Lee Grant is an American actress, documentarian, and director who was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal on October 31, in the middle of the 1920s. Grant received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1951 for her role as a young shoplifter in William Wyler’s Detective Story. She won the Best Actress Prize at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival. Grant’s performance as Warren Beatty’s elder girlfriend in Shampoo (1975) earned her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Grant was put on a 12-year acting blacklist in 1952, yet she occasionally found theatre work or employment as a teacher during this time. After being taken off the blacklist in 1963, she began to reestablish her cinematic acting career.
Acting to directing
Grant appeared in 71 episodes of Peyton Place on television between 1965 and 1966. In 1967, she went on to play the lead in films like Valley of the Dolls and The Heat of the Night. For her work in The Maids, she received the Obie Award for Distinguished Performance by an Actress in 1964. She had seven nominations over her career and garnered two Emmy Awards. Later, Grant shifted her attention to directing. For Nobody’s Child, she received a Directors Guild of America Award in 1986. She co-directed the documentary Down and Out in America, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1987.
Her career in a retrospect
In David Lynch’s lauded Mulholland Drive from 2001, Lee Grant played Louise Bonner. From 2004 to 2007, Carlin Glynn, Stephen Lang, and Grant shared creative leadership of the Actors Studio. For Lifetime Television in the early 2000s, Grant produced a run of intimate portrait episodes that honored a variety of successful women. She had a brief theatrical comeback in 2013 when she starred in one performance of The Gin Game as part of a fundraiser for the Island Music Guild’s development initiatives. This actress portrayed Fonsia Dorsey, while Frank Buxton played Weller Martin. Dinah Manoff, Grant’s daughter, oversaw the production. Lee Grant made a brief appearance in Taylor A. Purdee’s 2020 movie Killian & the Comeback Kids after a fourteen-year absence. AFI Docs at the Guggenheim Symposium and a program titled “20th Century Woman: The Documentary Films of Lee Grant” honored Grant’s career as a documentarian in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the country’s first virtual repertory film series. She remains the only Academy Award-winning performer who has also served as the director of an Academy Award-winning documentary as of 2022.
A look at her awards and nominations
For her roles in The Landlord (1970), Shampoo (1975), and Voyage of the Damned (1976), Grant was nominated for three Academy Awards in the 1970s. She portrayed the frazzled mother of a bride in Plaza Suite (1971), a popular comedy written by Neil Simon and directed by Arthur Hiller, with Walter Matthau playing the groom. Grant played the killer opposite Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo in the Columbo episode ” Ransom for a Dead Man” in Walk 1971. She got an Emmy selection for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Film for that job. She was selected for a second Emmy under the category of Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role that year. In Shampoo (1975), Grant received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Warren Beatty’s elder girlfriend. In their studio’s fifty-year existence, the movie was Columbia’s largest success. Grant appeared in Shampoo, Hal Ashby’s second film, as an actor. When comparing her performances in the two films, critic Pauline Kael observed that she is a cool-style comedian and very good at her acting.
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