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Axel Madsen, dead at 76, was a prolific writer best known for chronicling the lives of Hollywood stars, fashion designers and business titans.
A Hollywood film reporter in the 1960s and '70s, Madsen authored more than a dozen biographies. He started with a short work on director Billy Wilder in 1968, then moved on to directors William Wyler and John Huston and fashion pioneers Yves St Laurent and Coco Chanel.
Among his other subjects were Barbara Stanwyck, French thinkers Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and business leaders John Jacob Astor and William C. Durant.
His most popular works, however, were salacious Hollywood fare such as Gloria and Joe: The Star-Crossed Love Affair of Gloria Swanson and Joe Kennedy in 1988 and The Sewing Circle: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women in 1995.
Born in 1930 in Copenhagen to a Danish father and French mother, he grew up in Paris and worked for the New York Herald Tribune in the early 1950s.
