Acting While still a student at Sarah Lawrence, Bosworth began modeling for the
John Robert Powers Agency. She was hired by
Diane and
Allan Arbus to pose for a magazine ad for the
Greyhound bus company. Allan drove everyone, including his and Diane's assistant Tad Yamashiro (who later became an exhibited photographer himself), from Manhattan to the Ardsley Acres section of Ardsley, New York for the photo shoot. Shortly after her college graduation, Bosworth became a member of the
Actors Studio in Manhattan, where she studied under
Lee Strasberg.
Arthur Penn cast her as the lead in her first professional play, a pre-Broadway tryout of
James Leo Herlihy’s
Blue Denim, about the consequences of teenage pregnancy and abortion. Bosworth appeared in several Broadway shows during the 1950s and 1960s, including
Inherit the Wind,
Small War on Murray Hill (directed by
Garson Kanin), and
Jean Kerr's
Mary, Mary (where she understudied from 1961 to 1965 before being cast as the lead for the end of the play's run). She played
Elaine Stritch's sister in the drama
The Sin of Pat Muldoon and a motormouthed teen based on the young
Nora Ephron in
Phoebe Ephron's comedy
Howie. During this period, Bosworth toured in
The Glass Menagerie, playing Laura to
Helen Hayes's Amanda and
Remains to be Seen with Tommy Sands. She worked regularly on popular television series, including
Naked City, Kraft Theater (The Man That Didn't Fly - 1958)
The Secret Storm,
Young Dr. Malone, and
The Patty Duke Show. Bosworth can be seen in the film
Four Boys and a Gun as
James Franciscus's wife and as a disgruntled redhead in the audience of
Bert Stern’s 1960 cult documentary ''
Jazz on a Summer's Day'', about the 1958
Newport Jazz Festival. As an actress, Bosworth is perhaps best known for playing Sister Simone, the young friend of
Audrey Hepburn's character Sister Luke, in ''
The Nun's Story (1959). Directed by Fred Zinnemann, the film was a box-office success and nominated for multiple Academy Awards. In 1958, upon learning she was cast in The Nun's Story'', she learned she was pregnant. She received an abortion at an underground abortionist in Manhattan. Shortly after, she boarded a plane to Rome to meet Fred Zinnemann, where she began to hemorrhage. In Rome, she was sent to a hospital convent where she was to learn about being a nun. The nun discovered she wasn't feeling well due to the abortion and rushed her to the hospital for care. The film was delayed for her recovery.
Journalist In the mid-1960s, Bosworth left acting to become a journalist. She gained notice as a writer with several Broadway-focused features and interviews published in
New York magazine and
The New York Times. In November 1965, she was one of three people on the staff of
Screen Stars magazine. Subsequently she worked at Magazine Management Company with
Mario Puzo, who was then beginning drafts of his novel
The Godfather. From 1969 to 1972, Bosworth was senior editor of ''McCall's
; she served as managing editor of Harper's Bazaar
from 1972 to 1974. Penthouse'' founder
Bob Guccione hired Bosworth as executive editor of the erotic women's magazine
Viva from 1974 to 1976. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bosworth reviewed numerous books for
The New York Times, wrote freelance art pieces for the
Times,
Time Life, and other national magazines, and she contributed a monthly column on arts and entertainment to
Working Woman magazine. Bosworth was an editor at
Mirabella from 1993 to 1995. She was first hired as a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair in 1984 under
Tina Brown’s editorship of the magazine, and she served in this capacity until 1991. She continued to freelance for the magazine until 1997 when she rejoined as contributing editor under
Graydon Carter’s leadership, a position she held to the end of her life. Her profile of
Elia Kazan and his reflections on the Hollywood Blacklist, published in a spring 1999 issue of
Vanity Fair, won Bosworth the
Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York.
Author Bosworth was the author of bestselling biographies on
Montgomery Clift (1978),
Diane Arbus (1984),
Marlon Brando (2000) and
Jane Fonda (2011). Her book,
Montgomery Clift: A Biography explores how the actor's introverted approach to his craft influenced
James Dean and many others. Bosworth, whose father had been Clift's lawyer in the late 1940s, had total access to Clift's family while doing research for the project. She also spoke to many of Clift's close friends and colleagues. Conversations between Bosworth and Brooks Clift appeared in Montgomery Clift's nephew’s documentary
Making Montgomery Clift. Bosworth's biography of
Arbus, a photographer known for her poetic approach to eccentric and abnormal subjects, was a nuanced appraisal of the artist that also investigated the lurid details of her life, culminating in Arbus's 1971 suicide. The book was critically acclaimed.
Andrew Holleran of
New York magazine said it was "a biography that seems to have...more than enough material for several art legends...Patricia Bosworth has created a spellbinding portrait."
Washington Post Book World reviewed it as "fascinating" and "a compelling biography.. as valuable in its insights into the cultural history of the 50s and 60s as its understanding of the special place Arbus occupies in it." However, the book proved to be extremely controversial, and it did not receive formal approval from the Arbus estate. Bosworth's work is still widely considered to be the definitive biography of Arbus; it was the inspiration for
Steven Shainberg’s 2006 film
Fur, which starred
Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus and
Ty Burrell and
Robert Downey Jr. as her husband and lover respectively. According to
Publishers Weekly, Bosworth's biography on
Marlon Brando "offers a vivid reminder of the personal and professional highlights of Brando's life...[It is] an informative biography of Brando that, because of the limited format of the Penguin Lives series, hints at but cannot do justice to the great unruliness of Brando's career and life. She provides a fine, detailed sketch of his New York days when he took acting classes with
Harry Belafonte, Elaine Stritch,
Gene Saks,
Shelley Winters,
Rod Steiger and
Kim Stanley, and presents a great portrait of the craziness on the set of
Last Tango in Paris (co-star
Maria Schneider announced that they got along 'because we're both
bisexual')", but in only 228 pages, the author "can't approach the complexity of her earlier work." Bosworth spent 10 years completing a biography of
Jane Fonda, with whom she had attended sessions at the Actors Studio in the 1950s and 1960s. Fonda granted Bosworth total access; they met frequently throughout the research process for the book. Bosworth's biography
Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman was on the
New York Times bestseller list in 2011 and was named one of
Kirkus Reviews’ Best Six Books of the Year. In addition to her biographies, Bosworth was the author of two memoirs. The first,
Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1997. It tells the story of Bosworth's father Bartley Crum and how his decision to defend the Hollywood Ten at the height of McCarthyism destroyed his career, ultimately leading to his suicide.
Anything was featured on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review, and it was named a Notable Book of the Year in 1997. Following publication of this memoir, Bosworth became an active spokeswoman for suicide survivors and suicide prevention. She received the
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Lifesavers Award in 1998. Her book
The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan was published by HarperCollins in 2017. It examines Bosworth's career as an actress, her early transition into journalism, her first and second marriages, and ways she survived the suicides of both her brother and father. In 2018, Bosworth released
Dreamer with a Thousand Thrills: The Rediscovered Photographs of Tom Palumbo, published by powerHouse Books. The book features Palumbo's fashion photographs and celebrity portraits from the 1950s and 1960s as well as several works that never were published during his lifetime. Bosworth was working on
Protest Song at the time of her death.
Protest Song (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) is about
Paul Robeson's work to create federal anti-lynching legislation, which her father collaborated, and
J. Edgar Hoover's successful campaign to blacklist Robeson. Similar anti-lynching legislation to that proposed by Robeson and Crum was passed by the
U.S. House of Representatives on February 26, 2020. ==Personal life==