Lee Grant
Lee Grant is an American actress and director. She made her film debut in 1951 as a young shoplifter in William Wyler's Detective Story, co-starring Kirk Douglas and Eleanor Parker. This role earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress as well as the Best Actress Award at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.
In 1952 she was blacklisted from most acting jobs for the next 12 years. She was able to find only occasional work onstage or as a teacher during this period. It also contributed to her divorce. She was removed from the blacklist in 1962 and rebuilt her acting career. She starred in 71 TV episodes of Peyton Place, followed by lead roles in films such as Valley of the Dolls, In the Heat of the Night, and Shampoo, for the last of which she won an Oscar. In 1964, she won the Obie Award for Distinguished Performance by an Actress for her performance in The Maids. During her career she was nominated for the Emmy Award seven times between 1966 and 1993, winning twice.
In 1986 she directed Down and Out in America which tied for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and in the same year she also won a Directors Guild of America Award for Nobody's Child.
Early life
Lee Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in Manhattan, the only child of Witia, an actress and teacher, and Abraham W. Rosenthal, a realtor and educator. Her father was born in New York City, to Polish Jewish immigrants, and her mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant. The family resided at 706 Riverside Drive in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Her date of birth is October 31, but the year is disputed, with all years ranging from 1925 to 1931 having been given as her year of birth at some point; however, census data, travel manifests, and testimony suggest that she was born in 1925 or 1926, while Grant's stated ages at the time of her professional debut and Oscar nomination indicate she was born in 1927.She debuted in L'Oracolo at the Metropolitan Opera in 1931 and later joined the American Ballet as an adolescent. She attended Art Students League of New York, Juilliard School of Music, The High School of Music & Art, and George Washington High School, all in New York City. Grant graduated from high school, and won a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where she studied under Sanford Meisner. Grant undertook further study with Uta Hagen at the HB Studio. She later enrolled in the Actors Studio in New York.
Career
1930s–1950s
Grant had her first stage ballet performance in 1933 at the Metropolitan Opera House. In 1938, in her early teens, she was made a member of the American Ballet under George Balanchine. As an actress, Grant had her professional stage debut as understudy in Oklahoma in 1944. In 1948, she had her Broadway acting debut in Joy to the World. Grant established herself as a dramatic method actress on and off Broadway, earning praise for her role as a shoplifter in Detective Story in 1949.She made her film debut two years later in the film version, starring Kirk Douglas, receiving her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination, and winning the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. She said she enjoyed working under director William Wyler, who helped guide her.
In 1951, she gave an impassioned eulogy at the memorial service for actor J. Edward Bromberg, whose early death, she implied, was caused by the stress of being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her name later appeared in the publication Red Channels, and as a result, for the next ten years, her "prime years" as she put it, she was blacklisted and her work in television and movies was limited.
Kirk Douglas, who acted with her in Detective Story, recalled that director Edward Dmytryk, a blacklistee, had first named her husband at the HUAC:
Grant appeared in a limited number of stage and television shows during these years. In 1953, she played Rose Peabody in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. In the Broadway production of Two for the Seesaw in 1959, she succeeded Anne Bancroft in the lead female role.
1960s
By the time her name was removed from the blacklist in the early 1960s, she had divorced, remarried, and had a young daughter, Dinah. She began re-establishing her television and movie career. In her autobiography, she writes: Her experience with the blacklist scarred her to such an extent that as late as 2002, she would freeze and go into a "near trance" when anyone asked her about her experiences during the McCarthy period.Grant's first major achievement, after HUAC officially cleared her, was in the 1960s television series Peyton Place as Stella Chernak, for which she won an Emmy in 1966. In 1967, Grant appeared in an episode of , portraying the wife of a U.S. diplomat who goes undercover to discredit a rogue diplomat. The same year, she played the distraught widow of a murder victim in the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night. In 1963, she won acclaim for her stage performance in the off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Maids.
1970s
Grant received Academy Award nominations for the dramas The Landlord and Voyage of the Damned. She also performed in Plaza Suite, a comedy directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Neil Simon; she played the harassed mother of a bride, with Walter Matthau as the father. The film was followed by another comedy role as the mother in Portnoy's Complaint.In March 1971, Grant played the murderer in the Columbo episode "Ransom for a Dead Man"', playing opposite Peter Falk as Detective Columbo. For that role, she was nominated for an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie. That same year, she also received an Emmy nomination for her performance in the television film The Neon Ceiling. The only other nominee for that category that year was Colleen Dewhurst; when Grant won, she wryly noted "I must thank Colleen Dewhurst since it takes two of me to equal one of her."
Grant reunited with Peter Falk on Broadway in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, written by Neil Simon; the playwright said that his "first and only choice" for the part was Grant, who he said was equally at home with dramatists such as Chekhov or Sidney Kingsley, yet could also be "hilariously funny" when the script called for it, for she was able to portray essential honesty in her acting.
Grant played Warren Beatty's older lover in Shampoo, a role for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The film received mixed reviews, but was Columbia's biggest hit in the studio's 50-year history. Shampoo was the second film in which Grant acted under director Hal Ashby. Critic Pauline Kael, comparing her in both films, noted Grant "is such a cool-style comedienne that she's in danger of having people say that she's good, as usual." During the filming, however, she did have some serious disagreements with Beatty, who was also the producer, and nearly quit. During one scene, she wanted to play it in a way she felt was more realistic from a woman's perspective, but Beatty disagreed. After thinking about the scene for a few days, she told director Ashby that she could not do it Beatty's way and was quitting. As she was walking out, Beatty stopped her, and asked what was wrong. "I sat down and told him", she said. "He threw up his hands and said, 'Play it your way. What do I know? I'm a man.'"
Despite the success of the film, Grant was feeling less secure in Hollywood, as she was then around 50 years old. She writes:
During the 1975-76 television season, she starred in the sitcom Fay, which, to her chagrin, was canceled after eight episodes. She made a guest appearance in Empty Nest, in which her daughter Dinah Manoff co-starred. In 1978, she was the lead actress in .
Grant successfully moved into directing when she directed the stage play The Stronger in 1976, written by August Strindberg.
1980s1990s
In 1980, Grant directed her first film, Tell Me a Riddle, a story about an aging Jewish couple. That debut narrative film was followed by a widely distributed documentary film titled The Willmar 8, which profiled eight female employees of a bank in Willmar, Minnesota who went on strike to protest pay inequities between male and female bank tellers. She starred in an HBO remake of Plaza Suite in 1982, co-starring with Jerry Orbach, both playing three different characters in three acts. It was filmed before a live audience.Actor Bruce Dern, who acted with her in The Big Town, recalls working with her: "Lee Grant is a fabulous actress. Anytime she works it's a blessing you have her in your movie." She directed several documentary films, including Down and Out in America which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The same year, she directed Nobody's Child, a television movie starring Marlo Thomas about a woman confined to a mental institution for 20 years. For her direction, Grant became the first female director to win the Directors Guild of America Award.
In 1988, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who through their endurance and the excellence of their work have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.
Admiring her directing and acting skill, actress Sissy Spacek agreed to act in Hard Promises "only to work with Grant", although Grant was later replaced as its director. In 1992, Grant played Dora Cohn, the mother of Roy Cohn in the biographical made-for-TV film Citizen Cohn, which garnered her another Primetime Emmy Award nomination. In 1994, she directed the television film Seasons of the Heart, starring Carol Burnett and George Segal.
2000s–present
In 2001, Lee Grant portrayed Louise Bonner in David Lynch's critically acclaimed Mullholland Drive. From 2004 to 2007, Carlin Glynn, Stephen Lang, and Grant served as co-artistic directors for the Actors Studio. In the early 2000s, Grant directed a series of Intimate Portrait episodes for Lifetime Television, that celebrated a diverse range of accomplished women.In 2013, Grant briefly returned to the stage, after a nearly forty-year absence, to star in one performance of The Gin Game, part of a benefit for improvement programs at the Island Music Guild, in Bainbridge Island, Washington. Grant played Fonsia Dorsey opposite Frank Buxton as Weller Martin; her daughter Dinah Manoff directed the production.
After a fourteen-year hiatus, Lee Grant played a small part in the film Killian & the Comeback Kids directed by Taylor A. Purdee.