00:00Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today, our source material guides us through, well, just an extraordinary life.
00:06We're looking at actress, pioneering director, industry legend Lee Grant.
00:10And it's a journey that covers almost 100 years. It's defined by incredible talent, yes, but also immediate political sabotage.
00:18And then this amazing second act, Hollywood's oldest living director, actually.
00:23Right. Her story is just a masterclass in resilience.
00:26Absolutely.
00:26Okay, so let's unpack this a bit. The core tension really is this. She gets an Oscar nomination. She's maybe 25 years old.
00:34Yeah, incredibly young.
00:35And then just two days later, the blacklist basically vaporizes her career, gone. But then, decades on, she completely reinvents herself, wins another Oscar, but this time for directing.
00:46And that's our mission today, isn't it? To really understand the mechanics of that survival.
00:50How does someone endure 12 years of being, for all intents and purposes, erased? And what kind of sheer force did it take for a woman, then in her 50s, to not just break into directing, but to shatter, like one of the biggest glass ceilings in Hollywood?
01:04And connecting her early career to the later work, there's this final detail she revealed just recently, which is fascinating.
01:11She lied about her birth year, 1925, for decades.
01:16Decades.
01:16And it wasn't vanity. It was purely about survival. A strategy, really, that kind of defines her whole story.
01:23Yeah, to get that relentless survival instinct, you really have to go back to the beginning. She was born Leova Haskell Rosenthal in Manhattan. Her parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants fleeing violence in Odessa.
01:33And her mother, Whittia, seems to have been the driving force behind her early career, just relentless pushing.
01:39Oh, absolutely. The sources paint a picture of incredible tension, Whittia's ambition, the disapproval from the father's Orthodox parents.
01:48Lee Grant didn't really have a childhood in the typical sense. She had a career.
01:51From age four, essentially.
01:52By age four, she was performing at the Metropolitan Opera, cast as the Kidnapped Princess and Laura Cololo.
01:57Got scholarship from that, which only seemed to intensify her mother's focus.
02:02And the sources mention some really extreme examples of that pressure.
02:07Whittia forcing her to perform in blackface at school, just desperate for applause.
02:12Mm-hmm. And then that layer of profound personal trauma.
02:17Finding her mother after a suicide attempt when Lee was only about 10, she said that moment just never left her.
02:24God, how awful.
02:25And then just as she's building momentum in the arts, another blow.
02:28She gets into the American Ballet Theater at 11, super young, one of the youngest ever.
02:33But then she has a growth spurt, grows several inches almost overnight, suddenly too tall for her partners.
02:38Yeah.
02:39Ballet career over. Just like that.
02:41And the family was depending on this income?
02:43They were depending on that dream financially.
02:44So, yeah, it vanished instantly.
02:47So what does that mean for a 12-year-old girl during the Great Depression?
02:50It meant she became the breadwinner.
02:52Total responsibility.
02:54By 12, she's paying rent, utilities, living off New Deal programs, sometimes going hungry, the sources say.
03:00But she always, always found a way to perform.
03:03That kind of pressure cooker start definitely shaped the actress who was ready for her big break in the late 40s.
03:13Changed her name to Lee Grant at 17 for Broadway, but still had that gutsiness.
03:18Oh, totally.
03:19When she auditioned for the play Detective Story in 1949, she was only 22.
03:24But she refused the young ingenue role.
03:26No kidding.
03:27Demanded to read for the 40-year-old shoplifter.
03:30She based the voice, apparently, on women she'd overhear riding the buses in New York.
03:35A really specific, bold choice.
03:37And it paid off.
03:39Big time.
03:40Won the Critic Circle Award.
03:41Then the film version in 51 with Kirk Douglas lands her that first Oscar nomination.
03:47She's 25.
03:48Everyone thinks she's heading for super stardom.
03:49And right there, that's where this political tragedy just slams into her life with terrifying speed.
03:55The timeline is what's really striking.
03:57Two days.
03:59Two days after the Oscar nomination, her name shows up in Red Channels.
04:02Instantly labeled a communist sympathizer.
04:05Instantly.
04:05And let's clarify for listeners, Red Channels wasn't an official government list, right?
04:09It was that private, anti-communist industry publication that basically functioned as the blacklist.
04:14Exactly.
04:15Wielded immense power.
04:16So what was the trigger?
04:17Why her?
04:18It seems to have been a combination of things.
04:21Yeah.
04:21Association, mainly.
04:22Her husband at the time, screenwriter Arnold Minhoff, was involved with the Communist Party,
04:27though she later claimed she never really understood or supported it deeply.
04:31Okay.
04:31But the specific public act, the thing that likely pushed it over the edge, was a eulogy she gave for an actor,
04:38where she openly blamed government pressure, H-U-A-C, for his death.
04:43That was likely enough.
04:44And the consequences were immediate.
04:45Absolutely devastating.
04:47Pulled from a role in a streetcar named Desire.
04:49Studio contracts just vanished overnight.
04:52Kirk Douglas later said her huge future was simply stolen.
04:56And the cost wasn't just professional.
04:57It became deeply personal.
04:59The FBI tapped her phone.
05:01They followed her.
05:01Constant surveillance.
05:03She described feeling like she was always being watched, like she was, quote, dancing on the head of a pin.
05:07That chilling phrase.
05:09So, this paralysis lasts for 12 years.
05:12Her entire prime earning years, really.
05:15We talked about the psychological impact, but just practically, how does a major star survive financially for over a decade with zero access to film or TV work?
05:23Well, the financial hit was immediate and brutal.
05:26Her income crashed from around $75,000 before the blacklist of fortune back then.
05:32Huge money.
05:32To maybe $4,000 by 1962.
05:35She talks about pawning jewelry just to buy food for her daughter, Dina.
05:39But the survival strategy itself is kind of the hidden story, isn't it?
05:42She found loopholes.
05:44Ingenious ones.
05:45Since the main roots were blocked, she took tiny roles in live theater.
05:49Actors' Equity, the union, actually protected blacklisted performers, so she could earn maybe $55 a week there.
05:55$55.
05:57But crucially, she turned her apartment into a secret acting school.
06:00No way.
06:01Yeah.
06:01Charging, like, $25 a session for private lessons, a hidden master class happening in her living room.
06:07Just keep the lights on.
06:08Imagine that.
06:08Your acting tuition is literally paying the electric bill for a blacklisted Oscar nominee.
06:13That's incredible.
06:14And her first student was Sandy Dennis.
06:16Her very first student, who later won her own Oscar.
06:20Amazing footnote.
06:20But that whole period, the constant need to watch what she said, who she associated with, it left scars, right?
06:27The memory issues.
06:28Yes, that's a really important point.
06:30After her interview with HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, she developed serious memory problems, struggled to recall names, even close friends.
06:39A direct result of that intense state-sanctioned paranoia.
06:44She said that trauma never fully went away.
06:46Just awful.
06:48How did the return finally happen?
06:49How did she get cleared?
06:50It wasn't a sudden change in political climate, really.
06:53It came down to her lawyer performing some kind of favor for someone connected to HUAC.
06:58A backroom deal, essentially.
06:59Her name was finally cleared in 1964.
07:01And she hit the ground running.
07:03Immediately.
07:03Lended a big role in the TV show Peyton Place in 1965.
07:07Did 71 episodes.
07:08It was a massive hit.
07:09And she won an Emmy for it in 1966.
07:11It's like she could finally pour all those years of suppressed emotion back into her craft.
07:15And she seemed to consciously blend that real-life pain with her roles.
07:20The story about In the Heat of the Night in 67 is powerful.
07:23It really is.
07:25She had a scene where Sidney Poitier's character tells her that her husband is dead.
07:30Now, at that exact time, Lee Grant was genuinely grieving the recent death of her ex-husband, Arnold Manoff.
07:36The one connected to the blacklist.
07:38Right.
07:38And she believed the stress of the blacklist had essentially killed him.
07:42So, in that scene, her grief was real.
07:44She was crying for Arnold.
07:45The director just kept the cameras rolling.
07:47Sposing the raw pain?
07:49Wow.
07:49So, she comes back.
07:50She's triumphant.
07:51She even wins her first acting Oscar for Shampoo in 1976.
07:56Which was a tiny role, wasn't it?
07:57Like, one of the shortest performances ever to win.
07:59Just 18 minutes of screen time.
08:01But even with that win, she felt the industry was already starting to sideline her again.
08:05She was 50, though, telling people she was younger.
08:09And Hollywood was deciding she was too old for significant parts.
08:12The ageism kicking in, even after an Oscar win.
08:15Exactly.
08:16So, she makes this incredibly strategic pivot.
08:18Totally proactive.
08:20Realizes if they won't hire her for the roles she wants, she has to create her own work.
08:25She enrolls in the AFI Women's Director's Workshop.
08:27A conscious decision to take control.
08:29And it led to immediate history-making moments.
08:31By 1980, she directs her first feature, Tell Me Your Whittle.
08:36And this film is significant because it was the first American movie written, produced, and directed entirely by women.
08:42She raised the money herself, too, didn't she?
08:44Over a million dollars.
08:45Single-handedly.
08:46Yeah.
08:46Which is an incredible drive.
08:48And this really kicks off her directing legacy.
08:50She didn't just transition quietly.
08:51She broke down major barriers.
08:53The Director's Guild Award in 86.
08:55Huge.
08:56For the CBS film Nobody's Child, she was the very first woman in the DGA's 51-year history to win in that specific category, television movie, or miniseries director.
09:0751 years.
09:08That's astounding.
09:09And she used that platform, that power, immediately.
09:12Started tackling tough, politically charged subjects that others wouldn't touch.
09:16It reflected her own progressive politics, sure, but also that deep-seated survival instinct forged over decades.
09:22She became an activist with a camera.
09:24Absolutely.
09:24In 1985, she directs What Sex Am I?
09:28A really candid documentary about transgender lives during the height of the Reagan era.
09:33Very brave for its time.
09:35And the next year, down and out in America.
09:37Which looked unflinchingly at poverty under Reagan.
09:41It apparently earned her death threats, but it also tied for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars.
09:45It was actually HBO's first ever Oscar win.
09:48And that Oscar gave her this unique distinction, didn't it?
09:51An absolutely unique one.
09:52She remains the only person in history to have won an Oscar for acting and an Oscar for directing a documentary.
09:59Nobody else has done that.
10:00So you look at this whole arc, pioneer actress, blacklist survivor, pioneer director, smashing glass ceilings left and right.
10:07And yet, she still felt she had to lie about her age right up until 2023.
10:12What does that tell us?
10:13It tells us that survival instinct never left her, because the industry's biases never fully went away.
10:18She only revealed the truth 97 and a half, born 1925, when she finally felt perhaps safe enough.
10:23The data she cited showed women over 50 get something like 78% fewer roles than men their age.
10:29So the lie was always a professional necessity, pure self-preservation.
10:33Written large across nearly a century, the blacklist didn't just steal 12 years.
10:38It shaped the activist who then used her director's chair, her camera lens, for the next four decades to make damn sure she was never silenced again.
10:47Her memoir title, I Said Yes to Everything, takes on a really complex meaning then.
10:52It really does.
10:53When you consider the intense pressure, the childhood trauma, the political persecution, the industry sexism, what does saying yes even mean when survival is literally the only choice you feel you have?
11:05It's a profound question about the real cost of having a career, especially for women in that era.
11:10A truly remarkable life built on defiance right to the end.
11:13Thank you for joining us for this deep dive.
11:15We'll see you next time.
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