Cari Beauchamp is dead: Hollywood writer and TCM regular was 74

Cari Beauchamp, the widely respected historian and author of several books about Hollywood who appeared regularly on Turner Classic Movies programs and at the network’s annual TCM Classic Film Festival, has died. She was 74.

TCM installed a tribute to Beauchamp on his Twitter/X page on Friday.

“We are saddened by the loss of one of our TCM families, pioneering historian Cari Beauchamp,” the network wrote today. Without their invaluable work, many female creations would have been lost to history. We are grateful for their many contributions to our network over the years.”

Beauchamp’s work focused on the role of women in Hollywood, including in her books Without lying down: Frances Marion and The Powerful Women of Early Hollywood And Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from the Studios of the 1920s. She also wrote Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Yearsprocess Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction from the Maker of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and written together Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival.

She was nominated for a WGA Award in 2001 for co-writing the documentary version of ” Without lying down, which first appeared on TCM. She wrote the 2003 documentary Independent Lens The day my God died which exposed child sex trafficking in India. The documentary received an Emmy nomination for Best Documentary.

She has also often appeared as a talking head in documentaries about Hollywood, including TCM Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood And The film history. She also worked on the 2018 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché.

Beauchamp, who earlier in her career served as political campaign manager and press secretary for California Governor Jerry Brown, became an important voice on Hollywood. According to her biography, she was twice named a film scholar at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was a visiting scholar at the Mary Pickford Foundation.

“We regret paying our respects to Cari Beauchamp, who left her mark on the film industry with her dedication to writing about powerful women in film,” said the latter foundation. Placed Today. “We are grateful to have known Cari. She made an invaluable contribution to the legacy of Mary Pickford and to so many female film pioneers.”

Popular on the speaking circuit, Beauchamp has given talks at AMPAS, the British Film Institute, the Edinburgh Film Festival, Cannes, the Women’s Museum of Art in Washington DC and elsewhere. She was a frequent speaker and presenter at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.

As a writer, her name has appeared in publications such as Deadline’s sister sites diversity And The Hollywood ReporterThe Los Angeles TimesThe New York Times And Vanity Fair.