Background and career
Lee Grant (born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal; October 31, during the mid-1920s) is an American actress, documentarian, and director. In a career spanning over eight decades, she won an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Directors Guild of America Award, in addition to nominations for five Golden Globe Awards. She is one of the last surviving actors of the Hollywood blacklist era. Having begun her career as a child performing in stage ballet, Grant rose to prominence as an adult on Broadway, making her debut in Detective Story (1949) as the Shoplifter. She reprised the role in the film adaptation (1951), earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and winning the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. Her career was interrupted when she was blacklisted for 12 years after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. During this period, she worked as an acting teacher and took minor television and theater roles under pseudonyms. Grant returned to prominence with her role in the television series Peyton Place (1965–1966), winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Drama Series. She appeared in supporting roles in In the Heat of the Night, Valley of the Dolls (both 1967), and The Landlord (1970), receiving Academy Award nominations for the latter, as well as Shampoo (1975) and Voyage of the Damned (1976), winning for Shampoo. Grant transitioned to directing in the 1980s, focusing on documentaries and television films. She won the Directors Guild of America Award for Nobody’s Child (1986) while her film Down and Out in America (1986) tied for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, making her the only Academy Award-winning actor to direct an Academy Award-winning documentary. She continued directing into the 2000s while occasionally making acting appearances.
Lee Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in Manhattan, the only child of Witia (née Haskell), a child care worker, 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 who, along with her sister Fremo, left Odessa to escape the pogroms. The family resided at 148th Street and Riverside Drive in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Her 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. Grant made her stage debut 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.
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 first major role as a shoplifter in Detective Story in 1949. Grant made her film debut two years later in the 1951 film version (Detective Story), 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 (HUAC). Her name soon after appeared in the publication Red Channels, and as a result, for the next twelve 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:Lee was only a kid, a beautiful young girl with extraordinary talent and a big future. You could see it. She was so good that she earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her very first film role. But because Eddie Dmytryk named her husband, Lee Grant was blacklisted before her film career even had a chance to begin. Of course, she refused to testify about the man to whom she was married, and it took years before anyone would hire her for another picture. Grant appeared in a number of plays, two feature films, and in a few small television roles during her blacklisted years. In 1953, she played Rose Peabody in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, had featured supporting roles in the film dramas Storm Fear in 1955, and Middle of the Night in 1959. On stage, Grant starred in the Broadway production of Two for the Seesaw. In 1959, she succeeded Anne Bancroft in the lead female role. That same year, she had a supporting role in the romantic drama Middle of the Night.
By the time Grant's name was removed from the blacklist in the mid-1960s, she was the divorced mother of a daughter, Dinah. Grant began re-establishing her television and movie career. In her autobiography, she writes:Dinah was my grail, my constant; nothing and no one could get between us. Dinah and my need to support her financially, morally, viscerally, and my rage at those who had taken twelve working, acting years from my life, were what motivated me. 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 1963, she won acclaim for her stage performance in the off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Maids. In 1967, she played the distraught widow of a murder victim in the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night. In 1968, Grant appeared in an episode of Mission Impossible, portraying the wife of a U.S. diplomat who goes undercover to discredit a rogue diplomat. In 1969, she had supporting roles in the crime drama The Big Bounce and science fiction drama Marooned, but they were not successful.
