Patricia Bosworth: “A biography is a voyeuristic act, and photography is too. I’m not proud of that, but I can’t help myself.”

Ms. Bosworth had a gilded childhood in San Francisco, where her glamorous parents gave parties that included writers and celebrities. Her mother was a novelist, and her father was a well-connected lawyer and White House adviser whose clients included Hollywood stars. . . .

From childhood on, she grew up in a milieu in which she routinely encountered people who were rich, famous and influential. Her parents’ dinner parties included labor leaders, politicians and such cultural figures as Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles and Paul Robeson. . . .

Ms. Bosworth was in her teens when she saved a discarded cigarette that had touched the lips of actor Montgomery Clift — one of her father’s clients. She went on to become a fashion model while in college, then studied at the Actors Studio with Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe and Steve McQueen, who drove her through Central Park on the back of his motorcycle. . . .

Her first biography, published in 1978, was about the mercurial and closeted Clift, whose intense performances in such films as “A Place in the Sun,” “From Here to Eternity” and “The Misfits” influenced a later generation of film actors. Ms. Bosworth next wrote a biography of photographer Diane Arbus, whom she called “the most mysterious” of her subjects. . . .

Her other biographical subjects included actors Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda. Only belatedly did Ms. Bosworth realize that many of her subjects’ lives — and her own — had been haunted by suicide or reckless behavior. . . .

In the 1960s, Ms. Bosworth gave up acting for journalism, working as a writer and editor at Woman’s Day, McCall’s and Harper’s Bazaar magazines. In the 1970s, she was executive editor of Viva, a magazine geared toward younger women. She joined Vanity Fair in 1984. . . .

In 2006, Nicole Kidman starred in “Fur,” a film based on Ms. Bosworth’s biography of Arbus. Explaining her interest in Arbus, whose photographs of people verge on the bizarre, Ms. Bosworth told The Washington Post in 1984: “I do not think she was a weirdo, nor do I think she was suicidal all her life. . . .