Joan Juliet Buck

Joan Juliet Buck (born 1948) is an American writer and actress. She was the editor-in-chief of French Vogue from 1994 to 2001, the only American ever to have edited a French magazine. and has written for New York, magazine Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, Air Mail, Homme Girls, Grazia, Study magazine, and the Style section of London Sunday Times.

Early life and family Born in 1948, she is the only child of Jules Buck (1917–2001), an American film producer, who moved his family to Europe in 1952 in reaction to the political repression in the United States at the time. Her mother, Joyce Ruth Getz (aka Joyce Gates, died 1996), was a child model and actress, and interior designer. Jules Buck served in the Signal Corps with John Huston, during the Second World War, Huston was the best man at her parents' 1945 wedding, and Joan Juliet learned to cook from Ricki Huston.

Buck grew up in Cannes, Paris, and London. which he republished in The Pump House Gang.

Journalism career United States and London, 1968-1994 Buck dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College to work at Glamour magazine then the features editor of British Vogue at the age of 23, then a correspondent for Women's Wear Daily in London and Rome. Buck was an associate editor of the London Observer. From 1975 to 1976 she lived in Los Angeles to work on a novel. Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review.

As movie critic for American Vogue from 1990 to 1994, she served on the New York Film Festival selection committee the year its program included Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine, Jane Campion's The Piano, and Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

French Vogue, 1994-2001 She was French Vogue's editor-in-chief from 1994 to 2001, The New York Times described her selection as indication that Condé Nast intended to "modernize the magazine and expand its scope" from its circulation of 80,000.

Buck replaced Helmut Newton with David LaChapelle and other young American photographers and hired American writers and tripled the text. In the Price of Illusion, she talks about wanting to upend French cliches such as black sweaters and Helmut Newton-referencing shoots; "French women know how to dress when they’re having sex. They need to know how to dress when they’re not having sex." Penelope Green of The New York Times wrote that Buck "upended what had been the magazine's rather staid coverage." Carey Mulligan, Natalie Portman, and Gisele Bündchen. She also penned profiles on the playwright Tom Stoppard and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy for the magazine. For Vanity Fair, she profiled people like Bernard-Henri Lévy and Mike Nichols. For the New Yorker her subjects included the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, chronicler of Russian émigrés in Paris Nina Berberova, and Princess Diana's relics post-death.

She has appeared in numerous documentaries, among them James Kent's Fashion Victim, the Killing of Gianni Versace, Mark Kidel's Paris Whorehouse and Architecture of the Imagination. Buck narrated James Crump's 2007 documentary Black, White + Gray, about art collector Sam Wagstaff and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

In the early 2010s, she wrote for T magazine, The New York Timess fashion magazine, W, and The Daily Beast, among others, and was the consulting editor to Dasha Zhukova's Garage magazine which The New York Times called "one of the most intriguing magazines to come along in years." Her humorous cultural pieces for T included subjects like the culture of high-end bedding and the cross-country tour of The Moth storytelling series, in which she participated in 2009 and 2012. For W she covered photographer Taryn Simon, the history of the social scene in Palm Springs, and the contemporary femme fatale.

Since 2015, she has written for Harper's Bazaar. Her topics have included Patti Smith, the art of the retort, the mother she chose, dressing one's age, and her friendship with Leonard Cohen. She has since written for Air Mail on Australian photographer June Newton, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Jane Birkin, Richard Linklater, and Louis Malle. Buck has also penned articles on fashion for Homme Girls, and “A Bathing Suit is Not an Evening Dress” and the column "WTF with Joan Juliet Buck" for the Italian weekly Grazia.

Asma al-Assad article In its March 2011 issue, Vogue published Buck's profile on Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, describing her as "glamorous, young and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She's a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement." The piece was strongly criticized in the US media as reports of al-Assad's violent repression began to emerge in mid-March. In April, former Atlantic writer-editor Max Fisher attacked it as an ill-timed "puff piece." The Washington Posts Paul Farhi wrote, "It may have been the worst-timed, and most tin-eared, magazine article in decades." "It seems that Ms. Buck's aim was more public relations spin than reportage,” wrote Bari Weiss and David Feith in The Wall Street Journal.

Although it acknowledged that the article had taken "more than a year" to cultivate,

In The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin also wrote: "It was the Washington liberal foreign policy community that, for years, had fancied Bashar al-Assad as a constructive player in the Middle East." Quoting Lee Smith, Rubin pointed out that John Kerry, Teresa Heinz, and James A. Baker, among others, courted Assad in an attempt to sway him from Iran. "American liberals and Republican realpolitikers were every bit as sycophantic and deluded as Buck," she wrote. Buck's contract with Vogue, however, was not renewed. In May 2022, in a business article for Washington Post about a new Anna Wintour biography, Bloomberg's Adrian Wooldridge wrote that Wintour's decision to commission the piece "went against stiff internal opposition" and that it was Buck, "a Wintour friend," as the author of the piece, "who got the chop."

Buck subsequently wrote in Newsweek that she had not wanted to write the story, and the explanation generated controversy. In The Guardian, Homa Khaleeli wrote, "It's hard to tell if Buck asked Asma—or Bashar whom she also met—any real questions at all." The Vogue article was satirized in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and it was republished in Gawker in September 2013.

Six years later, Buck recalled that she was "tainted, like a leper" and that "There was so much opprobrium sticking to me. I was so flayed. My life as I knew it had vanished." Will Pavia of The Times later wrote that the magazine "left Buck twisting in the wind.... It's hard not to think that Wintour contributed to Buck's woes."

Performance As a child, Buck was cast as a Scots waif in the Walt Disney film Greyfriars Bobby.

Buck began studying acting in 2002, and appears in a supporting role in Nora Ephron's 2009 movie Julie & Julia as Madame Elisabeth Brassart, head of the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. She wrote about the experience of auditioning for Ephron after the latter passed away in June 2012. Curated by Michael Portnoy and Sarina Basta, Buck and another actor held a conversation guided by a third actor's random flashing of prompt cards.

In 2010, Buck played Mrs. Prest in an adaptation of The Aspern Papers, a Henry James novella, directed by first-time filmmaker Mariana Hellmund. She played Marguerite Duras in Irina Brook's La Vie matérielle that spring and again in 2013 at La MaMa E.T.C. theater in New York City alongside Deadwood'''s Nicole Ansari.

In May 2012, Buck appeared with comedian Eugene Mirman, performers Ira Glass, Lucy Wainwright Roche, and Amber Tamblyn in a night of interpretations of the Joan of Arc narrative at the Littlefield, a Brooklyn performance space. In 2015, Buck appeared in the Supergirl episode "Red Faced," playing Katherine Grant, the mother of CatCo founder Cat Grant.

In February 2017, she appeared in a production of 18th-century playwright Pierre de Marivaux's The Constant Players at the Henry Clay Frick House in New York, directed by Mériam Korichi. The next month she was in a Columbia Stages production of Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast in the East Village, adapted and directed by Pálína Jónsdóttir.

In March 2026, she performed in Swiss theater director Milo Rau and Servane Dècle's U.S. premiere of the Pelicot Trial at Judson Memorial Church with Ellen Barkin, V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), former U.S. Solicitor General Neal Kumar Katyal , and Laila Robins.

Novels and adaptations Buck's two novels about multicultural expatriates are The Only Place To Be, published by Random House in 1982, and Daughter of the Swan, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1987. She was one of a long line of writers commissioned to adapt, for film, D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel. Her version was singled out by Thomas as "faithful and intelligent" among versions that included ones by the writer himself and Dennis Potter, but the film has never been made.

In 2009, the story "The Ghost of the Rue Jacob" was a big hit at The Moth. In February 2012, Buck went on "The Unchained Tour of Georgia" headed by George Green on a remodeled 1975 Bluebird schoolbus funded by Kickstarter.

The Price of Illusion, radio, and other work In March, 2017, Buck published The Price of Illusion, her memoir of her life in Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, London and Santa Fe from the '60s through the '90s. It was reviewed favorably by The New York Times, People, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, among other places, and was an Amazon Editors' Pick and an "Oprah Pick". It was also a starred Publishers Weekly review, and Kirkus Reviews described it as “relentlessly candid and often absorbing account of a complex life spent in and out of the fashion spotlight."

The memoir was excerpted in New York magazine in February 2017 and published in paperback in November 2017. It was released as an audiobook on Audible in May 2018.

In 2020, Buck contributed “Corona Diary,” her missives on Facebook, to the literary magazine Stat o Rec's anthology, Writing the Virus. It was nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize.

In 2021 she started to broadcast "Companion Fog" on Radio Free Rhinecliff, a novella about a custom-made cloud one could have to protect one from bad news. "Serial Tales," set in Littleburg in the Hudson Valley, followed weekly in 2022.

In April 2024 Buck started her Substack, "Everyday Until I Die" which now has 52 entries. Also through Radio Free Rhinecliff, Buck helms the podcast Joan of Art where she has interviewed Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Molly Crabapple, Ian Buruma, Laura Day, Griffin Dunne, George Green, John Patrick Shanley, and Joan Tewkesbury.

Personal life In 1977, Buck married John Heilpern, an English journalist and writer; keeping a part of her 7,000-volume library in storage in Poughkeepsie.

Non-fiction The Price of Illusion, New York: Altria Books, 2017 2017 Babette's Feast'' Narrator (16 characters) Connelly Theater