Lee Grant

Lee Grant (born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal; October 31, 1925) is an American actress, director, and producer whose career spans acting in over 70 films and television roles alongside documentary filmmaking focused on social issues. She launched her professional life as a child performer in New York City's Metropolitan Opera productions and later trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in her screen debut as a shoplifter in Detective Story (1951). Grant's ascent was interrupted by a twelve-year blacklist from the mid-1950s, imposed after she refused to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about her political affiliations and those of her screenwriter husband Arnold Manoff, who had been identified as a Communist Party member. Resuming work in the late 1960s, she secured the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for portraying a free-spirited divorcée in Shampoo (1975), marking a triumphant return amid the industry's recognition of her talent despite prior exclusion. Transitioning to directing, Grant produced and helmed documentaries examining economic hardship and labor struggles, culminating in a second Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Down and Out in America (1986), which chronicled poverty during the Reagan administration.

Lee Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal on October 31, 1927, in Manhattan, New York City, the only child of Jewish parents Abraham W. Rosenthal, an educator and real estate broker born in the Bronx to Orthodox Jewish immigrants, and Witia Haskell, a Russian Jewish immigrant from Odesa who worked as a teacher, model, and child care provider. The family resided on 148th Street and Riverside Drive in a middle-class household that valued education amid the economic hardships of the Great Depression, which began shortly after her birth and strained many urban families' finances through widespread unemployment and reduced opportunities in sectors like real estate.