The latter, for which Lambert gained an Academy Award nomination, is based on a novel by D. H. Lawrence. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) adapted a novella by Tennessee Williams on the affairs of an older actress with a young Italian gigolo. As, from the 1920s through the late 1960s, homosexuality was rarely portrayed on the screen, gay screenwriters like Lambert learned to express their personal sensibilities discreetly between the lines of a film. "The important thing to remember about 'gay influence' in movies," observed Gavin Lambert, "is that it was obviously never direct. It was all subliminal. It couldn't be direct because the mass audience would say, Hey, no way." But then, in 1965, Lambert adapted his own Hollywood insider novel Inside Daisy Clover (1963) for the screen. Clover, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, which tells the cautionary tale of a teenage movie star involved in the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and her unhappy marriage to a closeted gay leading man. However, in the film version he was not fully identified as gay because, at Redford's request, the husband he played was changed from homosexual to appear as though he might be bisexual. From this time on, Lambert and Wood became lifelong friends. Another of Lambert's screenplays was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), based on a novel by Hannah Green, which describes in layman's terms a teenager's battle with schizophrenia. Later, the author also wrote the scripts for some TV movies such as Second Serve (1986) on transgender tennis player Renée Richards and Liberace: Behind the Music (1988) on gay performer Liberace. In 1997, he contributed to Stephen Frears's film A Personal History of British Cinema. He was heavily quoted in William J. Mann's book, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969. Biographies and non-fiction Lambert was also a biographer and novelist, who focused his efforts on biographies of gay and lesbian figures in Hollywood. According to screenwriter and writer Joseph McBride, he was "a keenly observant, wryly witty chronicler of Hollywood's social mores and artistic achievements." He wrote biographies on Hollywood figures such as On Cukor (1972) on film director George Cukor and Norma Shearer: A Life (1990) on the Canadian actress Norma Shearer. His book, Nazimova: A Biography (1997) was the first full-scale account of the private life and acting career of lesbian actress Alla Nazimova.