He may have inherited his ferocious drive from his father, a journalist and editor of Advertising Age magazine. "It's like living with a body and Michael is somewhere else," she claimed. His private life suffered four of his five marriages ended in divorce the settlement in his fourth divorce, from the actress Anne Marie Martin, cost him an estimated $100m (£63m). At his peak, he was earning tens of millions of dollars a year, but he rarely slowed down his pace of work, once claiming to have as many as 30 ideas for books "buzzing around in my brain" at any time.
His notorious social detachment stemmed, he said, from self-consciousness about his height. Tall, handsome and successful, he had his own dystopian side. Crichton's book was hailed by President George Bush, and he came under fire for accepting the American Petroleum Geologists journalism award.
In his novel, a group of scientists engineer natural disasters which are then blamed on global warming. Ironically, he achieved a great deal of notoriety with his 2004 novel, State Of Fear, which argued that attribution of global warming to human activity was speculation, not fact. His utilitarian writing style, primarily plot-driven, made his books naturals for screen adaptation, but many authors' writing makes the transition without the authors themselves succeeding in screenwriting, much less directing, feature films. "He was the greatest at blending science with big technical concepts," said the Jurassic Park director, Steven Spielberg, a long-time friend.Ĭrichton was unusual too in the way in which he moved from writing novels to directing films at a very early stage in his career. This was all the more surprising because his speciality, the "techno-thriller" strand of science fiction, was remarkably dystopian, generally dealing with the unexpected consequences of technology or misunderstood science gone out of control, and could usually be read as warnings about putting too much faith in progress. And catch it he did, selling more than 150m books worldwide, and seeing many of his works made into hit films. This remarkable hat-trick emphasises the ability Crichton, who died yesterday, aged 66, possessed to catch the interests of the mass-market audience with fiction that otherwise might be consigned to genre ghettos.
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In quick succession in the early 1990s, Michael Crichton's novel Disclosure was No 1 on the US best-seller charts, the film Jurassic Park, based on another of his novels and on whose screenplay he worked uncredited, was America's top-grossing film, and the television series ER, which he created, was the best-rated programme on US television.
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