Lee Grant at Mid-Life: A New Career as Director

“I’m starting a new career in mid-life, which is pretty dumb when you think about it,” said actress-turned-director Lee Grant.

She received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as the shoplifter in “Detective Story” (1951), but had to begin her acting career anew (with her Emmy-winning performance in TV’s “Peyton Place”) after being blacklisted during the ‘50s. (Her then-husband, the late writer Arnold Manoff, was accused of having ties to the Communist Party by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She didn’t work in the industry for more than a dozen years.)

Now, the Oscar- and two-time Emmy-winning actress is attempting to clear yet another hurdle: the barrier to becoming a sought-after film director.

“I would like to get to the point where I have my picture a year,” said Grant, whose “Staying Together” opened Friday to mixed reviews. For Grant, the film, a coming-of-age story of three brothers in a rural South Carolina town, is the fruit of more than 10 years of struggling to break into a male-dominated field.

“I was trying to cross over from being a kind of well-known actress to ‘Give me the responsibility--and the money--to direct a picture,’ and I was making a demand that broke their (the Hollywood Establishment’s) circuit,” Grant said of her first forays into directing.

“I think it would be hard for anybody to make that transition . . . but, at that time, Hollywood was at a period when it was totally unacceptable to think of women as directors. . . . The desire was ahead of its time.”

Grant began pursuing a directing career in 1976 after winning an Oscar for best supporting actress in “Shampoo.”

“(The American Film Institute) called me one day,” the New York-based Grant said on a recent trip to Los Angeles, relaxing in friend Brenda Vaccaro’s Beverly Hills home. “They were doing their first women’s directing workshop and they called to have me recommend someone. I recommended myself.”

Grant said, however, that her original involvement with the workshop was merely on a whim.

“Your focus has to be so tunnel vision when you’re in front of the camera, that (directing) just had never, ever, occurred to me. I had no interest in it. Then they gave me a $350 budget, a producer and a camera crew. And it just broke open for me that side of the camera that I’d never thought of or been interested in before--bringing the whole story, the whole canvas, to the screen.”

After finishing the AFI workshop, and with a well-received short based on Strindberg’s “The Stronger” to show for it, Grant made her first feature film, “Tell Me a Riddle” with Melvyn Douglas and Lela Kedrova. Although the 1980 film received favorable reviews, it didn’t give her a high commercial profile.

After failing to get any additional features off the ground, Grant and her present producer-husband and partner, Joseph Feury, packed up and headed for New York.

In New York, Grant directed a documentary on “The Willmar 8,” later turned into an NBC TV movie. Then came several other documentaries for HBO, including the Academy Award-winning “Down and Out in America” and the recent “Battered.” Then came movies of the week, including the CBS movie “Nobody’s Child,” for which she received a Directors Guild Award.

“I think her projects speak for themselves--she’s an extraordinary director,” said Barbara Corday, CBS executive vice president of prime-time programs who worked with Grant on the upcoming CBS TV movie “No Place Like Home.”

Grant believes that inroads made by other women directors have helped her.

“In the last five years--I can’t say there’s been a revolution--but, well it’s almost like time-lapse photography. There really have been some charming and important and successful movies done in the last five years by women,” she said, citing such directors as Gillian Armstrong, Penny Marshall, Randa Haines and Joan Silver. “They really did it. They made it possible for me.”

She acknowledged before “Staying Together” opened that she had a lot riding on it. “There’s a lot hinging on this film--and I’m expecting mixed reviews on it.” And that’s what she’s gotten.

The Times’ Peter Rainer and USA Today’s Mike Clark did not look kindly on her directorial effort; Vincent Canby in the New York Times was short on praise for the film but said the fault wasn’t Grant’s, rather it was the implausibility of the film itself.

“Staying Together” executive producer John Daly said that regardless of how the film does, Grant should have a future as a director. His Hemdale Film Corp. would “absolutely” hire her again, he said: “The signs are that she’s going to be getting an opportunity to direct in the future.”

Grant seems to take her hard climb up the directorial ladder in stride. “I find the rise and fall to not only be a normal part of my life, but one that I really like, because obstacles are very challenging to me. As long as I’m in motion, I’m OK,” said Grant, whose age has been reported between 58 and 60.

“But now I’m older and I don’t have all that time stretching ahead of me. Maybe I’m more driven because of that.”