At the beginning of the 1950s, Lee Grant had one of the most promising careers in Hollywood.
She had made a splash on Broadway in 1948 as a young shoplifter in the play Detective Story, before her 25th birthday. Three years later, she starred opposite Kirk Douglas in the big-screen adaptation and earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress and the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Unfortunately, timing was not on the side of Grant, who turns 100 on Oct. 31. (Though the exact year of her birth has been disputed, public records indicate it is 1925.) In an upcoming episode of Life Stories' YouTube anthology documentary series The Thread, currently in its third season, Grant discusses what happened next. Her professional ascent happened to coincide with the pursuit of alleged Hollywood communists that was led by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy.
Grant, who was considered guilty by association (she had married screenwriter Arnold Manoff, a communist, in 1951), had a target on her career.
"I was blacklisted," Grant recalls in her episode of The Thread, premiering Nov. 9 on the Life Stories' YouTube channel. "And so for the next 12 years, I couldn't work in film or television. I kept on being called by the Un-American Activities Committee to name my husband, Arnie Manoff, who was a communist. And that's all they wanted. They wanted me to name my husband."
Her refusal to testify against Manoff put both of their careers on hold for more than a decade, though Manoff, as Grant explains in the episode, found some loopholes.
"Well, they all worked under the table for… you know, there were great people at the TV stations," Grant continues. "Arnie used Joel Carpenter as his name to write under. And they were rogues in a way, you know. They were charming and funny and interesting and undercover. And there was something about that and about beating the system and writing all these things that had a kind of… I don't know, but it had a kind of fun to it along with the danger."
The actress, who was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal, gave birth to their daughter, future Empty Nest actress Dinah Manoff, in 1956, and had to sit on the sidelines until her husband's death in 1965. That year, she was cast on the prime-time soap Peyton Place, and she won an Emmy for that role in 1966.
From there, her screen career took off again, with roles in 1967's In the Heat of the Night and Valley of the Dolls, 1970's The Landlord (for which she received her second best supporting actress Oscar nomination), 1975's Shampoo (which finally earned her the best supporting actress Oscar) and 1976's Voyage of the Damned (Oscar nod No. 4).
In the decades since, she has continued to work steadily, as both an actress and a director. In 1986, the made-for-TV movie Nobody's Child, which Grant directed, won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Specials. That same year, the Grant-directed documentary Down and Out in America won the Oscar for best documentary feature, making her the only Oscar-winning actor to direct an Oscar-winning documentary.
“I’ve made great documentaries, really great documentaries and important ones,” she told Vanity Fair in 2020. “They were my war against the people who were blacklisting — to be able to speak with my own voice.”
The Thread: Lee Grant will be available to stream on the Life Stories' YouTube channel @LifeStoriesInterviews starting Nov. 9.
Article by Jeremy Helligar