Joan Juliet Buck
Joan Juliet Buck | |
|---|---|
 Study for a portrait of Joan Juliet Buck by Reginald Gray. Paris 1980s(graphite on canvas) | |
| Occupation | writer/editor/actor |
Joan Juliet Buck is an American writer, social critic, and actress, who was the editor in chief of French Vogue from 1994 to 2001.
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.
Career
Dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College to work at Glamour magazine as a book reviewer in 1968, she became 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.
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]
Marriage
Buck married, in 1977, John Heilpern, a journalist and writer; they divorced in the 1980s.[9]
Controversies
On February 25, 2011, Joan Juliet Buch wrote a flattering portrait of the wife of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad[10]. The piece was seen by Foreign Policy, among others, as particularly ill-timed given reports of demonstrations and human rights abuses in Syria[11].
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://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/25/Vogues_ridiculous_puff_piece_on_Syrias_ruling_family