Author Dominick Dunne dies at 83

The Vanity Fair journalist and novelist Dominick Dunne has died from cancer at 83. It transpires that he passed away on Wednesday just when the world's media were scrabbling to cover the death of Edward Kennedy. Because they did not want his obituaries to be overshadowed by the senator's death, Dunne's family tried to keep his death a secret, with a spokesman initially refusing to confirm it.

Dunne set out to make his name in the film business. His LA 'contacts' in the Sixties, with whom he would fall in and out of friendships and feuds, while simultaneously battling booze and drugs, included Humphrey Bogart, Liz Taylor and Frank Sinatra. In one famous incident, Sinatra paid a waiter at Daisy, the Beverly Hills nightclub, to walk up to Dunne's table and punch him in the face.

But all that was to change in 1982 when his own daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, was strangled to death by a former boyfriend called John Sweeney.

Sweeney served only two of his six-year sentence for manslaughter - and Dunne was furious. Asked by Vanity Fair's then editor, Tina Brown, to write about the injustice, he produced a superb article that was to change his life.

"If you go through what I went through, losing my daughter, you have strong, strong feelings of revenge," Dunne said years later, discussing his novel People Like Us, in which the protagonist shoots the man convicted of killing his daughter.

Dunne now became an ardent supporter of victims' rights and a highly regarded chronicler of the great courses of recent years. He covered for Vanity Fair the trials of OJ Simpson and Phil Spector, Princess Diana's inquest and Bill Clinton's attempted impeachment.

Known for his dapper look and gossipy style, as well his vitriolic pen, he sat at the front of the courtroom throughout OJ's murder trial. Vanity Fair's current editor, Graydon Carter, writing about Dunne this week, said: "Anyone who remembers O J Simpson trying on the famous glove probably remembers a bespectacled Dunne, resplendent in his trademark Turnbull & Asser monogrammed shirt, behind him. We will not see his like anytime soon, if ever again."

Dunne was the brother of John Gregory Dunne, husband of the great Joan Didion. As well as People Like Us, his book titles included The Winners and An Inconvenient Woman. ·