors.[16] Buck had quoted al-Assad as saying that he was attracted to a career in eye surgery "because it's very precise, it's almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood."
By May, as the Syrian regime continued to kill protestors,[17] the article was removed from Vogue's website.[18] No explanation has been reported.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/arts/jules-buck-83-film-producer-and-battlefield-cameraman.html?scp=1&sq=%22jules%20buck%22&st=cse
- ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1336908/Jules-Buck.html
- ^ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituaryjoyce-buck-1310768.html
- ^ http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/11/business/the-media-business-french-vogue-names-editor.html?scp=1&sq=%22joan%20juliet%20buck%22%20vogue&st=cse
- ^ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914995,00.html
- ^ http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/la-et-julie-julia7-2009aug07,0,1975214.story
- ^ http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/08/07/julie_julia_review/index.html
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/aug/28/books.featuresreviews
- ^ http://www.wowowow.com/post/joan-juliet-buck-yves-saint-laurent-fashion-style-remembrance-44543?page=0#comment-46243
- ^ http://www.vogue.com/vogue-daily/article/asma-al-assad-a-rose-in-the-desert/
- ^ http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1035.html#country
- ^ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704506004576174623822364258.html
- ^ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/02/vogue-defends-profile-of-syrian-first-lady/71764/
- ^ http://www.scotsman.com/syria/Stephen-McGinty-Nation-bleeds-as.6744591.jp
- ^ BBC Timeline: Syria
- ^ http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/us-syria-usa-idUSTRE72T5MV20110330
- ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13167433
- ^ http://gawker.com/5800551/vogue-disappears-adoring-profile-of-syrian-butchers-wife
