Gillian Freeman (1929–2019)

Gillian Freeman was born in London, England, a daughter of Jack Freeman, a dentist and physician, and his wife Freda. She attended Francis Holland School in London and Lynton House school in Maidenhead. She read English and philosophy at the University of Reading and graduated with honors in 1951. She then worked as a copywrighter in an advertising agency, as a schoolteacher in the East End of London, and as a reporter for the North London Observer. She wrote her debut novel, The Liberty Man, published in 1955, while working as a literary secretary to novelist Louis Golding. That same year, she married Edward Thorpe, a novelist and the ballet critic of the Evening Standard, with whom she had two daughters. One of Freeman's best-known books was the groundbreaking novel The Leather Boys (1961), published under the pseudonym Eliot George, a story of a marriage between two young working-class men. It was adapted into a 1964 film for which she wrote the screenplay under her own name. In 1978, she published a fictional work called Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg, 1938–1948, which many readers believed was genuine. Freeman wrote more fiction, including an historical novel, The Alabaster Egg (1970); other screenplays including That Cold Day in the Park (1969), directed by Robert Altman; the scenarios for two ballets by Kenneth MacMillan, Mayerling and Isadora Duncan; and the collection of interviews Ballet Genius (with Thorpe, 1988). Her last book was the novel But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006).