Amy Dawes was a fighter.
In the years she worked at the Los Angeles Daily News in the 1990s as an entertainment writer and my fellow film critic, we had our share of heated aesthetic arguments. She was open and inquisitive but rarely backed down, always made smart points, often enlightened me and never, ever lost my respect.
It was great. And so you don’t get the wrong impression, we laughed together far more often than we growled at one another.
Amy died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Friday after battling lung and stomach cancer. She was 56.
“She was diagnosed in April of 2015 and they gave her six months to live,” said Billy Vasquez, Dawes’ husband of 19 years. “So she was a fighter. She was vital until the end, she was interested in everything. She was a journalist through and through and at the top of her game when she went out.”
The New York-born, Alabama-raised Auburn and USC graduate was also a staff writer at Daily Variety and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. A produced screenwriter herself (“Zoe”), Dawes edited Creative Screenwriting magazine and wrote about music, movies, television and other topics for The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, Emmy magazine, the Directors Guild Quarterly and many other publications.
Her 2002 nonfiction book “Sunset Boulevard: Cruising the Heart of Los Angeles” was a regional bestseller. It reflected Dawes’ passionate interest in her adopted city, one of the qualities – along with her smarts, loyalty, sense of humor and professionalism – that endeared her to, as far as I can tell, everyone she met.
“I had only been there a couple of years, and Amy took me around and introduced me to L.A.,” recalled close friend Elizabeth Cosin, a novelist and television writer who met Dawes when they both worked at the Daily News. “We were two people that loved Los Angeles, and that showed in all of her work. She had friends who were famous, but she wasn’t that kind of L.A. person. Everyone loved Amy and wanted to be in her orbit.”
“I’m not surprised how well-regarded she was in town,” Vasquez, a movie and TV digital artist who also writes the food blog the99centchef.blogspot.com, noted. “All of her friends and colleagues have come forward and really offered their condolences and sadness and shock and love of her. It’s been very touching, and I’m sure she would just be . . . She would actually cringe, y’know? It would be too much for her.”
After Amy left the Daily News, I would see her and Billy at screenings and Hollywood events. Each meeting was an unadulterated pleasure, always marked by the most stimulating conversation and best one-liners of the evening. The one where she told me about the cancer was, of course, gloomier. But every subsequent encounter was with the old, endlessly engaging Amy – who would only say when asked that she was doing good, and convinced us that she was.
Vasquez said there will be a memorial for Dawes in late March or early April at the Village Green complex near L.A.’s Baldwin Hills, where the couple made their home. Beside her husband, she’s survived by her parents, Robert and Annette Dawes of Redondo Beach, a brother and a sister.
