NEW YORK — Author Dominick Dunne, who told stories of shocking crimes among the rich and famous through his magazine articles and best-selling novels such as “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles,” died Wednesday in his Manhattan home at age 83.
Dunne’s son Griffin, an actor-director, said in a statement released by Vanity Fair magazine that his father had been battling bladder cancer. But the cancer had not prevented Dunne from working and socializing, his twin passions.
Last September, against the orders of his doctor and the wishes of his family, Dunne flew to Las Vegas to attend the kidnap-robbery trial of football great O.J. Simpson, a postscript to his coverage of Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, which spiked Dunne’s considerable fame.
Dunne discontinued his Vanity Fair column to concentrate on another novel, “Too Much Money,” due out in December.
Dunne was part of a famous family that also included his brother, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne; his brother’s wife, author Joan Didion; and his son Griffin.
A one-time movie producer, Dominick Dunne carved a new career starting in the 1980s as a chronicler of the problems of the wealthy and powerful.
Tragedy struck his life in 1982 when his actress daughter, Dominique, was slain — and that experience informed his fiction and his journalistic efforts.
“If you go through what I went through, losing my daughter, you have strong, strong feelings of revenge,” Dunne said in 1990 in discussing his novel “People Like Us,” in which the protagonist shoots the man convicted of killing his daughter.
He was as successful as a journalist as he was as a novelist and spent many of his later years in courtrooms covering high-profile trials. Writing for Vanity Fair, he covered such cases as the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in 1991 and the trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez, accused of murdering their millionaire parents, in 1993.
From the gritty world of the courtroom, he would, at night, move into the glamorous realm of high society, dining with the rich and famous. He was a colorful raconteur, and his stories mesmerized listeners.
Dunne and his wife, Ellen Griffin Dunne, were married in 1954. They divorced in the 1960s, but he wrote that afterward they remained close nonetheless. She died in 1997.
