Lee Grant - biography

“Every actor in the room honored Sidney for being there so many years before.  And everybody was so moved to be at a place where history was being made again.  It was tangible.”

“When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life.  Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.”

“A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again.  Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer’s name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.”

“I know what you go through when you learn someone close to you has died.”

“What goes on between a father and a son, which is usually such a private matter, is that they are able to be honest with each other, and be honest with me, as a director.  It’s just remarkable.”

“I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world.  I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then.”

“People break down after a couple of hours.  All the defenses go down, and there’s a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.”

“This is our lives.  The way to give it dignity is to tell the truth.”

“You don’t need a love scene to show love.”

“I’ve been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.”

“I am proud of Kirk.  I think he drums to his own drummer in every way.”

“It’s a very good feeling to be around a man who thinks women are juicy.”

“Kirk is a man, and he loves it.  He loves women.”

“I don’t think I fit the Marilyn Maxwell mode.”

“My instinct was that it was Sidney’s childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism.  So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.”

Lee Grant has appeared in the following films:
Detective Story (1951)
Middle of the Night (1959)
The Balcony (1963)
Divorce American Style (1967)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Valley of the Dolls (1967)
Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968)
Marooned (1969)
The Big Bounce (1969)
There Was a Crooked Man... (1970)
The Internecine Project (1974)
Shampoo (1975)
Voyage of the Damned (1976)
Airport ’77 (1977)
Damien: Omen II (1978)
The Swarm (1978)
The Mafu Cage (1978)
When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? (1979)
Little Miss Marker (1980)
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981)
Visiting Hours (1982)
Teachers (1984)
The Big Town (1987)
Defending Your Life (1991)
It’s My Party (1996)
The Substance of Fire (1996)
Dr T and the Women (2000)
Poor Liza (2000)
Mulholland Dr. (2001)


Lee Grant directed the following films:
Tell Me a Riddle (1980)