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Gavin Lambert (*1924) is an British-born screenwriter, novelist and biographer who has lived for much of his life in Hollywood.

Lambert was born in England and educated at Cheltenham and Oxford. At Oxford he founded, together with his friend Lindsay Anderson, the short-lived but influential journal, Sequence. From 1949 to 1955 he co-edited, together with Anderson, the periodical Sight and Sound. He also wrote film criticism for The Sunday Times and The Guardian. In 1957 he moved to Hollywood in order to work there as a screenwriter and personal assistant to director Nicholas Ray, whose movie Bitter Victory (1957) he co-wrote.

Lambert became a notable screenwriter of the Hollywood studio era. In 1954, while still living in England, he wrote his first screenplay, Another Sky about the sexual awakening of a prim English woman in North Africa. In 1955, he also directed Another Sky in Morocco. This was followed in 1958 by the Hollywood screenplay, Bitter Victory and in 1960 by Sons and Lovers (directed by ). 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, directed by José Quintero), adapted a novella by Tennessee Williams on the affairs of an older actress with a young Italian gigolo. Some critics say that there is a homosexual subtext in this film, as in one scene the actress overhears herself being referred to as a "chicken hawk", a gay slang expression for an adult homosexual who is attracted to much younger men. 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. It was not until 1965 that Lambert adapted his own Hollywood insider novel Inside Daisy Clover (1963) for the screen. The film tells the cautionary tale of a teenage movie star involved in the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and her unhappy marriage to a secret homosexual leading man. Another of Lambert's screenplays is I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977, directed by Anthony Page), based on a novel by Hannah Green and regarded as one of the best lay descriptions of a teenager's schizophrenia. Later, the author also wrote the scripts for some TV movies such as Second Serve (1986) on transgender tennis player Renee 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".

Lambert is also an accomplished biographer and novelist. He wrote biographies on some Hollywood stars, such as On Cukor (1972) and Norma Shearer: A Life (1990). His book, Nazimova: A Biography (1997) is the first full-scale account of the private life and acting career of the great Hollywood lesbian Alla Nazimova). He is the author of the memoir Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000) and wrote seven novels with Hollywood settings, among them The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life (1959), a collection of seven short stories that portray a bevy of tinsel-town lowlifes, Inside Daisy Clover (1963), which follows the ups and downs of a teenage movie star who falls prey to the lure of sex and drugs but ultimately gets back on track, The Goodbye People (1971) about Hollywood's beautiful people, and Running Time (1982), a portrait of an indefatigable woman from child starlet to screen goddess, but also a unique life history of the American film industry. One of his recent publications, Natalie Wood: A Life (2004) supplies an insider's look at actress Natalie Wood and chronicles everything concerning her life, as Lambert was a Wood friend for 16 years. The book includes interviews with the people who knew Wood best, for instance, Robert Wagner, Warren Beatty, Paul Mazursky, and Leslie Caron and describes her affairs with many Hollywood stars. It is also shown that Wood frequently dated gay men in Hollywood circles including director Nicholas Ray, actors Nick Adams, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Tab Hunter and Scott Marlowe, and that she supported homosexual playwright Mart Crowley in a manner that made it possible for him to write his play, The Boys in the Band (1968).

Gavin Lambert has been an American citizen since 1964. From 1974 to 1989, he chiefly stayed in Tangier. He currently lives in Los Angeles.