Lee Grant

Is her version of Plaza Suite available anywhere? I could only find a few clips online but would love to see it.

My favorite Lee Grant performance was in The Spell, a wonderful TV movie from the mid 70s.

I read her book. Some of it was good. Plastic face, unable to cope with age. That’s about all the dirt. She fucked Warren Beatty & was happy about it until he became obsessed with Dolly Parton - Dolly wasn’t having it

R1 no! I've been looking for it for years! Another great one HBO did was Bess Armstrong and Richard Thomas in Barefoot in the Park. Again, very funny, and it blew the lame ass movie version away.

R3 She IS strangely attractive in Shampoo. I think if I were I woman, I'd wanna be her Shampoo character.

R2 I'll see it out.

seek it out.

I loved her in an early Columbo were she plays a wicked murderers who takes Columbo up in her plane

I think she pretty much said fuck it after her blacklist sympathy Oscar for Shampoo (love her but it was the second worst s. actress winner in the 70s only behind Helen Hayes who Lee ironically lost to) and pretty much did paycheck shit like Omen 2 and Visiting Hours. She did direct a documentary about the homeless that won an Oscar in 1986. She lost so much momentum on the blacklist but came back strongly in her middle age. Hope she lives to 100!

Here she is being her campy, imo best self in Airport '77.

I posted above. Re : her book. The chapters are titled for easy access to the dirt. Example (If i remember right: ) Blacklisted. Or Making Shampoo.

You fags are slipping. Lee as Miriam "I'm going to heat up the Lasagna" Polar.

In the late '70s Lee Grant had the same hairdo as my mom's shih-tzu.

Love her in Defending Your Life. And I even love her in trash like Visiting Hours. I found that movie very scary.

She is so good as a fragile mentally unstable mother who hooks up with a garage mechanic in The NEON CEILING.

Also stars Violet Beauregarde (sp?) who is funny and intense.

Real name: Lyova Haskell Rosenthal

lee grant tcm tribute to ida lupino

Paramount+ has [italic]the Detective Story[/italic] which includes Lee Grant at the beginning playing a shoplifter.

She wowed me as a teenager in In The Heat of the Night. "What is WRONG with you people?!" A question I had been wanting to ask my birth family in exactly that tone of voice for years.

I hate the movie of Plaza Suite. I don't even think it's a good play. But I'd give it another chance with Grant and Orbach.

Her grandson Dashiell, Dinah Manoff’s son, was killed in a car accident a few years back.

She did an interview with Alan Locher a month or so ago.

Locher's a former soap opera PR guy who's mostly been talking to soap stars during the pandemic, but somehow, he landed Grant and her daughter Dinah Manoff.

She was so good in the Columbo episode, Ransom for a Dead Man

She was wonderful in "Defending Your Life". It's an underrated film, but a good one. Available streaming on Cinemax or Sundance.

Lee Grant was offered the role of Alexis on Dynasty. After Sophia Loren turned down the part, the Shapiros felt that Lee could be a great Alexis, after she played a villainess on Peyton Place (which Lee won an Emmy for)

But Lee turned it down, as she didn't want to be tied down to a series, as she wanted to focus on Directing.

Yet Lee still continued to act, playing an "Alexis" type on the mini-series "Bare Essence"

Here is a scene with Lee playing opposite Linda Evans, (imagine Lee as Alexis and Linda as Krystle from "Dynasty")

I’ve been on a Lee Grant kick lately, having seen The Mafu Cage and Visiting Hours recently. I’ve always liked her, and she had the best hair in the 70s. Cool lady.

I’ve heard Jessica Walter, Sophia Loren and Liz Taylor being offered Alexis, never Lee. I really can’t imagine her as Alexis tbh.

Even as a kid, I found her look very unusual. She was so cool and sexy. That face photographed beautifully.

R18 the final segment is fantastic. She makes it a comedic tour de force. She's also the best thing about the movie. But she's better in the HBO play, playing to a live audience.

R23 that scene is hysterical. As much as I love Joan Collins, Lee Grant would've been really fun. Though, maybe Lee Grant once a week is a bit much. You can't have caviar EVERY night for dinner, after all.

In a precursor to her Defending Your life role, at 1:46:40 in the below video she's wonderful as a defending angel in The World of Sholem Aleichem.

Loved her and her personal theme music in Peyton Place

Her husband would spend all their money on films I tried to get made so she had to take any acting job that paid.

That said the way she screams DAMIEN!!!! at the end of Omen 2 is iconic.

He^^ not I (Lol)

Lee Grant’s more than okay, but Ronee Blakley deserved to win that 1976 Oscar instead of her.

She and my father go to the same eye doctor. I began speaking with her when I saw her there a few years ago and she was nice…after sizing me up…she has that fabulous old lady Jewish shrewd New Yorker poker face…but who wouldn’t be nice to a 50 year old son taking his 85 year old father to the doctor and telling you “I love your work?” She is teeny-tiny. Maybe 90 pounds and maybe five feet tall.

Then, I saw her speak at my friend’s senior center. She said The Landlord was her favorite movie of hers. She said the Peyton Place series was the first big part she read for after the blacklist lifted and that she had been so forgotten by the mid 1960s that she lied and said she was ten years younger than she actually was and the casting people believed her. She said she got her first plastic surgery right before shooting began.

We got to ask questions. Someone asked about working with Warren Beatty in Shampoo and she said “What can I say. We fucked. It’s all true about him.” The people in the audience gasped, it was hysterical.

I asked her about her Ill-fated sitcom 1970s “Fay,” and she had a whole story about drama at the network and why it got cancelled.

I think she’s amazing and yes, under-appreciated.

Watching her now in the above-mentioned Colombo episode (I’ve been “obsessed” with the show lately, after resisting it for years). (Though it’s really more a series of TV movies—73 minutes in length, typical of early 70s—than episodes of a weekly drama series, isn’t it.)

r35 I love the one with Janet Leigh

Yiiikes, poor Lee, she's heading into Lion Lady territory.

What are all those weird lumps and areas of white skin?

There were much worse photos, but they weren't clear.

[quote] I’ve been on a Lee Grant kick lately,

Now [italic]there's[/italic] a clause you'll only read on Datalounge!

At night all cats are gray.

I liked her book too. She is pretty blunt about her own foibles and vanities, and has had a roller coaster life and career.

Lee was good in Detective Story. She did the stage play and then the movie directed by William Wyler.

I’m gonna heat up the lasagna.

With Dinah on Empty Nest. Her face was already looking odd here, and it was 30 years ago.

r19, and I know it shouldn't be relevant, but the grandson was a beautiful kid.

Grant was only 28 when she did Shampoo, she's always looked wretched due to her smoking and drug abuse. She's always lied about her age.

That would make her born in the ‘40s, R45. Your math is all wrong.

.,.,

OP's clip is amazing - they read out all the nominees, told a few lame jokes plus Lee's walk up to the podium and full acceptance speech [bold]all within 2 minutes and 14 seconds[/bold]

R45, her daughter was born in 1957. If she was 28 when Shampoo was released in the mid-‘70s, that would make her a 10-year old Mother.

Well, she DOES admit to having led a wild life, R49.

I forgot she was also in Night Slaves (1970), an ABC Movie of the Week, with the beautiful James Franciscus.

Interstate 90 is a fuckhole, [R44]. I've driven on it enough times. And Snoqualmie Pass is scarier than anything *during the day*! At night it's frightening. You realize how small you are driving on this teeny ribbon jack hammered out of huge mountains.

I’m recalling that video of her not too long ago at LAX where she had the carriage of someone half her age.

Grant received her second Oscar nod for Hal Ashby's The Landlord (1970). It may be her best film performance. Ashby also directed Grant in Shampoo (1975)

R20, ..."somehow he landed Grant."

Oh puleaze, she'd do an interview at a Payless Shoe Store if they promised to keep her 200ft from any seeing customer.

Correct. After all, the title of her autobiography is "I said Yes to Everything".

In this interview, she says she was blacklisted (from movies/tv) from the age of 24 to 36. The reporter replies, "The prime of your life." Grant: Can you imagine?

Well, no. But there are other jobs.

She's made a career of being a victim, a martyr. Meanwhile, her contemporary, Cloris Leachman, just moved on, and had a VERY successful career.

I thought she was great back in the day. I appreciated how she fully committed even if the roles were campy and lower quality work like The Spell and Omen 2. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Spell is on YouTube. A lot of old TV movies are.

She got blacklisted and wasn't in the communist party. but her husband Arnold Manoff was and got named by Edward Dymtryk. Also she landed in Red Channels after giving an impassioned eulogy at the memorial service for actor J. Edward Bromberg, whose death she blamed on the stress of being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

She hams it up in Cornel Wilde's STORM FEAR, made in 1955. So she wasn't completely off the screen in the 1950s.

She won Best Actress at Cannes for THE DETECTIVE STORY, even though it's pretty much a bit part.

One of her first movie roles after being blacklisted was playing a hooker opposite Dick Van Dyke in "Divorce American Style." (1967). The two have a memorable scene together in which Van Dyke goes to her apartment and then changes his mind and goes home to his wife Debbie Reynolds. The movie is a comedy but this scene wasn't played just for laughs.

It's a brief role for Grant but somehow I always remember her in it.

Her sad whittling started with the nose, around the time she dropped the Rosenthal.

Not that I blame her. It was a different time.

Her birthday is Hallowe'en.

If she was 28 when she did Shampoo how old was she when she did Detective Story? 4? And let's say she cut her age by 10 years. She was 14? And they were blacklisting teens? Wow.

I saw her at the theater a few years ago and she looked like a burn victim. She always seemed like a pain in the ass, for good or for bad, and she probably got the career she deserved.

She still seems so alive and curious at her age. We should all be so lucky.

Behold the nonagenarian Lee Grant at LAX.

Her face, well, but her mind and her movements in that clip are of someone in their 60s.

Re: her age, per Wikipedia:

Her date of birth 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.

Which would suggest she was in her late 30s when she won the Oscar for Shampoo in 1976.

WHAT NO love for lee in her role in "for ladies only" where her older (old enough to be his mother) wealthy woman character seduces male stripper gregory harrison into her bed (and amazingly he kept coming back for more!)...

in real life at the time, harrison was 31, grant was 56...although he looked younger and he looked older....

[quote] Her birthday is Hallowe'en.

You are the only person besides Drew Droege as Chloe Sevigny who still puts the apostrophe in "Halloween."

I hope you also pronounce it as he/she does.

The Spell is indeed on YouTube and if she was 50-ish there, she looked great!

I recall seeing Shampoo which is a total bore and being underwhelmed by Lee i it. She won the Oscar for this?! Her competition was Brenda Vaccaro for Once Is Not Enough, Lily Tomlim for Nashville, Ronee Blakley for Nashville, and Sylvia Miles for Farewell, My Lovely.

R67 I saw her speak in person r34 and she said she put it out there that she was 10 years younger in the 1960s but she was born in the 1920s—I forget which year—and she said she has no problem telling the truth now.

Have we discussed her turn as the delicious and devious Ava from Bare Essence? A star studded prime time soap mini series starring Genie Francis, Linda Evans, and Donna Mills -- but Grant stole the show as Ava.

can't find the whole thing but here's part of it where she plays stepson Bruce Scarecrow Boxlietner like a fiddle. at 32:29;

Dinah Manoff is a wonderful actress and played Lee’s role in an LA stage production of Detective Story.

R73 I remember this. She was great. The glitzy TV movies of the 1980s were great.

r73, meet r23

She was also amazing in an episode of Mission: Impossible as the wife of a senator or something. They had to have an insider so it couldn’t be an operative. It must have been another early role after coming back from the blacklist.

She reminds me of the lady from the Omen.

R78, she starred in Omen II (1978).

r71 Grant has said that she won for the worst of all her Oscar nominated performances. It was a political win for her comeback from blacklisting. (Plus the Nashville women were kind of equally acclaimed and cancelled each other out. At the Golden Globes 4 of them from Nashville were nominated and Brenda Vacarro somehow won.)

It's funny in the clip at r1 they mistake Susan Sarandon for Ronee Blakely. She's up there when the do the split screen. And didn't Joel Grey pronouce Ronee Blakely's name wrong? Poor woman. She was great in that film. She deserved better.

(Sarandon isn't even that famous at this point I don't think. She's just there with then husband Chris Sarandon who is nominated.)

Was she trying to be funny with her name?

[quote]R73 Have we discussed her turn as the delicious and devious Ava from Bare Essence?

As a side note, Grant was replaced by Lucille Bluth when the TV movie became a series.

Choose sides.

R83 Yet another “almost-Alexis.” We’ve gone full circle.

I still wish old, wobbly Jane Wyman had played Alexis… just for laughs.

Grant was born in 1925 so she's a very spritely 96. She's going to bury us all.

some things were mean to be....I can't imagine anyone else as Alexis but Joan Collins

tho I do love Lee Grant

R71 I find her absolutely delectable in Shampoo. Watch her putting together that her young daughter has fucked Warren Beatty, and deciding she didn't care. She's really funny in it. And the movie is a classic.

Lee Grant starred in a TV series called "Fay" if I recall correctly. I think it was in the 1970s or very early 1980S.

It’s kind of amazing they didn’t give the Oscar to Lee in 1971 with the blacklist thing fresher on voters minds. Helen Hayes somehow ended up winning for Airport which is probably the worst ever supporting actress win. Granted the competition was tougher in 1971, but still anyone of the actresses nominated deserved it over Hayes.

In her book it's her performance in "Voyage of the Damned" she is most critical of and surprised to have been nominated for, but maybe she now feels it's "Shampoo". Hal Ashby directed both "The Landlord" and "Shampoo", and she says he was her favorite director.

I’ll heat up the lasagna.

Was she nominated for supporting for VOTD? Clearly everyone remembers all her lines from the film...

R93 lol no. But she picked up her first Emmy around that time frame for Peyton Place.

Dinah...

Lee's long resume includes at least two VOTDs: Valley of the Dolls and Voyage of the Damned.

r89 1975. Lee was nominated for an Emmy for it. My father and I watched its first episode and he told me at the time that it was the first time shows were on TV simultaneously that starred a single woman character (Mary), divorced (Rhoda), a widow (Phyllis), and now, separated (Fay). I asked Lee about it at a speaking engagement and she said the network (NBC) supremely fucked up every aspect of it. It was created by Susan Harris: creator of Soap and, of course, The Golden Girls.

Wow Dinah Manhof could really sing. She should have done more musicals.

Are they lip synching? Patrick Cassidy seems to pull the mike away a bunch of times too soon.

I have access to her insane Tonight Show appearance after Fay was cancelled. She dubs the head of NBC the "Mad programmer" for moving her show around several times, and then cancelling it all within a few weeks. Lee also gives the finger to him, which was covered up by a bar at the bottom of the screen. It was wild.

R95 to quote Beavis and Butthead "uuuuh that sucked."

THAT'S Diana Manhoff? She stinks on ice! I had her confused with Diana Canova.

This person is really Lyova Rosenthal.

R99, please post it, or post a link!

That appearance is a TV legend.

R102 the problem is, I'm lucky enough to have access to the site where you can license clips. It's AMAZING. Every single show of Carson's and many of his guest hosts that still exist are on that site. Unfortunately, before 1972, it's very spotty. Some short sighted moron at NBC decided to save money by reusing the videotapes. Unfathomable. But there ARE some amazing, full color videotaped shows from 1965 on.

When the show was 90 minutes it was vastly different from the version I remember from the '80s. It was more intelligent, more cerebral. It's a really cool thing to sit down and watch after a long day. Helps you unwind.

Anyway, so, I don't want to post clips partly because they're really nice over there and I don't want to screw them over like that, and partly because I don't wanna lose my access

I have to think on it, but what I might to is post the audio of the appearance, with maybe a couple of stills. Including her giving the finger with the bar on the screen. I doubt they'd care. I'll throw it up on Google drive for a day or something. Or R102 if you want to create an email, I can share the audio with you personally. We'll see

R98, while yes, she's at least in tune, that's pretty sad that you think that's example of someone 'who could really sing'.

bitchy musical queen at r104

I think she's very entertaining

R103 I remember the 90 minute format well. I can’t believe I would stay up until 1AM to watch it on school nights. Carson had it and possibly, for a while, Merv Griffin.

Lee Grant >>>> Lou Grant

I did a film project with Lee Grant years ago. She only had one small scene and so insisted on wearing her own clothes but invited me to her apartment to go through her closet with her to choose it. I loved her! Very classy lady.

Oh my God, R108. That sounds wonderful. Man, she's one person I really wish I could've gotten to know. She seems like she'd be a ton of fun, and, I don't know, I just get the sense I would really vibe with her.

Lee Grant is magnificent. She elevated every film she appeared in.

Lee is a survivor. Love her.

I fucking LOVE when she does the tough Jewish broad schtick.

Does anyone have her and Jerry Orbach in Plaza Suite? It's wonderful. So much better than the doa movie.

If she showed her tits she’d work more.

That was her problem sort of r113. I saw her speak at a lecture. She said she was blacklisted during the prime years of an actresses life. Late twenties or thirties or something like that. I don't know the exact ages she was blacklisted from.

She said her addiction to plastic surgery and lying about her age stemmed from that. She felt she'd lost a decade and was trying to recapture it.

She couldn't get roles in theater during that decade? People who were blacklisted had few problems in NY.

I haven't read this whole thread so forgive me if it's already been discussed before, but Lee's big early break came from her Oscar-nominated performance in the1951 film DETECTIVE STORY, playing a naive young shoplifter, who's arrested and waiting in a police station to be charged. The character is very middle class and ordinary, not street trash, and she's actually kind of the comic relief as the revelations of the main rather tension-filled story unreel. I could be mistaken about this but I believe her role was originally written as a young first time streetwalker, not a shoplifter, in the Broadway play (by Sidney Kingsley) but was changed for censorship reasons for the film.

The film stars Kirk Douglas and Eleanor Parker and is worth a look. Great storytelling and ensemble cast.

Addenda to my post above ^^^

Apparently, Lee created the role of the shoplifter in the Broadway play and, doing my own little research, I see the character was actually called Shoplifter (no name) so the character was never written as a streetwalker. When I first posted above I checked the wiki entry for the play Detective Story and Lee is not mentioned at all so I assumed she wasn't in the production. But looking the play up on the IBDB data base, she is listed.

Anyway, watch the film! It's great and she's wonderful in it.

When Lee was blacklisted she stood by for Anne Bancroft in Two for the Seesaw on broadway and later replaced her.

He hated spunk.

Be Kind Rewind has a new episode devoted to Lee Grant.

There’s a great episode of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast with Lee. She’s very intelligent and has seen everything. She dishes on The Valley of the Dolls and The Swarm and (surprise) her relationship with Princess Grace of Monaco!

Take a break.

Thanks, r121! I’ll listen to this later!

Thanks for posting that link, R123.

The "Columbo" TV series of which Lee guested in her episode was part of NBC's early 1970s "Sunday Mystery Theatre" or something lineup of regularly rotating weekly mystery shows that alternated with each other, among them Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James's "McMillan & Wife" and Dennis Weaver's "McCloud," in 90-minute (with commercial breaks) scheduling timeblocks.

At the 59:00 mark in the r123 interview she talks about Carol Matthau, who cropped up as Anne Baxter’s understudy in the Broadway thread recently.

For anyone who’s read the book, what does she say about working with Our Faye in “Voyage of the Damned”?

They have a scene where Faye shears off Lee’s hair just like she did Christina’s.

Did Faye say to Lee as she cut off her tresses, 'I'd rather have you die bald than looking like tramp!'

Oh please, wait until you have Betty coming at you brandishing scissors.

Lee Grant isn't a 'survivor', she's a victim, a professional victim, and she'd be the first person to tell you that.

Well, can’t someone be a victim AND a survivor, Cloris?

Why must everything be [italic]a contest?!