Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film

by Clancy Sigal, Julie Taymor, Linda Sunshine

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

Clancy Sigal was the child of a love affair between two idealists. His parents Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal were labor organizers. Jennie, a single mother, raised Clancy on her own. Chicago-born, he was an ordinary street kid until the army sent him overseas. He attended the Nuremberg war crimes trial, and then enrolled at UCLA where his classmates included the later Watergate conspirators, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Blacklisted by a movie studio, and chased by the FBI, he lucked into a job as a Hollywood talent agent for clients like Humphrey Bogart. He slipped into Great Britain as an illegal immigrant and had a years-long affair with the writer Doris Lessing. Intending only a tourist weekend, he stayed in London for 30 years where, as well as broadcasting for BBC, he collaborated with the ‘anti psychiatrist’ R.D. Laing in the care and feeding of “incurable” schizophrenics. Relocating to Hollywood, he co-wrote “Frida” (Kahlo) and the Hemingway love story “In Love and War”.