The New York actress who was nominated for her first Oscar at twenty-four, blacklisted the same year for refusing to testify against her husband, returned to Hollywood twelve years later, and won the Oscar at forty-nine. The blacklist gave her the second career. The second career was better than the first would have been.
Portrait · Lee Grant
Born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal on October 31, 1927, in New York City — the daughter of a Hebrew teacher and a women's clothing buyer, raised in the Bronx, studying at the Metropolitan Opera School from the age of four, at the High School of Music and Art, and at the Juilliard School and the Neighborhood Playhouse. She made her Broadway debut in 1949 and her film debut in William Wyler's Detective Story (1951), for which she received her first Academy Award nomination at twenty-four.
The nomination arrived simultaneously with the HUAC subpoena of her husband, the playwright Arnold Manoff. She refused to confirm or deny information about him to the Committee. The result was twelve years on the blacklist — no film or television work, sustained primarily by theatre work that the Committee's reach did not fully extend to. She was twenty-four when the blacklist began and thirty-six when it ended. The years in between, she has said, made her the actress she became.
Her return began in television and found its footing in Hal Ashby's Shampoo (1975) — Felicia, the Beverly Hills wife who knows everything that is happening around her and chooses which of it to acknowledge. The Oscar at forty-nine; the most delayed major recognition in the history of the Academy Awards; and the performance that demonstrated what twelve years of theatre training had added to the instrument that had already been good enough for a nomination at twenty-four.
She subsequently directed — winning an Academy Award for her documentary Down and Out in America (1986) — and continued to act in films including Voyage of the Damned (1976), Damien: Omen II (1978), and Mulholland Falls (1996). She has taught at the Actors Studio and published a memoir, I Said Yes to Everything, in 2014.
Felicia's quality — the Beverly Hills wife who has bought into everything the culture offered and retained the intelligence to see through it — is played by Grant with a comic precision that never softens into caricature. Her final scene, in which Felicia confronts what she already knew, is the film's moral centre: the woman who has been performing not-knowing finally stops the performance.
The shoplifter's terror — not the conventional guilt of a person who has been caught, but the specific panic of a person from a vulnerable background encountering the machinery of institutional power — is played by Grant with a psychological specificity that goes well beyond what the role's size required. Wyler said she was the best actor in the film. Douglas, who was the film's star, has never contradicted this.
Grant's performance in Voyage of the Damned carries biographical weight that the script did not need to provide: as a Jewish actress who had been blacklisted by a Committee whose methods the film's antagonists would have recognised, she brought to the material an understanding of institutional persecution that was not academic. The Oscar nomination confirmed the range — comic intelligence in Shampoo, historical gravity here — across a single twelve-month period.
The film's argument — that the prosperity of the Reagan years was sustained by the invisible suffering of people the prosperity had left behind — is made not through polemic but through the specific faces and voices of people who had fallen through the system. Grant's directorial voice is the same as her acting voice: the intelligence that sees clearly and the commitment that insists on showing what it sees.
The blacklist gave me twelve years of theatre. I learned more in those twelve years than I had in the twelve before them. I don't recommend it as a training method. But it worked.
Lee Grant's legacy is the refusal — the twenty-four-year-old who said no to HUAC and paid twelve years for it — and the career the refusal produced when the blacklist finally ended. Four Oscar nominations, two wins (acting and directing), the most delayed major recognition in Academy history, and a political commitment that the blacklist tried and failed to extinguish.
HUAC intended to silence her. It produced instead a better actress and a filmmaker. The work she made after the blacklist — Shampoo, Voyage of the Damned, Down and Out in America — is the direct expression of the values HUAC tried to destroy, made by an instrument those twelve years had sharpened rather than dulled.