Sally Vincent: Interviewer with a flair for getting to the heart of her celebrity subjects, and an ear for a well-turned phrase

Sally Vincent was a journalist who excelled at the art of the interview. Through her numerous encounters with the great and good, Vincent indulged her fascination for her subjects, mined the rich seams of their lives, and revealed to her readers the gems that she had extracted and polished to make her sparkling finished pieces.

She interviewed subjects as diverse as the actor George Clooney, television cook Nigella Lawson, and the stop-smoking guru Allen Carr, and always succeeded in bringing out the best in them. But her forte was in exposing another side to the usual public persona which the audience is less used to seeing, the unusual, the unexpected. So, from Clooney we learnt that "Men make better shoppers than women. Take it from one who knows the retail trade." Vincent noted: "He sold shoes, apparently."

Sally Vincent was born Sally Webb in Chelsea, west London, in 1937. Her father, Albert Webb, was a police detective who had solved the case of the "acid bath murderer", John George Haigh, and brought him to justice in 1949. She was educated at the Grey Coat Hospital School in central London, where she excelled in academic subjects, as well as in singing and athletics.

On leaving school at 16, she first worked at a local newspaper in Wembley and subsequently began writing at a new publication, Nova. Launched by its editor Harry Fieldhouse in March 1965, Nova called itself "The new kind of magazine for a new kind of woman"; it was later described by the journalist Kate Muir as "a politically radical, beautifully designed, intellectual women's magazine". It featured distinguished writers, including Graham Greene, and photography by Harri Peccinotti and Terence Donovan. Vincent's articles tackled difficult subject matter, such as her 1974 piece "What is a woman – Men living as women", an early investigation into the transgender issue. Ahead of its time, Nova might have endured if it had been born in the Eighties, but lasted only a decade before folding.

Around the same time, Vincent joined the staff of the Daily Mirror and then the Daily Express, as well as contributing regular pieces to The Spectator. An eyewitness piece, "Cat among the pigeons", in The Spectator in October 1970, epitomises her skill in observation and picking out the human aspect of a story, at a CND demonstration in Trafalgar Square. "Time for the last speaker, Paul Foot who has been pacing the base of the column for an hour and a half telling himself that Christ, he's nervous. He's on and has them rolling in the aisles," she wrote.

Fleet Street in the Seventies and Eighties was still very much a man's world. Her friend, Jeffrey Bernard, in a 1984 Low Life column from The Spectator exemplifies the view of this heavy-drinking male culture. "Sadly, I know only three equal women, Irma Kurtz, Sally Vincent and Hazel Evans, all of whom generously stand their round. Oh yes, and my landlady and Liz Elliot at Private Eye."

Autobiographical insights abound in Vincent's writing on the work of others. For example, in her review of John Bayley's Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1999), she reflects ruefully: "There are those of us who have fallen into the habit of confusing our most loving partners with buses, something to embark on in order to get somewhere. We check our desired destination with what the vehicle has written across its face, climb aboard, become unhappy if it fails to take us where we want to go, get off the bus and try to catch another one. Marriage à la mode."

Her own brief marriage to the copywriter Michael Vincent ended in the Sixties and was followed by an affair with the psychiatrist R D Laing, who had just separated from his wife. She recalled: "Ronnie was brilliant, a complete original, but he desperately overdid the drugs and drink ... He would be lying on the floor, paralytic but talking nonstop and making perfect sense."

It is in her interview pieces for The Guardian that she shows her relaxed style at its best. Of the actor Derek Jacobi readers learnt from Vincent that "at school, Leyton County High, he was a swot and went on to win a state scholarship to Cambridge. He told his dad that if he was still eating baked beans after five years of acting, he would be happy to become a history teacher, but by the time he was 21 he had joined Birmingham Rep...".

An entire decade of his early life, so neatly expressed.

Then in the piece "Who'd be a goddess?", an interview with Nigella Lawson published in October 2004, one sees Vincent at her peak. Here she reflects on Lawson's background, and wonders how she herself would have felt.

"Personal identity can be a swine,"she wrote. "What must it have been like, I wonder, to have grown up bearing, for instance, her dad's name with an 'a' thrown in?

"Imagine if I'd had to struggle through school being Alberta Vincent, with everyone knowing who he was, without the 'a'." And then she revealed Lawson's confession: "I always wanted to be called Caroline."

MARCUS WILLIAMSON

Sally Webb (Sally Vincent), journalist: born London 22 April 1937; married Michael Vincent (divorced); died 26 December 2013