Sally Vincent, who has died aged 76, was one of the great interviewers of modern British newspapers.
In her care, even the most reluctant and media-shy of subjects would succumb. An interview with cartoonist Ralph Steadman blossomed into an enduring friendship. One with George Clooney somehow prompted him to purloin the restaurant's cutlery and hide it in her handbag.
A date with Benicio del Toro became an epic drinking session, while a potentially prickly interview with Martin Amis, whose reputedly gigantic dental bill had made him something of a press hate-figure, became warm, open and expansive when Vincent was able to reveal that she remembered him as a little boy when she had been friendly with his mother.
Intellect
Sally Vincent was a journalist of great talent, and a woman of formidable intellect, toughness and glamour. Born in Chelsea, her father, Albert Webb, was a detective inspector at Scotland Yard, while her mother was related to the actor Ellen Terry.
Effortlessly bright, she went to the Grey Coat Hospital school for girls, competed for London in athletics and was an accomplished singer.
But it was rare at the time for girls to go to university, even ambitious girls such as Sally. As a teenager she started working for a local newspaper in Wembley, where she found that preconceived ideas about subjects suitable for coverage by women were no less prescriptive than they had been at school.
With the launch of Nova magazine in 1965, she got her break. It aimed to be a “new kind of magazine for a new kind of woman” and she became both a regular contributor and a regular also at the media pub the Coach and Horses, where she held court alongside her friend the writer Jeffrey Bernard.
She was a “face” on the scene, and it was quite a face. She was extremely beautiful – tall, slender, with impossibly sculpted cheekbones and great, brown penetrating eyes. A large painting of herself, seated, in an ochre glow, hung in the hallway of her Islington home, a glorious testament to her distinctive beauty.
Marrying and quickly divorcing an advertising copywriter, Michael Vincent, in the 1960s, Vincent embarked on an affair with the radical psychiatrist RD Laing, who persuaded her to take part in one of his rebirthing workshops.
As Nova declined amid financial difficulties, Vincent joined the staff of the Daily Mirror. There, ideas about the sort of subjects women should cover were still pretty fixed, and she did a beauty column for the paper, then a cookery column – she was a great cook.
The cookery column was eventually taken over by Delia Smith, as Vincent began winning her battle to write less gender-specific pieces, having been hired at the Daily Express by Denis Hackett, a former editor of Nova. She was witty and mordant, qualities she displayed in many articles for Punch magazine.
Perfect copy
There followed a spell with the Sunday Times. A promise of the pick of interview subjects, and total freedom to write pieces as long as she wanted, from whatever angle she saw fit, and with no changes to her copy without permission, managed to lure her to the Guardian. It was a good deal, since her copy was always perfect anyway.
As an interviewer, Vincent was intimidated by no one. Also she was not afraid of hard work. She would always turn up to an assignment ultra-fully prepared, her research exhaustive, her analysis of the available clues forensic. Perhaps there was a genetic element at work here. Her father, after all, had coaxed a full confession from John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer, who was hanged in 1949.
Above all she was simply a natural as a writer, her minute observation and ability to ask the right question easily matched by her way with a phrase. Derek Jacobi was, on first sight, "as inscrutable as a parked Skoda".
Nigella Lawson seemed preternaturally perfect until Vincent had the inspired idea of asking to inspect the inside of her handbag. “Now there’s a proper disgrace. Not only is it a slutty mess of used tissues, tinchy purselets and Biros and lippies and bits of biscuit, but there are cigarettes, loose, scruffy fags, all stained and bent and mungy in there.”