David Bret (born 8 November 1954) is a British author of show business biographies. He chiefly writes on the private life of film stars and singers.
Life
Born in Paris, France, in 1954, Bret was adopted by an English couple and raised in Wath-on-Dearne, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He worked for several years in the retail trade, then as an administrator with the NHS, and as a singer in working men's clubs. He then began writing the biographies for which he is best known. He married Jeanne Elliss in October 1972, and has a son, Marleau, born in October 1973. He lives in West Yorkshire, England.
Biographies
Bret has written a number of biographies for several publishers. Many of these have focused on the private or intimate lives of entertainment celebrities. Lewis Jones, in the Telegraph wrote that Bret "for decades has churned out sensationalist biographies of such figures as Diana Dors, Barbra Streisand and Tallulah Bankhead."
Clark Gable
In Clark Gable: Tormented Star Bret deals at length with Gable's sex life and particularly his sex with other men. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Ada Calhoun wrote "How does Bret, the author of numerous celebrity biographies, know so much about Hollywood stars’ sex lives? Judging by this new book's convoluted wording, he really doesn't." She also wrote: "For all its smut, the book is painfully unsexy. ... And yet Bret undermines his own arguments. ... 'Clark Gable' teems with innuendo and exclamation points, but still presents a thoroughly joyless view of old Hollywood."
George Formby
In George Formby: A Troubled Genius Bret explores the "innocent innuendo" of a once hugely popular music-hall performer. Jonathan Glancey writing for The Guardian described it as "David Bret's thoughtful book about the life and unhappiness of an entertainer who would surely never make it anywhere near the top now."
Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo: Divine Star was criticized by Lewis Jones, who wrote: "There is little new to say about Garbo’s life, and the best one can expect of a retelling is insight, wit and a shapely narrative, none of which is provided by Divine Star." Lewis complains that:
Bret makes many errors. Of Garbo’s visit to New York in 1925, for example, he notes that she met Humphrey Bogart, one of "the biggest stars of the day", when he made his name with The Petrified Forest in 1936. He thinks that the Académie française is a drama school. And so on. He also writes incredibly badly, ..."
Christopher Fowler was more positive about Divine Star. In The Independent he wrote:
Garbo biographies are virtually an industry in themselves. But David Bret is after something more. Digging into previously unsourced material and collating fresh stories from friends and fellow studio employees, he tries to close the two major gaps in his subject's life.
Fowler concludes by saying: "Bret's biography is rightly partisan and fully prepared to name enemies, which makes it a bracingly pleasurable read in these anodyne times."
Joan Crawford
Writing in The Washington Post, Carolyn See has a very negative view of Brent's biography of Joan Crawford, calling it "one of the ickiest film biographies I've ever read."
See writes: But suppose you gorged on old movie magazines and ghostwritten gobbledygook and pieces of weird gossip you overheard and then decided to rewrite what has been written and rewritten again for 80 years or so, and you picked as your subject Joan Crawford, "gay icon par excellence"? You'd produce something like David Bret's new biography.
Hollywood was not as it seemed -- sexually. That's the author's main theme here. (The "Hollywood Martyr" business of the subtitle is purely an afterthought.) Couples lived in "lavender" or "twilight-tandem" marriages.