Lee Grant, child of the Depression, survivor of the anti-communist blacklist, director, Oscar winner and – incredibly – 95 and looking nothing of the sort, is standing in her Manhattan kitchen. It is the size of a medieval castle’s, with copper pots hanging from the ceiling, a catering-size fridge and what appear to be three ovens. “They’re all used,” says Grant, triumphantly, a tone she has earned. For 12 years during the McCarthy-era witch-hunt of the 1950s, Grant was banned from working in Hollywood, re-emerging in the 60s to become not only a wildly successful actor, but one of the US’s finest documentary makers of the late 20th century. Over the course of our conversation, the phrase she uses most often is “I was lucky”.
If you have seen Grant on screen, it was most likely in one of her two best-known roles, from very different, seminal films. In 1967, she appeared as Mrs Colbert, the grieving widow, in the classic Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night. Eight years later, she played opposite Warren Beatty in the cult favourite Shampoo, for which she won an Oscar. Grant is a terrific actor, with a Zelig-like performance history that begins as a child dancer at the New York Ballet under George Balanchine (“My only memory of him is of my mother flirting with him; I was a fat little girl, that’s how I got in”), on through a scholarship at New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theater under Martha Graham, and, after her acting career was unfrozen at the age of 33 – “old for Hollywood!” – includes a heady decade living in Malibu knocking around in Joan Didion’s circle. “It was like entering The Truman Show. I get to live here? On the beach? With my eight-year-old daughter? Are you sure?! It was so delicious. And then I met Joey.”
