One of the grand old liberal belletrists, this essayist and novelist also has a knack for writing best sellers and scripts, including ones for such film classics as "Ben-Hur" (1959), "Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959), and the decidedly less-than-classic "Is Paris Burning?" (1966). His 1968 fictional spoof of Hollywood "Myra Breckinridge" became a notorious 1970 film. Equally adept as a writer of popular historical biographies, campy melodramas and urbane political commentary (a proclivity that led to endless brouhahas with his "bete noir" Norman Mailer), Gore Vidal even took a few jabs at politics, running unsuccessfully, for Congress in New York in 1960 and Senate in California in 1982.

He scripted "Dress Grey" (1986) and the 1989 TNT miniseries "Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid" for TV, the latter adapted from his best-selling novel. Vidal has also tried acting, playing himself in Federico "Fellini's Roma" (1972), and more recently, appearing in "Bob Roberts" (1992) and "With Honors" (1994), playing sympathetic patrician characters--a politician and a professor respectively.