Jill Schary Robinson, a memoirist, novelist and mother of UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer, has died at 88.
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Robinson died Saturday at her home in Beverly Hills, CA, according to a statement from her family. A cause of death was not specified.
Born in 1936 in Los Angeles, Robinson was the daughter of two artists. Her father, Oscar and Tony winner Isadore “Dore” Schary, was head of production at MGM from 1948-1956. Her mother was painter Miriam Svet.
After starting as a copywriter for Foote, Cone & Belding, Robinson trained with iconic Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and embarked on a career in journalism. She wrote about women’s issues for Cosmopolitan , covered political trials for the Soho Weekly News , and appeared on Los Angeles radio stations KLAC and KPFK.
Robinson’s 1963 memoir, With a Cast of Thousands , chronicled her experiences growing up in Hollywood during the Golden Age. It was followed by Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Pass the Moon . Her next memoir, Bed/Time/Story , won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and was the basis of the television movie A Cry for Love . In its review of the movie, the New York Times wrote of the author, “No one has written better than she of the bewitching and distorting power the dream factory can have over our lives.”
In 1978, Robinson branched into fiction with the novel Perdido , followed by Dr. Rocksinger and the Age of Longing and Follow Me Through Paris . John Lahr, a critic at The New Yorker , called her “the Whitman of Sunset Boulevard” and Vanity Fair’s Dominic Dunne praised her “knack for the beautifully constructed sentence.”
Robinson also continued her journalism career, reviewing books and writing articles for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and American and French Vogue . She relocated to London in the ‘80s and continued her journalism career, writing a series of columns on being an American in Britain for London’s The Daily Telegraph . She interviewed everyone from Lily Tomlin to Barbara Walters and her Vanity Fair story on Roman Polanski was included in George Plimpton’s book The Best American Movie Writing for 1998.
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Other books included Star Country and Past Forgetting , which Vanity Fair described as “the astounding chronicle of her journey to recover her memory.” In 2002, she co-wrote Falling in Love When You Thought You Were Through: A Love Story with her husband, Stuart Shaw.
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In 2005, Robinson was given a lifetime grant to develop the non-profit Wimpole Street Writers, a community for dedicated writers to exchange ideas, which she founded in London on Wimpole Street and continued when she moved back to Los Angeles. Through this program, she ran workshops for the Veteran’s Administration and hosted dinners for young writers with the only rule being “no pages, no dinner.” She was also a devoted and longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In 2009, Robinson also played an instrumental role in efforts to save the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Hollywood. An anthology of her works, Go Find Out , was published in 2021 and she published her final novel, Come Home Canyon , in 2023 at age 87.
Robinson was married three times, to Jon Zimmer, Jeremiah Robinson, and Stuart Shaw. She is survived by her children, Jeremy Zimmer and Johanna Simmel, as well as eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Motion Picture and Television Fund in Robinson’s name.
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