Actress, director, and author Lee Grant will be honored this year at the Split Screens Festival. According to an announcement from the television fest, Grant will receive its first Legacy Award, which pays tribute to “an individual whose career has had a lasting impact on television.” Split Screens will present the award to Grant on June 5, in partnership with AMC Networks.
One of Grant’s first films, 1951’s “Detective Story,” earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. But her success was short-lived. In 1952 the House Un-American Activities Committee — aka the Communist Witch Hunt Club — ordered Grant to testify against her husband, playwright Arnold Manoff. She refused and was blacklisted as a result.
Luckily that wasn’t the end of her career. She won an Emmy in 1966 and for her turn as Stella Chernak on nighttime soap “Peyton Place” and an Academy Award for her supporting role in “Shampoo.” After making her comeback as an actress, she shifted gears. She “channeled her political awareness into a career as a director of socially aware fiction and nonfiction films, tackling such hot-button subjects as workplace discrimination (‘A Matter of Sex’), transgender identity (‘What Sex Am I?’), poverty and Reaganomics (‘Down and Out in America’), and sexism in medical treatment (the TV movie ‘Nobody’s Child’)”, the Split Screens website details. She won a Director’s Guild Award for “Nobody’s Child,” becoming the first woman ever to receive the honor.
“Lee Grant is the history of television,” Split Screens Creative Director and TV/film critic Matt Zoller Seitz told Women and Hollywood. “She’s one of the most important trailblazing women in both film and television, and the way she remade herself over and over again is inspiring.” “Lee has done it all,” he added.
“Mulholland Drive,” “Dr. T & the Women,” and “Defending Your Life” are among Grant’s other screen credits. In 2014 she published her memoir, “I Said Yes to Everything.”
The Split Screens Festival is June 2–8, 2017 at the IFC Center in New York City. Head over to the fest’s website for more information.
