Gavin Lambert(1924-2005)

Lambert knew Natalie Wood as both were intimates of director Randy Suhr. In the early 1960s, he wrote a novel about a Hollywood child star in the 1930s, Lo strano mondo di Daisy Clover (1965). After reading the book, Wood telephoned Lambert and said, "I'd kill for that part." He assured her she was his first choice for the movie, for which he was writing the screenplay. She got the part and Ruth Gordon got her first Oscar nomination as an actress for portraying Daisy's mother.

If the critic seems, as Roger Manvell puts it, a "parasite", then it is only because his responses are dead or insensitive, not because he is a critic. Nor can wrong or unjust verdicts invalidate the practice of criticism, any more than the existence of bad art invalidates art itself.