1. Lee Grant is one of the last surviving actors of the Hollywood blacklist era.
39 Facts About Lee Grant
1. 2.
Lee Grant reprised the role in the film adaptation, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and winning the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress.
3.
Lee Grant's career was interrupted when she was blacklisted for 12 years after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
4.
Lee Grant returned to prominence with her role in the television series Peyton Place, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Drama Series.
5.
Lee Grant appeared in supporting roles in In the Heat of the Night, Valley of the Dolls, and The Landlord, receiving Academy Award nominations for the latter, as well as Shampoo and Voyage of the Damned, winning for Shampoo.
6.
Lee Grant transitioned to directing in the 1980s, focusing on documentaries and television films.
7.
Lee Grant won the Directors Guild of America Award for Nobody's Child while her film Down and Out in America tied for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, making her the only Academy Award-winning actor to direct an Academy Award-winning documentary.
8.
Lee Grant continued directing into the 2000s while occasionally making acting appearances.
9.
Lee Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in Manhattan, the only child of Witia, a child care worker, and Abraham W Rosenthal, a realtor and educator.
10.
Lee Grant's father was born in New York City, to Polish Jewish immigrants, and her mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant who, along with her sister Fremo, left Odessa to escape the pogroms.
11.
Lee Grant's birthday 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.
12.
Lee Grant made her stage debut in L'Oracolo at the Metropolitan Opera in 1931 and later joined the American Ballet as an adolescent.
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Lee Grant graduated from high school and won a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where she studied under Sanford Meisner.
14.
Lee Grant undertook further study with Uta Hagen at the HB Studio.
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Lee Grant later enrolled in the Actors Studio in New York.
16.
Lee Grant had her first stage ballet performance in 1933 at the Metropolitan Opera House.
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Lee Grant established herself as a dramatic method actress on and off Broadway, earning praise for her first major role as a shoplifter in Detective Story in 1949.
18.
Lee Grant made her film debut two years later in the 1951 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.
19.
Lee Grant said she enjoyed working under director William Wyler, who helped guide her.
20.
Lee Grant was only a kid, a beautiful young girl with extraordinary talent and a big future.
21.
Lee Grant was so good that she earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her very first film role.
22.
Lee Grant appeared in a number of plays, two feature films, and in a few small television roles during her blacklisted years.
23.
On stage, Lee Grant starred in the Broadway production of Two for the Seesaw.
24.
In 1968, Lee Grant appeared in an episode of Mission Impossible, portraying the wife of a US diplomat who goes undercover to discredit a rogue diplomat.
25.
Lee Grant received three Academy Award nominations in the 1970s for The Landlord, Shampoo, and Voyage of the Damned.
26.
In March 1971, Lee Grant played the murderer in the Columbo pilot episode "Ransom for a Dead Man", playing opposite Peter Falk's Lieutenant Columbo.
27.
Lee Grant reunited with Peter Falk on Broadway in the original production of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, written by Neil Simon; the playwright said that his "first and only choice" for the part was Lee Grant, who he said was equally at home with dramatists such as Chekhov or Sidney Kingsley, yet could be "hilariously funny" when the script called for it, for she was able to portray essential honesty in her acting.
28.
Lee Grant won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress playing Warren Beatty's older lover in Shampoo.
29.
Shampoo was the second film in which Lee Grant acted under director Hal Ashby.
30.
Lee Grant made a guest appearance in Empty Nest, in which her daughter Dinah Manoff co-starred.
31.
In 1980, Lee Grant directed her first feature film, Tell Me a Riddle, a story about an aging Jewish couple.
32.
In 1986, Lee Grant directed Down and Out in America which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
33.
Lee Grant became the first female director to win the Directors Guild of America Award.
34.
Lee Grant starred in an HBO remake of Plaza Suite in 1982, co-starring with Jerry Orbach, both playing three different characters in three acts.
35.
In 1992, Lee 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.
36.
In 2001, Lee Grant portrayed Louise Bonner in David Lynch's critically acclaimed Mulholland Drive.
37.
From 2004 to 2007, Carlin Glynn, Stephen Lang, and Lee Grant served as co-artistic directors for the Actors Studio.
38.
In 2013, Lee 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.
39.
Lee Grant played Fonsia Dorsey opposite Frank Buxton as Weller Martin; her daughter Dinah Manoff directed the production.