Roddy McDowall was a child star, a Planet of the Apes icon, a photographer, a director, and Elizabeth Taylor’s best friend for life — and he was gay in a Hollywood that gave him no safe way to say so. In his new biography, Roddy McDowall: An Actor’s Life, author Samuel Garza Bernstein went through 520 boxes of letters at Boston University and found something surprising: inside Roddy’s own circle — agents, executives, family, friends — his relationships were completely, casually normal. He stayed discreet because he had to. He never pretended to be straight, because he chose not to. We sat down with Samuel to talk about the archive, Montgomery Clift, Joan Crawford, and why keeping our own history is community work nobody can defund.
He Never Pretended. That’s the line that stayed with me after sitting down with author, screenwriter, playwright and producer Samuel Garza Bernstein to talk about his new book, Roddy McDowall: An Actor’s Life — From “How Green Was My Valley” to “Lassie” to “Planet of the Apes.”
Most of us know Roddy McDowall’s face before we know his story. The child star of How Green Was My Valley and Lassie Come Home. Cornelius under the makeup in Planet of the Apes. Octavian in Cleopatra. The neighbor in Fright Night, the steward in The Poseidon Adventure. Sixty years of work. And underneath all of it — a gay man who navigated the studio system on his own terms, at a time when the system offered no terms at all.
The first biography, and a very deep paper trail
This is the first biography ever published about McDowall (1928–1998), which is remarkable on its own for someone who worked that long and knew that many people. Bernstein had an advantage most Hollywood biographers only dream about: Roddy saved everything. He left roughly 520 boxes of material to Boston University, an archive that wasn’t unsealed until 2020.
“I was able to sift through thousands of letters from people like Noël Coward and Richard Burton and John Gielgud,” Bernstein told us. “It’s really been an amazing process — and I have to say, don’t tell my husband, but I pretty much fell in love with Roddy McDowall in this process.”
Anyone who has spent a year inside someone else’s correspondence knows exactly what he means.
The discovery: normalization, decades before anyone called it that
Here’s the part of our conversation that genuinely surprised me.
McDowall was never publicly out — the era simply didn’t allow it. But he never played the other game either. He didn’t manufacture girlfriends. He didn’t pretend. And inside his actual circle, Bernstein found something the history books tend to leave out.
“The one great thing that I discovered in the archives was the total normalization of his relationships within his circle,” he said. “Whether you’re talking about the business people, agents, network executives, TV executives, film people, or his family and friends — everyone knew who his partners were.”
The letters read like letters between friends anywhere: Give my love to John. John sent me the funniest card the other day. Oh, you two are so lucky to be together. No coded language. No one pretending the partner was an assistant or a roommate.
Bernstein was careful with the word. “I use the word ‘normal’ in quotes — I don’t mean to imply my own idea of what is normal, but just the idea that among family and friends, people know about it and it’s okay.”
He has a point of comparison, too. His earlier biography of Cesar Romero found the opposite: a gay star whose relationships never got that acceptance, even privately. Same town, same decades, very different lived experience. That contrast is the real value of doing this kind of history properly — it breaks the flat, single-story version of the closet we’ve inherited.
A life that didn’t stop at acting
The book follows McDowall from wartime child stardom in England and Hollywood, through a bumpy adolescence and a move to New York for theater and live anthology television, into the long adult career that followed. Along the way: a lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Taylor, a first love with Montgomery Clift, and a body of work that kept reinventing itself.
And then there’s everything he did when the cameras weren’t rolling. He was a serious photographer and a director. He was deeply involved with the Motion Picture & Television Fund and the country home where older actors go to live. He was one of the great advocates for film preservation at a moment when nobody else was paying attention.
“He left behind a great legacy of not just the movies that he made, but also the good works that he did,” Bernstein said.
The book has landed with people who actually knew him. Carol Burnett read it and called it “a beautiful tribute to a very special man… You will get to know a man who was as kind as he was gifted.”
Why this story still lands in 2026
We talk a lot in LGBTQ+ marketing about authenticity, and the word has been worn down to almost nothing. Roddy McDowall is a useful reminder of what it looked like before it was a brand strategy.
He didn’t have a platform. He didn’t have a coming-out interview or a rainbow logo behind him. What he had was a refusal — a quiet, consistent decision not to lie about who he was, in an industry that would have preferred he did. He stayed discreet because he had to, and he stayed honest because he chose to.
Stories like this one matter now for a practical reason as well. When corporate support for our community gets shaky, our own history is the thing nobody can pull funding from. Books, archives, biographies, film preservation — the work of keeping the record — is community infrastructure. Roddy understood that instinctively. He saved the letters.
What’s next for Samuel Garza Bernstein
Bernstein is a 30-year veteran of Hollywood, and he isn’t slowing down. He’s currently finishing scripts for the fourth season of After Forever, the LGBTQ+ series on Amazon he executive produces alongside Kevin Spirtas and Chris Rowe — ten more episodes, with a major move for the lead characters away from New York City. (He wouldn’t tell us where.)
He has two more books in the pipeline that he’s not ready to announce, plus private story-development work with clients, which he described as the creative reset that keeps everything else moving. “It sort of takes me out of my own creative work, and then I come with fresh eyes to whatever the problem is at hand for myself.”
He’s also the author of a book on Joan Crawford that he frames as a corrective — a look at her work and cultural impact rather than the Mommie Dearest caricature. “We’re talking about a woman who was number one at the box office in 1930… and yet we still know who this person is,” he said. “She was enormously impactful on our ideas about what an American woman is, what she should be, what she should strive to be.”
There’s a through-line in all of it, and he named it himself at the end of our conversation: “The people that I write about, the things that I write about — they’re connected to my own life. They’re connected to my LGBTQI+ identity. They’re connected to things that I believe about the world.”
Watch the interview & get the book
Our full conversation with Samuel Garza Bernstein is up now on the Pink Media / #ILoveGay YouTube channel. Watch it here.
Roddy McDowall: An Actor’s Life is out now from Citadel, in hardcover, ebook and audio, and available wherever you buy books. You can find Samuel at samuelgarzabernstein.com — and as he put it, searching his name pretty much gets you everything.
