Gore Vidal: not just about the books

Suddenly, Last Summer Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view Gore Vidal followed in the footsteps of William Faulkner and F Scott Fitzgerald when he took the Hollywood shilling and signed on as a screenwriter for MGM. He scored an early success with his pungent adaptation of Tennessee Williams 's Suddenly, Last Summer , starring Elizabeth Taylor , Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift. Williams, though, took all the credit. Ben-Hur Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view Just how much involvement did Vidal have in Ben-Hur , William Wyler's Oscar-winning chariot opera from 1959? The writer served as a script doctor and later claimed to have introduced a simmering gay subtext to the rivalry between Ben-Hur ( Charlton Heston ) and Messala (Stephen Boyd). He was warned not to tell Heston, in case the straight-arrow actor "freaked out". Roma Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view Vidal stepped in front of the camera to play himself in Federico Fellini 's whirling, chaotic, semi-autobiographical saga . The shoot, he later recalled, was pure pandemonium. "I was in the middle of take five when all hell seemed to break loose behind us," he said. "I looked around and there were four of the most beautiful white horses drawing an empty cart. 'Freddie,' I said, 'what the hell is that?' 'I don't know, Gordino. It looks nice. Don't you think it looks nice?'." Caligula Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view Directed by Tinto Brass , scripted by Vidal and co-founded by Penthouse magazine, Caligula wallowed, generally without clothes, in the scurrilous life and times of the debauched Roman emperor. The critic Roger Ebert dismissed it as "sickening, utterly worthless, shameless trash". Vidal, for his part, disowned it. Bob Roberts Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view Vidal took his biggest screen role playing foil to Tim Robbins in this tub-thumping liberal satire from 1992 . He plays the veteran Democrat senator Brickley Paiste, targeted by the media, dogged by a scandal and doomed to slide to defeat in his race against a telegenic, rightwing folk singer. Igby Goes Down Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view One assumes that family ties were instrumental in securing Gore Vidal's patrician cameo as a Catholic priest in Igby Goes Down . Burr Steers's waspish New York drama charts the fall from grace of a Holden Caulfield-esque teen and starred Kieran Culkin, Claire Danes , Susan Sarandon and Jeff Goldblum . Steers, it should be noted, was Vidal's nephew. The US vs John Lennon Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view Gore Vidal made one of his last big-screen appearances in The US vs John Lennon , an acclaimed documentary charting the Nixon administration's efforts to have the former Beatle discredited and deported. Nudging into his 80s, the writer remains full of vim and vigour, tossing barbed statements at the camera and daring us to disagree. Lennon , he says, "represented life, which is admirable, and Mr Nixon and Mr Bush represent death - and that is a bad thing".