Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Looking for Mr. Goodbar ( 1977 ) R | A dedicated schoolteacher spends her nights cruising bars, looking for abusive men with whom she can engage in progressively violent sexual encounters. Director: Judith Rossner (based on the novel by), Richard Brooks (written for the screen by) Stars: a list of 35 titles created 24 Oct 2011 a list of 45 titles created 08 May 2013 a list of 27 titles created 16 Mar 2015 a list of 33 titles created 7 months ago a list of 30 titles created 3 months ago Title: Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) 6.7/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin.

Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 1 win & 3 nominations. See more awards » Photos A Los Angeles male escort, who mostly caters to an older female clientèle, is accused of a murder which he did not commit. Director: Paul Schrader Three sisters with quite different personalities and lives reunite when the youngest of them, Babe, has just shot her husband. The oldest sister, Lenny, takes care of their grandfather and ... See full summary » Director: Bruce Beresford 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 5.6/10 X Eddie, a Chicago cop on the edge, goes undercover as hitman. A man and a mysterious woman want him to kill a merciless New Orleans criminal kingpin. The sting goes sour and Eddie's partner is killed. All Eddie wants now is revenge. Director: Richard Pearce Elliott Gould and Diane Keaton take out a lease on love with an option to buy in this glossy romantic comedy costarring Paul Sorvino, Victoria Principal and Candy Clark. Unhappily divorced ... See full summary » Director: Norman Panama During WWII, the United States set up army bases in Great Britain as part of the war effort.

Against their proper sensibilities, many of the Brits don't much like the brash Yanks, ... See full summary » Director: John Schlesinger A young man joins the Marines during WWII but fails to meet qualifications so is washed out and sent home in a light blue uniform which apparently indicates his status. He meets a real war ... See full summary » Director: John D. Hancock Edit Storyline Theresa is a successful teacher of deaf children during the day but after a short unhappy affair starts to spend her nights cruising bars. Her craving first for sex but later also for drugs leads into increasingly demeaning and dangerous situations completely at odds with her daytime commitment to her children. Written by Jeremy Perkins {J-26} 13 March 1978 (Sweden) See more » Also Known As: Buscando a Mr. Goodbar See more » Filming Locations: Black and White (still photograph montages)| Color (Metrocolor) Aspect Ratio: Did You Know? Trivia Actress Diane Keaton 's contract explicitly prohibited the manufacture of any production photograph stills from any "sexually suggestive" frames from the film's print.

See more » Goofs In the book, Theresa's sister Katherine goes to Puerto Rico to procure an abortion during a scene that takes place in the mid-1960s. In the movie, the timeline is changed so that this scene is set in 1975, two years after abortion was legalized by the Roe v. Wade ruling, making the trip to Puerto Rico unnecessary. See more » Quotes Cautionary tale holds up over time 31 March 2001 | by mollylane (Seattle, washington) – See all my reviews Few viewers can deny the impact of this film  on the '77 crowd and generations afterwards. As a curious 8-year-old up late watching HBO, I never forgot the story or the lesson. Based on a true story, Richard Brooks astutely translated Judith Rossner's best-selling novel to screen, choosing a luminous Diane Keaton, hot off `Annie Hall' and `The Godfather' to play Theresa Dunn, an up-and-coming Richard Gere, a quirky Tuesday Weld , and amazing Richard Kiley as Dunn, the overbearing Irish-Catholic father. The misogynistic Richard Atherton and an ominous Tom Berenger rounds out the solid cast.

Neither traditionally beautiful like her stewardess sister, Katherine or a baby factory like her other sister living at home with her, Theresa is the odd one out, the sister who is searching for approval from a father who barely acknowledges her existence. Childhood traumas mold her and make the fact that Theresa allows herself to be strong and fallible all the more powerful and endearing. Tired of her father's unyielding rule, Theresa moves into the apartment building owned by Katherine's next attempt at a husband. As the women's freedom movement is underway, Theresa is caught in the position of questioning the traditional roles for women, roles against a new woman in control of her body and her sexuality. By day she teaches at a school for the deaf. By night her nightly jaunts into New York's seamier nightlife scene, expose the dichotomy of being a professional woman by day who must maintain credibility and responsibility, especially with young children while trying to be sexually active, experimental and suffering the stigma attached to both  as whore and as a free woman  wanting purely physical experiences much the same as men, yet realizing the label is different. Throughout this film, Brooks explores Theresa's perpetual search for acceptance by men but a need to maintain her own identity.

From a failed affair with a Prof. she was a TA to, to her fling with Tony, a local hustler, Theresa is perpetually in question of her sexuality and her allure for men, making poor choices in her partners only to endure their violence and possessiveness - much like her father. That she meets up with a homicidal drifter the New Year's Eve night she has decided to quit drugs and cruising, is the irony of her self-discovery. The only positive male in her life appears to be is LaVar Burton's character, Cap Jackson, the sullen brother of one of Theresa's students. He is the only male presence in the movie that is not malevolent or trying to extract something from Theresa and during her altercation with Tony at the school, he is the only person to defend and protect her. While the scare of AIDS stole later generations' promiscuity, this tale still resonates for viewers, especially for women on their own, looking for intimacy yet craving isolation. While the ending tends to drag with one too many drug scenes the movie still packs a wallop for a finale. 28 of 33 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Home LOOKING FOR MR.

GOODBAR By Judith Rossner. udith Rossner has impeccable literary credentials. Her first three novels were beautifully reviewed and didn't sell. "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" is so good a read, so stunningly commercial as a novel, that it runs the risk of being consigned to artistic oblivion. That would be a mistake. The sureness of Judith Rossner's writing and her almost flawless sense of timing create a complex and chilling portrait of a woman's descent into hell that gives this book considerable literary merit. "Mr. Goodbar" is based loosely on the actual case of a Roseann Quinn, a quite, rigidly brought-up, Catholic schoolteacher, who was wholly unremarkable except that she sought out her sexual partners in New York singles bars. The last of them bashed in her skull on New Year's Day, 1973.

The question the author asks, as she tours the life of Theresa Dunn, the Roseann Quinn-like character of the book is, "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" She follows Theresa through a miserable ugly-duckling-with-a-swan-for-a-sister childhood, a childhood also clouded with a crippling illness that leaves deep emotion and physical scars. She meticulously explores and examines an adulthood of disastrous love affairs. And the answer that emerges--"Just unlucky, I guess"--speaks to a larger question: how much control do women have over their own lives? Certainly, Theresa is unlucky. Her first lover, a professor who quotes Ecclesiastes to her as he ditches her after four incredibly exploitative years, is one of the best-drawn bastards of modern fiction. Having looked passively to a man and entirely past herself to make herself whole, the message Theresa takes away from the affair is that she's not good enough to hold a man. Her life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; she involves herself with a series of men--married, newly divorced--whose rejection is almost guaranteed.

Finally, she is left looking for a life in which no rejection is possible; all she asks of men is that they want to use her body. Her life-style--going to bars, picking up men and bringing them home to sleep with--has the appearance of aggressiveness and the illusion of control. After all, she is the one who decides whom she'll sleep with, isn't she? She is in charge of her emotions, isn't she? But the author makes it clear that Theresa's life is one of consummate passivity and emotional impotence. Theresa's illusory control is threatened when a decent and sensitive man falls in love with her. James's love terrifies her; she sees returning it and committing herself to him as an abdication of her control, when what it really is, the author implies, is a chance for her to achieve control. But any action is beyond Theresa. Finally, temporarily estranged from James, Theresa goes to a bar and picks up her last man. Committing the ultimate passive act, she gets herself killed.

What is ironic and instructive is that at her most passive--dead--she makes the most happen: the death of her murderer; the disgrace of her name; the misery of her family and of James. Passivity is a theme that has been dealt with much of late. Sumner Locke Elliot's brilliant novel, "Going," describes a Nixon-like United States where nobody acts until it's too late, and they're all dead. Erica Jong explored that emotional disease in women whose pathology is not only similar to cancer's but whose morbidity is greater. Passivity may kill more slowly, but it is more efficient; it kills a whole lot more people in the end. Judith Rossner gives passivity an added dimension of horror. She anatomizes its growth, step by chilling step, showing how it can be as effective a means of suicide as poison or a gun. It is a measure of "Mr. Goodbar's" richness and complexity that it can be read on many levels. Catholics might view it as a passion play; feminists might consider Theresa a political victim of rape. Men may focus on the book's sexuality.

(Men have tended to overreact to the wider use of sex in recent writing by women, but I don't think there's all that much behind this new freedom: sex is simply another area of experience for the woman novelist to mine in the same sense that the freedom to write about being Jewish say, is for Jewish writers.) What adds to my view of "Mr. Goodbar" as an exploration of passivity is the angry and frustrated reaction of a number of women who have read the book. "Mr. Goodbar" may, for them, have driven the final stake through the heart of the axiom that passive is a good way to be if you're a woman. Another thing that has to go is the assumption that any book written by a woman about a woman who even vaguely resembles herself fits neatly into a genre labeled "women's fiction." You can bet that the current and upcoming novels by middle-aged men--Bellow, Heller, Roth, Styron--won't be labeled "male menopausal fiction." Nor should "Mr. Goodbar" be shunted off into the genre of "commercial fiction," a convenience by which reviewers are able to measure literary merit simply as inversely proportionate to the number of people who buy a book.

If there is a genre into which "Mr. Goodbar" falls, it is a genre of uncommonly well-written and well-constructed fiction, easily accessible, but full of insight and intelligence and illumination. It is a noble genre. And, Rossner's heroine, Theresa Dunn, in this tough and powerfully controlled novel, takes her place beside Henry James's Isabel Archer and Scott Fitzgerald's Nicole Diver as another victim of the American Dream, a woman who never roused herself enough to wake up from the nightmare. Carol Eisen Rinzler is an editor and writer. The real-life murder behind Looking For Mr. Goodbar - Jan 01, 1973 - HISTORY.com The real-life murder behind Looking For Mr. Goodbar Share this: The real-life murder behind Looking For Mr. Goodbar Author The real-life murder behind Looking For Mr. Goodbar URL Publisher A+E Networks Roseann Quinn, a 27-year-old New Yorker, visits Tweed’s Bar on the Upper West Side and is picked up by her soon-to-be killer. The incident inspires the cautionary novel and subsequent movie Looking For Mr. Goodbar. For many, Quinn’s murder represented the dark side of the sexual revolution.

At Tweed’s on New Year’s night,Quinn had met John Wayne Wilson, an outwardly charming, but seriously disturbed man who wasdealing with problems of sexual identity and orientation. He was homosexual but refused to admit it to himself, leading to violent feelings toward women. At his home later that night,Wilson beat Quinn, stabbed her numerous times, and sexually assaulted her before finally killing her. Before he could stand trial for his brutal crime,Wilson hanged himself in jail in May 1973. In 1975, Judith Rossner wrote the best-selling novel Looking For Mr. Goodbar, which described a similar incident and served as a warning to women about the dangers of anonymous one-night stands. Diane Keaton starred in a popular movie version of the book in 1977. Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, contact us ! Get This Day In History every morning in your inbox! Judith Rossner, 70; novelist wrote 'Mr. Goodbar,' 'August' - The Boston Globe Judith Rossner, 70; novelist wrote 'Mr.

Goodbar,' 'August' By Hillel Italie, Associated Press | August 11, 2005 NEW YORK -- Judith Rossner, the straight-talking, straight-writing New Yorker who in ''Looking for Mr. Goodbar" and other novels relentlessly analyzed educated women amid the fear and freedom of social and sexual revolutions, has died at the age of 70. Mrs. Rossner died Tuesday night at NYU Medical Center, her family said yesterday. She had been ill with diabetes and leukemia, but the cause of death was not immediately determined, said her brother-in-law, Rayner Pike, a retired Associated Press writer. ''Mr. Goodbar," which came out in 1975, was probably her best-known work, because of to the 1977 movie that starred Diane Keaton as the Roman Catholic schoolteacher in New York City who frequents singles bars, with fatal results. ''The sureness of Judith Rossner's writing and her almost flawless sense of timing create a complex and chilling portrait of a woman's descent into hell that gives this book considerable literary merit," The New York Times wrote. Mrs.

Rossner's many novels also include ''To the Precipice," in which a woman leaves her husband after she becomes pregnant from an extramarital affair, and ''His Little Women," a modern, feminist retelling of ''Little Women." The No. 1 bestseller ''August," published in 1983, tells of a young woman and her Manhattan psychoanalyst, whose own travails include dealing with two husbands, a lover, and a society that views women over 40 as over the hill. In a 1983 interview with The Washington Post , Mrs. Rossner said, ''It's astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body -- some of the brightest women I know are just obsessed with that search. It's very sad." It was a subject she explored repeatedly. ''My abiding theme is separations," Mrs. Rossner, married three times, said in the same interview. Her women yearn to connect with men or family to find love, but typically find it unattainable. Influenced by such explicit works as Erica Jong's ''Fear of Flying" and Truman Capote's ''In Cold Blood," Mrs.

Rossner narrated in fullest detail life's most extreme and private moments, from the murder in ''Mr. Goodbar" to an orgy in ''Attachments" that featured Siamese twins. Longtime friend, journalist, and author Betty Rollin said yesterday that Mrs. Rossner's personal honesty was inseparable from her writing. ''You knew what was on her mind and in her heart. She let you know," Rollin said. ''In the world we live in, where everyone was careful, Judy wasn't careful at all. . . . In this great way, she didn't give a hoot. She wasn't for show at all." Another close friend, film critic Andrew Sarris, called Mrs. Rossner ''an exemplar of that New York sensibility" -- cosmopolitan and ''skeptical of everything. ''She was always trying to push the envelope a little bit, to come up with something beyond the ordinary," Sarris said. ''Her writing . . . is very much a reflection of who she is and what she is.

She was like her writing." Born Judith Perelman in 1935, she was a native New Yorker who dropped out of college to marry Robert Rossner, a writer and teacher whom she divorced in 1972. As a single mother with two children, and author of three previous novels that sold little, Mrs. Rossner consciously sought a more commercial story and began working on ''Mr. Goodbar," based on the true story of a teacher murdered in a singles bar. She wrote in the early morning, before leaving for her job as a secretary, and hoped the book would make enough money to allow her to take time off from work. She achieved far more. ''Mr. Goodbar" was both a bestseller and hot property in Hollywood, which purchased film rights even before the book came out. In a Detroit News interview, Mrs. Rossner credited her mother, a schoolteacher, for inspiring her to become a writer. ''She kept encouraging me when I was young, and so I just accepted it -- this was what I was going to do -- I was going to write books," Mrs. Rossner said. ''But she never said anything about money or success, so none of that was built into my expectations.

Just writing and getting published was enough at first." She leaves her husband, Stanley Leff; her children, Daniel and Jean Rossner; and three grandchildren. © Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company. More: A still from the film adaptation of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. © 1977 Paramount Your level of enjoyment, when it comes to Judith Rossner’s 1975 best-seller Looking for Mr. Goodbar , may very well depend on whether you’re willing to read an entire book for the sake of being sarcastic. I bought it from a used bookstore when I was in my mid-20s. I had heard that it was about a desperate single woman in New York. I was young; I was hip; I was a woman in New York. I bought the book as a defiant feminist gesture, a statement on all I would never be. Then I read it. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a book about misery—a claustrophobic, paranoid misery that seeps into you. It made me feel spooked by my own psyche, like a campfire tale that reveals the Hook Hand Killer was never found because he’s … right … here!

But before we get there, let us pause, and appreciate the charm of the jacket copy that pulled me in, and the specific female despair it delineates: “Judith Rossner writes with haunting intensity of the temptations and problems of a young woman of today alone in a big city where there are opportunities for a different kind of life—a life that relieves the boredom of work or dispels the chill of solitude, a life”—wait for it—“where you can have sex with strangers.” Advertisement The plot of Goodbar is probably familiar to many readers, either from the book itself or from its 1977 film adaptation . A young woman named Theresa Dunn lives a double life. By day, she’s a clean-living schoolteacher, in a serious relationship with a kind but unexciting lawyer named James. By night, she frequents singles bars, where she wantonly tempts men into bed, with working-class sexual dynamo Tony her most common hook-up. A grisly fate, of course, awaits, as we’ve known from the beginning. Theresa rejects Tony for slapping her, rejects James for proposing to her, then takes home a drifter, who bashes her head in and rapes her corpse.

Pleasant dreams! Get Slate in your inbox. Just because it’s no longer 1975 doesn’t mean that the temptations and problems of a young woman alone in a big city—especially the problems of who she’s having sex with and how—don’t still take up quite a lot of cultural space. And to some, it’s still a horror story. Consider the reaction to HBO’s Girls , which features several young women of today alone in the big city. In its premiere, protagonist Hannah submits to cheesy dirty talk and doggie-style sex with an inconsiderate woodworker. “Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this?” Frank Bruni moaned in the pages of the New York Times. Or look to Rush Limbaugh’s reaction to Sandra Fluke, who attempted to testify before a congressional committee about the health benefits of the pill. You recall that Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” but do you remember he also described her with language—“She wants all the sex in the world whenever she wants it, all the time, no consequences”—you could imagine Theresa Dunn’s neighbors using?

Bruni argues that young women are forcing themselves to have too much casual sex, and making themselves miserable. Limbaugh argues that women are gleefully having too much casual sex, and making everyone else miserable. But the basic story they’re telling is surprisingly similar: Young women plus sex equals excess, and excess equals misery. Something is out of joint with the girls today; they’ve gotten out of control, and it has to end badly. But this fear has been with us since before the sexual revolution. Maybe since the seduction novel , in which sheltered girls were invariably impregnated and left to die by handsome rakes. Or since Anna Karenina taught us that sexual awakening was the first step to being crushed by a train. Or maybe it’s older still: Maybe it’s been with us ever since we started warning little girls to be careful when they go through the woods alone, don’t talk to wolves on the road, don’t get into bed with anything they don’t recognize, because it might have teeth. Advertisement Of course, Goodbar is, itself, a copy of an earlier story; it fits the framework of moral panic because it’s based on one.

Rossner began the novel as a reported piece for Esquire on the 1973 death of Roseann Quinn. Quinn was 28. She lived alone in Manhattan, near a bar named W.M. Tweedy’s. After work, she would often go to a bar and read. When she didn’t come in to work, a friend went to her apartment and found her body. She had been beaten, and stabbed 18 times, and a candle had been inserted into her vagina. She had picked up the killer, John Wayne Wilson, at a bar. The story was a media sensation, dominating headlines for weeks. Feminist Susan Brownmiller decried the heated, sexualized coverage. Much of the public discussion centered on Quinn’s private life. Wilson wasn’t the first man she’d brought home! Neighbors had heard fighting in her apartment before! Was this rough sex gone wrong? Was she suicidal? Had she wanted all the sex in the world with no consequences? Was she what Gloria Steinem was going to the barricades for? The answer was never only about Quinn. The day after her body was found, the Daily News ran the headline “ Once more, bachelor girls ask: Who's Next?

” From Roseann Quinn to “bachelor girls,” from one woman’s death to a warning about single womanhood: It only took one day. Rossner must have had a sense of the story’s mythic resonance while reporting her Esquire piece. But when her piece was killed, and she fictionalized it, she had substantially more room to enhance the story. Which she did, in epic fashion. Advertisement At the time, Rossner was a divorced, well-praised, and poorly-compensated literary novelist; she worked as a secretary. She described her working conditions for Goodbar as follows : “I had just had a car accident and burned my leg and I was all depressed.” And so, she sat down and wrote the saddest (and most surprisingly well-reviewed ) potboiler imaginable. Although the basics of Quinn’s life—a slight limp caused by childhood polio, being murdered, the fact that she had been to bars—are adhered to, Theresa Dunn stands well apart from Roseann Quinn. First, because Rossner goes out of her way to establish a complex, tormented inner life for Theresa. Second, because her complex and tormented inner life is extremely goofy. Rossner presents Theresa’s sex life as a process of slow soul death.

Because she is shy and self-conscious about her limp, she must therefore have an affair with a married professor, who says things like, “You may write me a special essay for Friday—How I Lost My Virginity. Work from your imagination, if necessary.” Because that professor dumps her, she must stay with her sister, who is a married swinger. Because she has a one-night stand at her sister’s house, she must have others. Because she has one-night stands, she’s revolted when James falls in love with her, and rebels by screwing half of Manhattan. Poor guy, Theresa’s boyfriend. He’s saddled with representing both the conservative promise of marriage and the inadequacies of the sensitive liberal man. He’s endlessly understanding, patient, and interested in this “women’s movement” he’s been hearing about; for all these reasons, he’s virulently unsexy. He’s sexually inexperienced; his explanation, that in college he “had a homosexual affair with a Jesuit priest,” remarkably fails to increase his allure.

(It’s never mentioned again.) And then, there’s what happens when they do have sex: [Theresa] touched the base of his penis, slowly began to run her finger up along it but felt something strange which at first she couldn’t— Advertisement Oh, Jesus, no! He was wearing a condom! She’d never even seen one before and it threw her. Yep: In this novel about the social conditions that create promiscuous women, birth control isn’t one of those conditions. Theresa doesn’t use it, relying on “her deep certainty that she would never become pregnant.” None of the other men in the book insist on it. Her sister has two illegal abortions. Theresa doesn’t approve of those, either. What does cause Theresa’s moral decline? Rossner provides a litany: divorces, open marriages, hippies (“two males and one female, although it was hard to tell, for they were less sexually differentiated than the homosexuals downstairs”), “the homosexuals downstairs,” singles bars, women’s lib, Theresa’s own self-loathing. Of all the explanations for Theresa’s lifestyle, the explanation Rossner never offers is the simplest one: She does it because she can.

It is possible to have sex without getting married or pregnant, so she has casual sex. Because when sexual freedom is an option, people will take it. Even girls. Advertisement The reason Roseann Quinn’s death terrified people wasn’t that she was a freak or a hippie. It was that she was steadily employed, modestly dressed, well-liked. She was normal. But she was a new normal—one that, decades later, we’re still trying to deny or scare away. What is the moral of Little Red Riding Hood’s tale? “Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf,” Perrault concluded. They may. But they often don’t. Women go to work, go out, and meet people to have sex with. Complications, we know, ensue. Corpses, usually, do not. The fact that Goodbar still haunts us—it’s been used as an argument against everything from 50 Shades of Grey to Craigslist —may point to a deeper fear than we’re willing to admit. Maybe what scares us isn’t that girls are putting themselves in danger.

Maybe what scares us is simply the fact that they’re putting themselves out in the world at all. There are many absurd things in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. But what’s most absurd is how relevant it still is. It’s valuable simply because—like all good horror stories, and all fairy tales—it boils a common fear down to its bare outline. A young woman has sex. She likes it. Because she likes it, none of the rewards we offer for good behavior—marriage, or children, or love—matter anymore. She goes out into the woods alone and does not heed her mother’s warnings. She finds a monster in her bed. And he eats her up. --- Looking for Mr. Goodbar ...and more Looking for Mr. Goodbar Summary Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner is a highly erotic novel about the dangers that lurk for young women in singles bars. The story begins with the confession of Theresa Dunn's killer. Theresa was a young schoolteacher who had a habit of picking up men in the bars near her home. Gary White is a small-time criminal on the run from a warrant in his home state of Florida. Gary...

Obituary: Judith Rossner | Books | The Guardian Books Judith Rossner A New Yorker who wrote 10 diverse novels, including the definitive story of female urban alienation, Looking For Mr Goodbar Friday 12 August 2005 19.57 EDT First published on Friday 12 August 2005 19.57 EDT Share on Messenger Close 'I despised Walter for opening the morning paper to the death notices; he read the obituaries as though they were the closing figures and he were a stockbroker." So says the female narrator, in To The Precipice (1966), the first novel by Judith Rossner, who has died aged 70. That New York wit of hers recurs in 10 diverse novels, in which skirmishes between the sexes soon become all-out warfare. This theme animated her best-known novel, the remarkable Looking For Mr Goodbar (1975), in which singles bar pick-ups result in that rare thing: scenes of raw sex, from the woman's point of view, which are neither pornographic nor hobbled by fanciful metaphor.

The writer was born Judith Perelman in New York, grew up partly in the Bronx, and, after a wild adolescence given to truancy from Taft High School, went to City College; she left at 19 to marry teacher and writer Robert Rossner. An enjoyable job in the advertising department of Scientific American hampered her desire to write, and she moved to a more mundane real-estate office. She set one novel aside, and then, after the birth of her daughter and son, she put five years' effort into To The Precipice. This book, set in the 1950s, is a long, naturalistic account of a young woman whose summertime tutorial job with a rich Manhattan family rescues her from a roach- ridden tenement. She abandons, for a while, the boy she had intended to marry, in favour of the divorced father of her charges. It is a saga, with many an unseemly turn, that contains such sharp observations as the hapless divorcé's "sexuality [being] that of a small boy promised a reward he is too timid to collect".

Nine Months In The Life Of An Old Maid (1969), a gothic tale of a mad woman in a mansion, heralded the outlandish turn that her work could take, while Any Minute I Can Split (1972) followed the Rossners' doomed move to New Hampshire to run a progressive school. The real events scuppered the marriage but inspired the novel, in which the nine months' pregnant heroine leaves her husband for a commune, where principles fall foul of feuds saltily described. Back in New York, Rossner took secretarial work in a hospital. The future looked penurious, but her determination to write was undaunted. She made her own luck. Nora Ephron asked her to write a piece for Esquire magazine about the murder of schoolteacher Roseann Quinn, killed by a man she had met in a singles bar. The piece encountered legal problems, but Rossner's imagination was galvanised to recreate the murder as a novel.

It neatly catches the experiences of childhood polio, university seduction, the 1960s ("sometimes they had what they called a party, but it was hard to tell those nights from the others") and then lingers in the heat of the 1970s metropolis: "She felt the need of a man ... At Luther's. Mr Goodbar. Wherever. Just pick up some anonymous muscular type and get laid. And never see him again." The book was a study of urban alienation and it was never simplistically anti-men. It encapsulated the quandary of "having it all" while craving security. It made Rossner a lot of money, but it does not read as if it had been written to order. Richard Brooks diluted it, when he directed a 1977 movie version, with Richard Gere and Diane Keaton; true fame came when it was later mentioned in an episode of The Simpsons. Rossner, now financially secure, briefly married once more (to Mordecai Persky) and divorced again, before meeting and marrying a genial publisher, Stanley Leff.

She had resumed work on Attachments (1977), a novel also based on a true case: two women married to, and having children by, Siamese twins, a relationship made more difficult after a successful operation to separate the twins. It may seem preposterous, but it is unflinching and touching. Emmeline (1980) was inspired by a story of a 19th-century girl made pregnant by her employer, a Massachusetts cotton mill owner, after which events take an incestuous turn: it became a fine opera at Santa Fé in 1996, composed by Tobias Picker, with a libretto by JD McClatchy. The production reached New York and was filmed for television. Rossner's bestseller, August (1983), returned to contemporary Manhattan, and New York's preoccupation with analysis. After that, there was a break in her writing because of a condition which turned out to be viral, and for a while affected her memory, a writer's nightmare. She resumed work with three novels in the 1990s.

His Little Women (1990), a variant on Louisa May Alcott, showed, as she once remarked, that "all women are great friends until in competition for a man or a job". Her last book, Perfidia (1997), went unpublished in Britain; it was partly inspired by visits to Santa Fé and it allies another real murder case with her own preoccupation with mother-daughter relations (Rossner's mother, a teacher, had committed suicide in the 1980s). The viral condition left Rossner with diabetes, but she never lost a relish for life. She was a perfect New Yorker, without pretensions, and she could rustle up meals over which others would have spent days in preparation. Hours went by in an instant at her dinner table high above the Hudson river, for she had the novelist's ability to get people to talk. A circle of friends from all spheres of Manhattan life will miss this great woman; how she would have hooted with laughter to hear it put like that. She is survived by her third husband and by the children of her first marriage.

· Judith Rossner, writer, born March 1 1935; died August 9 2005 Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) Author: mollylane from Seattle, washington Few viewers can deny the impact of this film  on the '77 crowd and generations afterwards. As a curious 8-year-old up late watching HBO, I never forgot the story or the lesson. Based on a true story, Richard Brooks astutely translated Judith Rossner's best-selling novel to screen, choosing a luminous Diane Keaton, hot off `Annie Hall' and `The Godfather' to play Theresa Dunn, an up-and-coming Richard Gere, a quirky Tuesday Weld , and amazing Richard Kiley as Dunn, the overbearing Irish-Catholic father. The misogynistic Richard Atherton and an ominous Tom Berenger rounds out the solid cast. Neither traditionally beautiful like her stewardess sister, Katherine or a baby factory like her other sister living at home with her, Theresa is the odd one out, the sister who is searching for approval from a father who barely acknowledges her existence.

Childhood traumas mold her and make the fact that Theresa allows herself to be strong and fallible all the more powerful and endearing. Tired of her father's unyielding rule, Theresa moves into the apartment building owned by Katherine's next attempt at a husband. As the women's freedom movement is underway, Theresa is caught in the position of questioning the traditional roles for women, roles against a new woman in control of her body and her sexuality. By day she teaches at a school for the deaf. By night her nightly jaunts into New York's seamier nightlife scene, expose the dichotomy of being a professional woman by day who must maintain credibility and responsibility, especially with young children while trying to be sexually active, experimental and suffering the stigma attached to both  as whore and as a free woman  wanting purely physical experiences much the same as men, yet realizing the label is different. Throughout this film, Brooks explores Theresa's perpetual search for acceptance by men but a need to maintain her own identity. From a failed affair with a Prof.

she was a TA to, to her fling with Tony, a local hustler, Theresa is perpetually in question of her sexuality and her allure for men, making poor choices in her partners only to endure their violence and possessiveness - much like her father. That she meets up with a homicidal drifter the New Year's Eve night she has decided to quit drugs and cruising, is the irony of her self-discovery. The only positive male in her life appears to be is LaVar Burton's character, Cap Jackson, the sullen brother of one of Theresa's students. He is the only male presence in the movie that is not malevolent or trying to extract something from Theresa and during her altercation with Tony at the school, he is the only person to defend and protect her. While the scare of AIDS stole later generations' promiscuity, this tale still resonates for viewers, especially for women on their own, looking for intimacy yet craving isolation. While the ending tends to drag with one too many drug scenes the movie still packs a wallop for a finale. Was the above review useful to you?

Question: Who wrote the novel ‘Looking for Mr Goodbar’?
Answer: Judith Rossner