Lee Grant

She always exudes sophistication but has an anger simmering underneath. She can pull off drama, comedy, and camp, often at the same time. She's one of my favorites.

Her ex-husband Arnold Manoff (who was a Communist) gave her up to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and she was blacklisted for 12 years at what would have been the height of her marketable Hollywood youth/beauty. That might explain some of the saltiness.

Her memoir, "My First 100 Years in Hollywood" was very funny.

She got some excellent work done, then some horrible work.

This video explains it all. The channel is one of my favorites.

She became a documentarian. She's active on Twitter and sometimes mentions others who were blacklisted.

Her daughter was a bit player in "Ordinary People," and the weakest part of "Empty Nest."

We've had a billion threads on Lee Grant over the years. Here's one -

Here's another

Say what you will about Empty Nest, I thought Dinah Manoff and Kristy MacNicol were totally believable as odd-couple siblings. Dinah was also so great as Marty in "Grease."

Dinah Manoff is great. Begone Manoff-Hater Troll.

In fairness to Dinah, the entire premise of "Empty Nest" was shit. And unlike Kristy M., at least she didn't quit the show!

Something about that show - and the fact that the Westons lived next door to a much cooler household - just grated on me.

[quote] Her memoir, "My First 100 Years in Hollywood" was very funny.

Was it? Because it was called "I Said Yes to Everything."

Mary Louise Wilson had the autobio called "My First Hundred Years in Showbiz."

Her daughter was the funniest woman on "Empty Nest."

One of the most talented, versatile actresses who ever lived. I love her!

Dinah of the Pack

Some of her documentaries are quite good and engaging. They were available on Criterion Channel a while ago. She had one discussing trans people and sex changes, which was interesting, especially considering it was made (I'm guessing) in the early 70s.

*

She's fiercely intelligent, and a great performer who somehow bridged the gap between campy, soap-opera style performances common in Golden Age Hollywood, and modern Lee Strasberg / NYC naturalism. If she had been allowed to work during her peak years she could have done some excellent films, but her CV has a lot of hidden gems anyway. You have to love a girl who has been in everything from Peyton Place to Mulholland Drive. She often steals a film she's in, such as Detective Story, The Landlord, and Shampoo (she was barely in it but her middle finger is legendary and she nails the part).

She also directed the Best Documentary Oscar winner about the housing/homeless crisis, Down and Out in America. However in those days only the producers got the award. I also loved her documentary The Willmar 8, and her book was a breezy read. She's lived quite a life. The work she's had on her face is a bit rough but she's a million years old and last time I saw her she was still very spritely and able to hold a clear conversation.

Lee Grant starred in a TV series titled "Fay" in the 1970s.

I loved her in The Landlord about a rich WASP playboy who buys an apartment building in the ghetto. Grant plays his mother who takes on the decoration of his apartment. She comes to deliver some fabric for the drapes and ends up getting drunk with Pearl Bailey and taking home a ham hock in her purse. Look at 1:02:43

She steals the show in Valley of the dolls, no easy feet, just sitting at a corner table observing her brother and Jennifer.

Always gets a big laugh at gay screenings.

^feat

Thanks! Keep it coming.

Is she better or worse than Lee Remick?

she's no MICHELLE LEE

You can see her in a vintage Perry Mason episode, The Case of the Crafty Kidnapper, and decide for yourself. As others have pointed out, the blacklisted years severely damaged her career. I was privileged to see her in a Neil Simon comedy in LA more than 50 years ago, and she was much better than his hackneyed material deserved.

she's an ugly , marginally talented one-note C-list actress with a shit nose-job, who's coasted on her blacklisting for 50 years.

You know, R23, you make a great point. Lee would have been AMAZING in one of those trashy 80's prime-time soaps, a great balls-to-the-wall shoulder-pad villain. Where was her "Falcon Crest?"

Here's an interesting PBS show about the 1976 Academy Awards that features Lee prominently because she was a winner, with the forever ugly, presumptuous, still closeted Lily Tomlin getting too much of the show's attention.

...And ESPECIALLY for someone blacklisted for 12 years and accused of Communism. The truly dish-served-cold way to respond to such allegations in the Reagan era would have been a star turn on "Dallas."

Michelle Lee is no Michele Lee, r23.

Happy 98th Birthday!!!

R25, she may have milked her blacklisting a bit but Lee Grant does not fit any of the rest of your description. I have enjoyed her performance and presence every time I’ve seen her.

As she says in her autobiography, she had a face lift at age 29.

[quote]campy, soap-opera style performances common in Golden Age Hollywood

That's bullshit.

Fuck this Jurassic cunt for giving birth to the most heinous actress ever to work with both Walter Matthau and Dody Goodman!

Dinah Manoff won a Tony for the Neil Simon play I Want to be in Pictures and she was excellent.

Oops. Make that I OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES. She did the movie, too.

Well, then she must have done the complete opposite in the movie version, because she fucking stunk out loud in that.

She got a lot of attention on the TV version of Peyton Place (which was on network TV three nights a week, at its peak). She was on 70 episodes (IMDB says). In her autobiography she says Mia Farrow (as Allison McKenzie) asked her, after playing a scene with her, what she thought of her (Mia's) performance. Lee said she had no idea, she was acting with her, not watching her performance.

With Glenda Farrell, Kim Novak and Fredric March in Middle Of The Night (1958).

*(or 1959)

Dinah’s son died in a car accident a few years ago when we has 19.

He sounds like he was a good kid, and cute too.

Her scene chewing in Airport 77 was the only decent thing in that movie.

Grant was gorgeous and obviously from a similar Russian tribe as Natalie Wood. They look similar.

Huge fan of her work and her daughter Dinah is no slouch. In the original 80s TV miniseries BARE ESSENCE, Lee Grant played the main villain Ava Marshall. Ava had a southern accent and Lee TORE IT UP. She was so good. Unfortunately she didn’t transfer over to the TV series. The part was taking over by the late great Jessica Walter who was great in the role but I would’ve prefer Lee.

THE LANDLORD (1970) is my favorite performance from her and a big reason why it’s my favorite Director Hal Ashby film. She was absolutely hilarious as the landlord’s mother Mrs. Enders. Lee win an Oscar for that other Ashby film SHAMPOO, but her Landlord performance was more worthy. I highly recommend this film.

Her carriage as an early nonagenarian was nothing less than remarkable.

Did she go to Kim Novak's plastic surgeon?

R5, her daughter was NOT a bit player in “Ordinary People.” She had a significant role, which she superbly performed.

She's one of the fucking BEST. Her performance in Shampoo alone scores her gay icon status.

Another outstanding performance was in Plaza Suite. Not the movie, but a videotaped version that ran on HBO circa 1981, with a live audience opposite Jerry Orbach. She was HYSTERICAL in the final act, and having the audiene there for her to play off of made a difference.

Definitely an under rated diva.

Loved her in Omen 2.

R44 YES! Watch the way she grabs and hangs in the strap of her purse. That is a gesture a 33 year old would make, not 93. She carries herself decades younger.

She directed 'What Sex am I' back in 1985, long before the current obsession with trans identity came into play. I know this is DL, but it deserves a sympathetic watch.

Dinah was awful in "Empty Nest" but everyone on that show was insufferable.

Dinah Manoff and Stockard Channing were the only Pink Ladies worth giving a damn about in GREASE. Dinah was also an absolute scene stealer in SOAP in her short lived role as Danny Dallas’ wife Elaine. Give Dinah her fucking props. I’m sure Lee is very proud of her daughter.

Exhibit A in the case of Good Acting vs. Dinah Manoff.

She is 1000% DELECTABLE here. Just *chef's kiss* Divine.

No one can heat up a lasagna like Lee can.

She also made an appearance in Backstairs At The Whitehouse as Grace Coolidge wife of President Calvin Coolidge.

R54- He does not look 👀 particularly heterosexual in this scene.

Wonderful as the prosecutor in "Defending Your Life".

R53- She looks like Kristy McNichol in that trailer.

And she acts worse than Tatum O'Neal

I ADORE her bit in Shalom Aleichem. She's utterly delightful. Her part is at 35:25.

Coolidge was president in 1925 when Lee was born.

She's another Hollywood hustler, using whatever happens to further her publicity. She plays down the Emmy she won in the sixties to make it seem as though she was suffering in Beverly Hills. Good actress, but a Hollywood player.

I watched my mother's favorite '60s TV show, Peyton Place, on YouTube during Covid lockdown. And I was knocked out by Lee Grant as Stella Chernak, a ferocious performance that got her an Emmy. I wrote about it here.

I guess I'm the only one on DL who liked Empty Nest. And shockingly, I liked it a lot more than The Golden Girls.

Heavens to Betsy. She's still alive.

Land sakes alive.

Dinah Manoff was really, really funny in the early episodes of Soap, throwing out insults with amazing skill. But she got her big dramatic moment and she took it and ran.

BTW, there was a fair amount of criticism when Grant won for Shampoo because the front runner was thought to be Tomlin for Nashville. Ronee Blakely was also up for Nashville and Brenda Vaccaro had a lot of momentum for Once is Not Enough so it was a very strong year for the supporting.

R42 I don't know much about Russian tribes. Would Jews and gentiles be part of the same tribe?

Lee and Dinah are both scream queens, Lee for Visiting Hours…

…and Dinah for Child’s Play…

A top talent whose blacklisting was a scandalous episode in American history.

That being said, the only person who really shined in VOTD was Sharon Tate.

Sharon Tate? Because of her wooden acting?

She was great in the Columbo episode Ransom for a dead man.

She had a sitcom called Lee, created by the great Susan Harris. It was cancelled and Lee made an impassioned plea on the Tonight Show. She called the head of Programming the mad programmer and sounded very much like Howard Beale from Network. Many thought she was drunk, stoned or both.

It was called Fay, you little homosexual boy.

R76, you're right but if it was called Lee, it might have run longer than one season. It was the same season as Phyllis.

R75 is there a link to that episode?

I thought she was a bit stagey in Detective Story (her film debut) - all the actors who were also in the stage version were (Joseph Wiseman, e. g.). The Hollywood stars tended to be better. I think Pauline Kael said L. G. "moiders" the part with her Bronx accent. She had a line: "I tuk a beeag." (I took a bag.) She was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar and won Best Actress at Cannes. Then - the blacklist.

I thought Lee looked lovely in her trade mark middle years, and can totally see why she got plastic surgery young, she looks like a young Maureen Stapleton in "Detective Story." But somewhere along the way, Lee's become addicted to procedures... Still lover her though!

Lou Grant

I'll heat up the lasagna.

[quote] I thought Lee looked lovely in her trade mark middle years, and can totally see why she got plastic surgery young, she looks like a young Maureen Stapleton in "Detective Story”.

I think she said she got a face lift at 29 because she had been blacklisted throughout her 20s and was starting over in movies. It wasn’t supposed to significantly alter her features afaik. Just make her look younger. I think she looks terrible and freakish now.

Her daughter was Chucky’s first victim!

[quote]Her daughter was Chucky’s first victim!

See R71!

I love the way she screams DAMIEN!!! at the end of Omen 2.

lol . I LOVE R86, and agree.

How come Ellen Burstyn had such good work done and Lee Grant looks like she looks?

Well, there are only so many times you can stretch before your face can go any further. We're looking at spackle covered over by MAC Viva Glam.

She should have received an Oscar nomination for her performance in Airport '77

Ellen Burstyn's plastic surgeon deserves the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

OMG r91, that’s hilarious! 😂

My Shih-Tzu has the same haircut as mid-career Faye Grant...

I just watched Defending Your Life tonight for the first time in about 15 years, and I’d forgotten she was in it! She’s great.

From a review of Lee's memoir:

[quote]Best of all are the outrageous stories she tells about the incomparable Shelley Winters. The two actresses worked together on “The Balcony,” and Winter’s narcissistic bullying instantly clashed with Grant’s professionalism. Their uncomfortable rivalry eventually exploded during promotion for the film at the Playboy Club in New York. I won’t soon forget the image of Lee Grant literally chasing Shelley Winters across the grotto screaming “Cunt!” at the top of her lungs.

The first feature film she could get after "Detective Story," in the blacklist, was "Storm Fear" (1955). She looks quite different under a blonde wig and has fun in the small role of a brassy gun moll who meets a grisly end. It's an unbelievably bad movie, but, gee, Dennis Weaver was just about a 10/10 back then.

I just want to BE her character from Shampoo.

[quote]r26 Where was her "Falcon Crest?"

It was called BARE ESSENCE, set in the fragrance industry. Lee Grant just did the TV movie, though. Lucille Bluth replaced her in the series.

[Quote] Dinah Manoff is great. Begone Manoff-Hater Troll.

she was Chucky's first victim in Child's Play

Lee is great in Hal Ashby's The Landlord. for which she was nominatd for Best Supporting Actress. Ashby directed Shampoo.

LMAO

In 2023, Dinah Manhoff’s claim to fame is not winning a Tony, being an Oscar-winner’s daughter, appearing in Grease, or landing a role on a long-running sitcom—in which she appeared in every single episode.

It’s being Chucky’s first victim in the Child’s Play franchise!!!

Lee WAS excellent in 99% of her work. but yee gads her grieving Greek mother in It's My Party was horrendous. How do you get out acted by Olivia Newton-John?

R100, see R71

Did she sing? She would have been great as Carlotta in Follies.

Lee Grant was never the beauty that Ellen Burstyn was. You have an advantage as you age when you start out with magnificent bone structure.

I doubt she was a singer. Never saw her attempt to carry a tune.

Ellen had hers (and I think her last) right after filming her Oscar nominated role in (fuck, I am too lazy to find it- the disturbing one and she lost to Julia Roberts- Requiem for a Dream!!??)

At the academy awards she looked absolutely amazing.

Yes, R108, that was Requiem for a Dream.

Dinah Minoff was also great in the First Nudie Musical.

R96 Chasing someone and yelling cunt at them is the mark of a true professional.

R106 That’s such bullshit. Kim Novak was way more beautiful than Ellen Burstyn and look at her. Hedy Lamarr had bad work done too.

In The Landlord, she played with a faux-Hepburn accent (minus the Parkinson’s vocal fry)…she was brilliant.

Quite honestly, I think Lee Grant was a very good actress. A lot of talent. A reasonable amount of star quality. But not the greatest actress ever or a genius.

R112, good plastic results come down to bone structure (& skin quality). Ellen Burstyn had the kind of impeccable bone structure of which Kim Novak could only dream.

R114 I saw Lee just now, at Erewhon. I showed her your post. She told me to tell you “Bless your heart.”

A 2021 interview

[R110] Not to add more weirdness to this Bizarroworld thread, but Dinah Manoff wasn't in The First Nudie Musical.

That would be her Soap co-star Diana Canova, daughter of Judy Canova.

Diana Canova will always be remembered as Chucky's first victim in the original Child's Play.

(kidding)

R96 Winters and Grant worked together again in 1968s Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell which was the template for the awful Momma MIa!

[quote]Diana Canova will always be remembered as Chucky's first victim in the original Child's Play.

A Sally for the ages...

[Quote] In 2023, Dinah Manhoff’s claim to fame is not winning a Tony, being an Oscar-winner’s daughter, appearing in Grease, or landing a role on a long-running sitcom—in which she appeared in every single episode. It’s being Chucky’s first victim in the Child’s Play franchise!

It's all of the above as various posters would indicate. Never saw the sitcom she was on and know her from Ordinary People and Child's Play

She's legendary because of...

*

No one could play an angry cunt like Lee. Her Stella Chernak character was the epitome of that persona.

R118 of course you are right - it was Diana Canova - no wonder I couldn't find a clip of Manoff on YT.

I believe all clips of Dinah Manoff have been banned due to the fact that they cause seizures.

Diana Canova and Dinah Manoff ARE Florence Unger and Olive Madison in "The Odd Couple"!

Are most of the replies on this thread from OP??

R115 I just watched Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More. Ellen Burstyn’s impeccable bone structure must have been well hidden. When people talk about the great screen beauties I don’t hear the name Ellen Burstyn mentioned a whole lot. Maybe it’s me.

Ellen Burstyn is very pretty, r129. What sets her apart is that like Ingrid Bergman, she can be luminous on screen.

And she had vavoom.

R129 she was described as beautiful when she appeared in Tropic of Cancer (1970) and The Last Picture Show (1971)

I don’t see it but not going to argue if that’s what you think.

Sorry she, the director and the designers chose to go with making her look like her character, r133.

I agree R134 She was 42 years old when she made Alice and I never believed Kris Kristofferson's character would have fallen in love with her.

I never thought Burstyn was beautiful until I saw her in The Last Picture Show but she totally fit perfectly as the aging beauty and mother of Cybill Shepherd. Fun Fact: Burstyn's maiden name was Gilooly I wonder if she was related to Tonya Harding's ex.

Apparently she was going to smash Cloris Leachman in the knees but Polly Platt talked her out of it.

Didn’t she originally go buy the name Ellen MacRae, or....? Wait...let me look at Wikipedia.

Burstyn was credited as Ellen McRae until 1967, when she and her then-husband Neil Nephew both changed their surname to Burstyn, and she began to be credited as Ellen Burstyn

Real Name: Edna Rae

Wikipedia also states her bone structure was unremarkable. (Okay I made that up.)

She was only 3 and a half years older than Kris Kristofferson. I thought they looked about the same age and well matched. I could totally picture that guy he played wanting to go out with Alice.

Now, who knows? If either of these attractive people liked in a big city, maybe they would have had more of a pick of many interesting, exciting, younger or good looking dates. But having lived in less cosmopolitan places, myself...your choices are more limited, and you get together with other people for different reasons. Alice was he standout in that diner, for sure, and probably for many miles around.

(Edna Rae Gillooly, that is.)

Peter Bogdanovich was originally thinking of casting Dorothy Malone as Cybill’s mother in The Last Picture Show. I love Dorothy but she was a bit too old and Burstyn was perfect If somehow overshadowed by Cloiris Leachman a bit). Glad she picked Scorcese to direct Alice and help her get the Oscar.

I loved her on Mary Tyler Moore. Did she transition?

[Quote] She was only 3 and a half years older than Kris Kristofferson. I thought they looked about the same age and well matched. I could totally picture that guy he played wanting to go out with Alice.

She looks and seems considerably more than 3 years older than Kris despite their actual ages.

[quote] She always exudes sophistication but has an anger simmering underneath

Love that

R142 not today. He seems 100.

I didn’t think he seemed young in the movie. He had salt-and-petter hair and beard. He always seemed grizzled, to me. I never thought he was attractive at all, btw.

he seemed much younger than Alice though

R146 And yet...he wasn’t.

I was surprised when I saw the movie recently that Harvey Keitel was supposed to be a boyish young guy in his 20s, much too young for Alice. He actually looked not that much younger than Burstyn (to me, anyway) and in fact was only 7 years younger (his young wife, played by Lane Bradbury, was a year older than Keitel).

Burstyn getting old at last.

Didn't she get mowed over by a grand piano in Airport '77?

Lee Grant, the actor and director, generally leaves her apartment, on West End Avenue, once a week, to go to Pilates. In the fall, shortly before her ninety-eighth birthday, she made an exception to attend the New York Film Festival, where the first two films she directed were being shown in the revivals selection. Grant wore a red silky blouse, a black skirt, and a grommeted belt; her silver-streaked hair hung over her forehead in bangs. Her voice was strong and warm, with a hint of rasp. “From my heart to yours,” she told the audience.

First up: “The Stronger,” from 1976, a lightly Sapphic adaptation of a Strindberg one-act about two actresses in a love triangle. Next was “Tell Me a Riddle,” about a Jewish immigrant couple who met as revolutionaries in Russia and find themselves at embittered odds in their old age.

Afterward, in a panel discussion led by the Turner Classic Movies host Alicia Malone, Grant talked about how her directing career came to be. “I was in a movie called ‘Shampoo,’ ” Grant said. The audience cheered. “And Warren Beatty turned to me and said, ‘Lee, you’re forty-nine.’ ” Never mind that she went on to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as a Republican housewife smitten with Beatty’s horndog hairdresser. “He was saying, ‘So long, baby! This is Hollywood!’ And I was really fifty.” The next day, she got a call from the American Film Institute. “They said, ‘Do you know any actors who would like to take a directing workshop?’ And I go, ‘Me!’ ”

When the moment came, Grant felt underprepared. “I didn’t know which end on the camera was up,” she said. She turned to Fred Murphy, the cinematographer on “Tell Me a Riddle,” who was sitting to her left. “So it was Fred who said—well, what did you say?”

“I just told you it was simple trigonometry,” Murphy said.

Grant decamped to Café Paradiso for a celebratory dinner. Brooke Adams, who appeared in “Tell Me a Riddle” as the vivacious granddaughter, and is now a grandmother herself, was there. So were Mary Beth Yarrow, Grant’s friend and producer, and Joe Feury, Grant’s husband, whom she met in the sixties while doing a musical. “She had on sailor’s boots, a sailor’s top,” he said.

Over steak and ginger ale, Grant reminisced. She was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal, and grew up on 148th Street and Riverside. “My father was the head of the Bronx Y,” she said. “My mother and her sister, Fremo, came from Odessa, because they were killing the Jews.”

In her memoir, “I Said Yes to Everything,” Grant writes that her mother “was determined to plunge her hands into my baby fat and model me into a superior, beautiful being, who would either marry rich or rise above all others in the arts: ballet, theater.” Grant went with option two. As a teen, she studied acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and made her Broadway début, in 1949, as the Shoplifter in “Detective Story.” When she reprised the role in William Wyler’s 1951 film adaptation, she won a prize at Cannes and earned an Oscar nomination. “I was twenty-two,” she said, laughing her throaty laugh. “I didn’t know what the Oscars were.”

The same year, she was asked to speak at a memorial service for a blacklisted actor whom she had worked with onstage: “J. Edward Bromberg, who was part of the Group Theatre,” she said. “He was in a play that I was in that my husband”—her first, Arnold Manoff—“had written. My husband was a Communist, and I guess Bromberg was, too.” Grant told the mourners that Bromberg had been terrified of appearing in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee; he had a bad heart and worried that the stress might kill him. “The next day, I was blacklisted,” she said. “And for twelve years I didn’t work.”

She was summoned by huac, too. “Macho, fat, skinny, old men asking me the stupidest questions,” she recalled. She refused to name names. “They wanted to know if William Morris was a Communist. And I laughed!”

She was finally taken off the blacklist in 1964. “My first film job was ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ ” she said. “Norman Jewison, Hal Ashby, they knew all about me. They called me in and said, ‘Lee, this is your job if you want it. It’s about a woman who lost her husband.’ And I had lost mine.” (Divorce, in her case, not murder.)

Dessert arrived. Yarrow got up to make a toast. “To our dear, remarkable Lee, my dearest, dearest friend,” she said.

“What about me?” Feury said. Grant cracked up.

“Actually, right now, this is not about you,” Yarrow told him.

Grant rose. “This is like a dream to me,” she said.

Love that lady. I am "only" 44 and I always thought that she was beautiful and just so appealing in every film. Charisma.

So the NYer is on record reporting that she’s 98.

And let's not forget her and Dinah's most brilliant screen collaboration -- FOR LADIES ONLY.