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Barbara Leaming is an American biographer, whose subjects have includedRoman Polanski,Orson Welles,Rita Hayworth,Marilyn Monroe,John F. Kennedy,Winston Churchill, andJacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Leaming, born inPhiladelphia,Pennsylvania, graduated from Haddonfield Memorial High School in Haddonfield, NJ, in June 1961, and earned her B.A. degree fromSmith College in 1965 and her Ph.D. fromNew York University in 1976. She wrote her doctoral dissertation,Engineers of Human Souls, on the transition tosocialist realism in the Soviet cinema of the 1930s.[1]
She was a long time professor in the Department of Theatre and Film atHunter College inNew York City until she left to devote herself to writing full-time.[2] Her articles have appeared inVanity Fair,[3][4] andThe New York Times Magazine.[5]
Leaming won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society for her bookChurchill Defiant: 1945-1955.[6] She also was awarded the Prix Litteraire 2000 by the Syndicat français de la critique de cinéma for her biography ofMarilyn Monroe which was published by Albin Michel in France under the titleMarilyn, une femme.
In 1985, Leaming's authorized biography ofOrson Welles was described byAnna Quindlen, writing inThe New York Times Book Review, as "a biography that splendidly evokes a good deal of the man, his work and his time."[7]Kirkus Reviews saw it as "a distinguished gift to American arts and letters."[8] TheLos Angeles Times called Leaming's 1992 biography ofBette Davis "a strong, poignant biography that has truth-telling power."[9] Leaming's 1995 biography ofKatharine Hepburn was said byEntertainment Weekly to tell the actress's story "with an empathy and acuity desperately rare in biographies of film stars."[10] In 1998, Leaming published her biography of Marilyn Monroe whichMolly Haskell, writing inThe New York Times Book Review, said "restores Marilyn's humanity, gives flesh-and-blood, intelligence and initiative, to the archetypaldumb blonde."[11]
In 2006 Leaming turned from the film world to the world of politics and history with her biographyJack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman.Christopher Hitchens declared inThe Atlantic Monthly: "The great merit of Barbara Leaming's new book is to demonstrate how dependent the young Kennedy became upon a charmed circle of British noblemen, and also how obsessed he became with the need to match himself with that greatest of Anglo-American aristocrats, Winston Churchill."[12] In the LondonSunday Telegraph, Christopher Silvester wrote of Leaming's JFK book, "No previous biographer has focused so sharply on Kennedy's attempts to apply Churchillian thought during his years in theWhite House."[13]
Leaming next told the story ofWinston Churchill's last ten years of public life in her bookChurchill Defiant. Writing inFinest Hour: The Journal of Winston Churchill, Richard M. Langworth said, "Leaming's insight is extraordinary."[14] Leaming'sJacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story appeared in 2014.The Boston Globe review commented that the book, "provides suggestive evidence that her subject suffered from the clinical symptoms ofpost traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD."[15] Leaming reconstructed the life of John F. Kennedy's sister Kathleen in her 2016 biography ofKick Kennedy, a book described byThe Wall Street Journal as "strikingly original."[16]
Summarizing Leaming's career as a biographer, the Canadian magazineMaclean's wrote in 2014 that "Leaming has built a formidable reputation for shaping biographies of outsized figures" that are "masterfully rendered and enticing."[17]
She lives inConnecticut.[18]
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