Gavin Lambert (23 July 1924 – 17 July 2005) was a British-born screenwriter, novelist and biographer who lived for part of his life in Hollywood. His writing was mainly fiction and nonfiction about the film industry.
Lambert was educated at Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where one of his professors was C. S. Lewis. At Oxford, he befriended Penelope Houston and filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, and they founded a short-lived but influential journal, Sequence, which was originally edited by Houston. The magazine, which lasted for only 15 issues, moved to London after the fifth issue, and Lambert and Anderson took over as co-editors. Lambert eventually left Oxford without obtaining a degree. From 1949 to 1956 he edited the journal Sight and Sound, again with Anderson as a regular contributor. At about the same time Lambert was deeply involved in Britain's Free Cinema movement which called for more social realism in contemporary movies. He also wrote film criticism for The Sunday Times and The Guardian. In late 1955, he moved to Hollywood, California, to work as a personal assistant to director Nicholas Ray and worked on the script (uncredited) for Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956). Later, he co-wrote the screenplay for Ray's film Bitter Victory (1957). According to the critic David Robinson, Lambert was Ray's lover for a time.