Lee Grant

Lee Grant is an American actress and director whose Hollywood career was interrupted for a dozen years by the McCarthy-era blacklist and resumed with a string of awarded performances. Born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in Manhattan on October 31, 1925 (some sources give 1927), she trained at the Juilliard School and the Neighborhood Playhouse and joined the Actors Studio.

Her screen debut as the shoplifter in Detective Story earned a 1952 Academy Award nomination and a Cannes acting prize. Days later her name appeared in Red Channels after she refused to testify against her first husband, the writer Arnold Manoff; she was effectively shut out of film and television until 1964.

Returning in the Sidney Poitier picture In the Heat of the Night and the prime-time soap Peyton Place, for which she won an Emmy, she rebuilt steadily and won the 1976 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Hal Ashby's Shampoo. Further nominations came for The Landlord and Voyage of the Damned.

From the late 1970s she moved increasingly behind the camera, directing the feature Tell Me a Riddle and the Academy Award-winning documentary Down and Out in America in 1986. Her HBO documentary Women on Trial and her 2014 memoir I Said Yes to Everything chronicle the blacklist years.

The name Lee comes from the Old English leah, meaning woodland clearing or meadow, and is also used as a short form of names such as Leah, Leigh, and Leona. Unisex in modern American usage, it was given to her as a stage shortening, and she carries it with the directness that suits her on-screen presence.