Nora Clemens Sayre (September 20, 1932 – August 8, 2001) was an American film critic and essayist. She was a reviewer of films for The New York Times in the 1970s, and, from 1981, a writing teacher for many years at Columbia University.[1] She specialized in the Cold War and authored books such as Running Time: Films of the Cold War (1982) in which she examined Hollywood movie-making in the 1950s.[2]
She attended Friends Seminary,[5] and was a graduate of Radcliffe College.[6] After graduation, she spent five years in England; and whenever she felt homesick she would pay a call on screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, a friend of the family who had scripted some of Hollywood’s most celebrated films.[7]
A mentor was the English critic and book reviewer John Davenport; he had become acquainted with the Sayre family while working as a screenwriter at MGM, when she was a child, and would later visit the adult Sayre with suggestions of things she should read and about which she should write. Sayre noted "after a dose of Davenport, one was all the more responsive to words—either to classical or contemporary prose, or to the random eloquence of the street... his conversation made one immediately want to go home and write. Hence he served as an igniter: He gave one momentum."[8]
She married the economist Robert Neild in 1957 but the marriage was dissolved four years later.[1] She died in 2001, at the age of 68, in New York City.
Legacy
The Nora Sayre Endowed Residency for Nonfiction was created at Yaddo, an artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York, to support her literary legacy.[9]
