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Ray Connolly (born 1941 in Lancashire) is an English novelist, screenwriter and journalist.

He is perhaps best known for writing the screenplays for the films That’ll Be the Day and the sequel Stardust and for his biography of John Lennon who he was waiting to interview when he died.

He was born and brought up in Lancashire and attended the London School of Economics where Mick Jagger was a fellow student and he read social anthropology. He then interviewed sixties pop stars for the London Evening Standard.

He has written numerous newspaper articles for the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer.

In addition to his biography 'John Lennon 1940-1980' he wrote the introduction to The Beatles Complete songbook and The Compleat Elvis.

His novels include; Girl Who Came To Stay, Sunday Morning, Shadows On A Wall and most recently Love Out Of Season.

He also wrote and directed the feature length documentary entitled James Dean: The First American Teenager and his television scripts have included Lytton's Diary and Perfect Scoundrels.

On the 30th anniversary of the death of his idol James Dean, Connolly took part in a BBC Radio 2 tribute to Dean. In the documentary, written and presented by Terence Pettigrew, he appeared with Carroll Baker, the Baby Doll actress who had known Dean at the Actors Studio in New York during the early 1950s and co-starred with him in Giant just before Dean's death. Also taking part was another Dean fan, singer/actor Adam Faith, who had co-starred with David Essex in That'll Be The Day The programme was produced by Harry Thompson, who later found fame as the originator and long-time producer of BBC TV's award-winning Have I Got News For You

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ray Connolly", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0