Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism. He lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1961 until his death.
James was famous for his dry and cheeky wit. He described actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his bodybuilding days, as looking like “a brown condom full of walnuts”. He described the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland as having “Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into the white cliffs of Dover.” Another of his famous remarks was “Whoever called snooker ‘chess with balls’ was rude but right.”
In 1968, at Cambridge, James married Prudence A. “Prue” Shaw, an emeritus reader in Italian studies at University College London and the author of Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. James and Shaw had two daughters. Following news reports in April 2012 that model Leanne Edelsten admitted to an eight-year affair with James beginning in 2004, Shaw threw her husband out of the family home.
For much of his early life, James was a heavy drinker and smoker. In April 2011, after media speculation that he had suffered kidney failure, James confirmed that he was suffering from B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia and had been in treatment for 15 months at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. He later said that he was also diagnosed with emphysema and kidney failure in early 2010.
Until June 2017, he wrote a weekly column for The Guardian entitled “Reports of My Death…”. Clive James died on 24 November 2019 at age 90 in Cambridge, England.
Link to Wikipedia biography