NEW YORK, NY.- Anne Edwards, a prodigious and peripatetic author who published bestselling books about actresses Vivien Leigh and Katharine Hepburn as well as 14 other celebrity biographies, eight novels, three children’s books, two memoirs and one autobiography, died Jan. 20 in Beverly Hills, California. She was 96.

Her daughter, Catherine Edwards Sadler, said she died of lung cancer at a senior living facility.

A child performer on radio and the stage, Edwards sold her first screenplay in 1949, when she was 22 (the movie “Quantez,” a Western starring Fred MacMurray, was released in 1957); her first novel (the mystery “The Survivors”) in 1968; and her first biography (of Judy Garland) in 1975. Her “Vivien Leigh: A Biography” (1977) spent 19 weeks on The New York Times’ hardcover bestseller list.

Reviewing that book for the Times, Richard R. Lingeman wrote that Edwards “has, with tact, sympathy and intelligence, given us an admirable portrait of Vivien Leigh that is a portrait of an admirable lady.”

Edwards said that she chose the subjects of her biographies — which also included Sonya Tolstoy, the wife of Leo Tolstoy — for the themes she believed they personified.

“Vivien, Judy and Sonya were vastly interesting people and symbolic of certain things,” she told Publishers Weekly. “Judy, the exploitation of a woman; Vivien, somebody who suffered from manic depression; Sonya, an intelligent woman subjugated to a man who used her, drained her, made a villain of her.”

Edwards also wrote biographies of, among others, Maria Callas, Ronald Reagan, Barbra Streisand and Diana, Princess of Wales. Her screenwriting credits include the British thriller “A Question of Adultery” (1958), starring Julie London, which was released in the United States as “The Case of Mrs. Loring,” and, with Sidney Buchman, and early and unused drafts of the screenplay for “Funny Girl” (1968).

Kirkus Reviews proclaimed her “the queen of biography.”

Her novels included “Haunted Summer” (1974), about author Mary Shelley and poet Lord Byron, which was adapted into a film in 1988.

Shortly after her biography of Vivien Leigh was published, Edwards was hired by the Zanuck-Brown Co. to write a story that could be adapted as a film sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” in which Leigh had memorably played Scarlett O’Hara. Because of a conflict with the estate of the novel’s author, Margaret Mitchell, the sequel was completed but never published and the movie was never made.

Anne Louise Josephson was born Aug. 20, 1927, in Port Chester, New York, just north of New York City. Her father, Milton, was a traveling clothes salesperson. Her mother, Marian (Fish) Josephson, managed the home.

The family moved to California in the late 1930s at the invitation of an uncle, Dave Chasen, a comedian whose West Hollywood restaurant, Chasen’s, which he opened in 1936, had become a magnet for movie stars.

She appeared onstage in children’s acting, singing and dancing ensembles and tap-danced on radio. But, she wrote in her autobiography, “Leaving Home” (2012), “My dream was never to be a star (or even a supporting player) but to write.” After appearing with the Meglin Kiddies, she joined the rival Gus Edwards troupe. By the time she graduated from high school, she had adopted Edwards as her surname.

Edwards studied writing at the University of California, Los Angeles (where she later taught), from 1945-46 while working in a junior writers’ program for MGM. She also studied at Southern Methodist University in Dallas from 1947-48.

After being bedridden with polio for a year, she gravitated overseas, living in expatriate communities in Britain, Switzerland and France from the mid-1950s until 1973. When she returned to the United States, she lived in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York before returning to Beverly Hills.

In 1947, she married Harvey E. Wishner, whose uncle, writer and director Robert Rossen, helped introduce her to Hollywood screenwriting. That marriage ended in divorce, as did her second marriage, to producer Leon Becker. In addition to her daughter, from her first marriage, she is survived by a son, Michael Edwards, also from that marriage; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her third husband, author and songwriter Stephen Citron, whom she married in 1980, died in 2013.

Edwards, who was president of the Authors Guild in 1981, lamented the dearth of women working in creative roles in Hollywood when she was starting out. Mostly, she told Film International in 2013, “women were either actresses or they were script girls, secretaries or in the wardrobe department. There were a few women writers employed at studios.”

She said that she wrote “Leaving Home” in part to expose the pressures that the Red Scare of the 1950s had placed on Hollywood professionals who had been blacklisted, or feared they would be, to move to Europe. (Jonathan Yardley, in reviewing the book in The Washington Post, took her to task for claiming “membership in a persecuted group to which she did not belong,” which he called “distasteful at best, dishonest at worst.”)

Writing about her life wasn’t difficult, Edwards said. “There comes a time, and I am at that age, when you have to take your life in your arms and hold it to you to keep it breathing,” she said in 2013. “It was a necessity.

“Writing is a lifeline to me,” she added. “I need it to breathe.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.