Elizabeth Snead, a former contributor and style and fashion writer for The Hollywood Reporter, died Monday in Delray Beach, Florida, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 74.
Snead joined THR in 2011 as a contributing style editor, and she interviewed costume designers, established stars like Kristen Stewart and emerging talents while covering industry trends through 2015.
During THR’s Costume Designers Roundtable in 2012, Lincoln’s Joanna Johnston told Snead and executive features editor Stephen Galloway that designing wardrobes for film was “somewhere between a war and a circus.”
And for a 2012 story on the retirement of Uggie, the Jack Russell who starred in the best picture Oscar winner The Artist, his trainer Sarah Clifford told Snead, “He’s at the stage where he just says, ‘I think I want to go and lay in the sun by the pool.’” Wrote Snead: “Uggie’s protégé, his brother Dash, is training hard and will be able to jump in and fill Uggie’s pawprints soon.”
Snead was born in Orange, New Jersey, to James, a relative of Hall of Fame golfer Sam Snead, and his British wife, Hazel. She graduated from Florida Atlantic University and began her journalism career at the South Florida Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale.
In the early 1980s, Snead was hired by the new USA Today as a style, fashion and pop culture writer. For nearly 20 years, first out of Washington and later as a correspondent in Los Angeles, she profiled the likes of Jane Fonda, George Clooney, Robert Redford, David Lynch and Barbra Streisand and covered awards shows, premieres and the Sundance and Cannes film festivals.
Snead went freelance in the early 2000s, writing a biweekly Hollywood column for the Los Angeles Daily News and a Fashion Police column for E!, and she contributed to The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar and InStyle as well.
In 2005, she wrote for the Los Angeles Times awards website, The Envelope, and created The Dish Rag, a celebrity news blog that became the newspaper’s most-read blog, with 3 million unique users a month. She also helped with the Calendar section and created the newspaper’s party page.
And she handled interviews for Entertainment Tonight.
Snead often brought her poodle Mina on assignment. She found the abandoned dog, dingy gray and with chipped nail polish, on a street near Dupont Circle in Washington. Once she bathed the pooch, she discovered Mina had snow-white fur.
She retired from journalism in the mid-2010s and returned to Florida, where she turned her attention to animal activities, such as showing her pack of Maltese dogs competitively and breeding Napoleon cats.
