[1] Gilliatt began her work as a film and theater critic with London's The Observer, where she wrote numerous reviews between 1961 and 1967.
In 1967, she began a column in The New Yorker, in which she alternated for six-month intervals with Pauline Kael as that publication's chief film critic.
Gilliatt's criticism tended to focus on visual metaphors and imagery, describing scenes from films in detail in her characteristically grandiose style.
[4] Some of her film (and theater) writing was first collected in Unholy Fools: Wits, Comics, Disturbers of the Peace: Film & Theater (1973), which reprints articles first published in The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar / Queen / Harper's & Queen, The New Yorker, The Observer, The Spectator, and Vogue.
In addition to her criticism and non-fiction books, Gilliatt wrote short stories, novels, teleplays, and one screenplay.
[1] Gilliatt wrote several novels, including One by One (1965), A State of Change (1967), The Cutting Edge (1978), Mortal Matters (1983), and A Woman of Singular Occupation (1988).
Gilliatt had an upper-middle class upbringing in Northumberland, where her father (having left his legal practice) was director of the BBC in the north east from 1938 to 1941, and she retained a lifelong love of the Roman Wall country.
[7] Gilliatt was then married to playwright John Osborne from 1963 to 1968, living at 31 Chester Square in central London in a house designed by architect Sir Hugh Casson.