"They don't make lives like Dominick Dunne's anymore," said Thom Geier in Entertainment Weekly. A film producer and TV executive who "forged a late career as a best-selling author and journalist (and telegenic raconteur)," Dunne died on Wednesday at the age of 83. Best known for his "witty" Vanity Fair coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial and of Princess Diana's death, Dunne "cast a cool, stylishly bespectacled eye on the national fascination with celebrity and high society." And "like Truman Capote," he became "as famous as his subjects."
But it was a long road getting to that point, said Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times. "Drugs and alcohol ruined" Dunne's career as a TV and film producer, and it took the murder of his daughter—Poltergeist actress Dominique Dunne—for him to start his "life over as a writer." In Vanity Fair, he "raged at the injustice of the crime and the leniency of the killer's punishment," and that "story propelled its author into a new career."
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