When Michael Crichton was attending Harvard Medical School in the late 1960s, he had a secret life that he kept hidden from his fellow students: To pay his tuition bills, he began writing paperback thrillers in his spare time under two pseudonyms.
He became so adept at cranking out his thrillers that he wrote one in nine days. And before long, as he later put it, "the writing became more interesting to me than the medicine."
Crichton, the doctor-turned-author of bestselling thrillers such as "The Terminal Man" and "Jurassic Park" and a Hollywood writer and director whose credits include "Westworld" and "Coma," died in Los Angeles on Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," his family said in a statement. He was 66.
For nearly four decades, the 6-foot-9 writer was a towering presence in the worlds of publishing and filmmaking.
"There was no one like Crichton, because he could both entertain and educate," Lynn Nesbit, his agent since the late '60s, told The Times on Wednesday. "His brilliance was indisputable, and he had a grasp of so many subjects -- from art to science to technology.
"I respected him so much intellectually and as a writer. I loved him. It's like losing a very good friend as well as a client of so many years."
Director Steven Spielberg said in a statement Wednesday that "Michael's talent out-scaled even his own dinosaurs of 'Jurassic Park.' He was the greatest at blending science with big theatrical concepts, which is what gave credibility to dinosaurs again walking the earth."
Spielberg, who was a new contract TV director at Universal in the early '70s when he first met Crichton and was assigned to show the writer around the lot, described him as "a gentle soul who reserved his flamboyant side for his novels."
"There is no one in the wings that will ever take his place."
Crichton was still in Harvard Medical School when he wrote his first bestseller: "The Andromeda Strain," a fast-paced, scientifically and technologically detailed 1969 thriller about a team of scientists attempting to save mankind from a deadly microorganism brought to earth by a military satellite. It was made into a movie in 1971.
With his success at writing thrillers, Crichton abandoned medicine to become a full-time writer whose novels in the '70s and '80s included "The Terminal Man," "The Great Train Robbery," "Eaters of the Dead," "Congo" and "Sphere."
