Daily Mirror entertainment columnist with an eye for a quirky story and a knack for building relationships with the starsIn Fleet Street, the golden age was always a generation ago. Donald Zec, who has died aged 102, belonged to a newspaper world so distant that there may now be no one left to judge whether it was golden or not. He joined the Daily Mirror 83 years ago and by the 1950s, when Rupert Murdoch was a wayward undergraduate, he was a star turn on what was then the biggest-selling daily in the western world.
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The paper’s first great editorial director, Guy Bartholomew, declared that the Mirror was about “humanity, heart, real life”. His successor, Hugh Cudlipp, added a new dimension: he wanted the paper to explain life’s complexities in simple language but with authority – and irreverence. No one executed that brief with more panache than Zec.