Fran Weil Biography

Fran Weil is a veteran, award-winning entertainment journalist and marketing communications practitioner who,
for more than a decade served as arts and entertainment columnist for two major Boston metropolitan dailies, The Record American and The Boston Herald.

In recent years she has been the principal of The Marketing Collaborative, providing marketing communications, publication writing and production supervision, Web design and implementation for profit and nonprofit organizations throughout the Boston area. She also has served the marketing communications needs of Lasell College, the four-year coeducational college in Newton, MA, and Lasell Village, the first of its kind living and learning retirement community located on the campus of an institution for higher learning.

During her tenure at the Boston metropolitan newspapers, Fran Weil reviewed films, traveled extensively around the globe to cover stories on movie locations, and profiled celebrities. She traveled to Germany to cover the making of James Bond movies, spent weeks on location interviewing directors and actors including Jacqueline Bisset (“The Deep”), Stephen Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss (“Jaws”), Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn, Gene Wilder, Faye Dunaway and George C. Scott, and traveled to Mexico to do stories on the American Western, visiting with John Wayne and his productions.

In addition to her newspaper work, Fran Weil was the Boston theater correspondent for the national entertainment weekly, Variety, for which she reviewed all out-of-town productions headed for Broadway and her celebrity profiles were carried nationally on the Heart wire.

She was a frequent contributor to New York’s Playbill Magazine, and the author of articles for premium souvenir booklets, for which she regularly profiled leading actors, directors, and producers, including “A Chorus Line” creator, Michael Bennett, actresses Elaine Stritch, Lucille Ball, Angela Lansbury, and Barbra Streisand, and actors Paul Newman, Jeff Bridges, Jon Voight, and Rock Hudson.
 
Fran was a contributor to the coffee table book, Close-Ups, a selection of celebrity interviews, published by Workman’s Publishing.

Prior to covering entertainment, Fran Weil covered lifestyle stories and spent a year on the medical beat.

The recipient of a New England Women’s Press Association “Columnist of the Year” award and winner of several Heart Writing awards for weekly celebrity columns carried nationally on the Hearst Wire service, Fran was also named a critic fellow to the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut.

Fran Weil is a graduate of Boston University’s College of Communication with a Bachelor of Science degree in journalism and was named to the Kappa Tau Alpha Honor Society for journalism and mass communication.