Lee Grant - Career

Career

Grant studied acting at the NYC Neighborhood Playhouse under the guidance of Sanford Meisner before establishing herself as a dramatic actress on and off Broadway, earning praise for her role as a shoplifter in Detective Story, which began its run on March 23, 1949. She was a regular on the CBS soap opera, Search For Tomorrow in the early 1950s. She made her film debut two years later in the film version of the same name (Detective Story), receiving her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination, and winning the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to testify against her husband, the playwright Arnold Manoff, father of her two children, Grant refused to testify and was blacklisted, but continued to work in theater and resumed her film career in the early 1960s, appearing in the television series Peyton Place as Stella Chernak. She won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Drama for that role. In 1968, Grant appeared in a 3rd season episode of Mission Impossible, portraying the wife of a U.S. diplomat who goes undercover to discredit a rogue diplomat.

She received subsequent Academy Award nominations for The Landlord (1970), and Voyage of the Damned (1976). She won an Oscar for Shampoo (1975). She has directed several documentary films, including Down and Out in America (1986) which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. In recent years she directed a series of Intimate Portrait episodes (for Lifetime Television) that celebrated a diverse range of accomplished women.

Grant appeared as a cunning killer on an episode of Columbo, for which she was nominated for an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress - Miniseries or a Movie. Competing against herself, she received the award for her other Emmy-nominated performance in The Neon Ceiling. She had her own sitcom, Fay, which was canceled after only eight episodes. She made a guest appearance on Empty Nest, in which her daughter Dinah Manoff starred. 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.