Entertainment

Lee Grant on aging, relationships, and plastic surgery in her 20s

For Lee Grant, the stage and screen star who won an Oscar for her role as “bored, horny housewife” Felicia Karpf in 1973’s “Shampoo,” age was everything, signaling her viability in a tough market. Grant lived and died by her perceived youth and beauty, even undergoing cosmetic surgery while still in her 20s.

“The face of 10 years earlier; a girl again. This new girl did not have the downward pull of rejection and atrophy,” writes Grant of that operation in her new memoir “I Said Yes to Everything,” the title a nod to advice she followed through decades of work.

She might be forgiven for worrying about her looks: Because of husband Arnie Manoff’s membership in the Communist Party, Grant was blacklisted in 1952 by the House Un-American Activities Committee and banned from performing in TV or film until 1964. That career hiatus, spanning her most marketable years (ages 24 to 36), made the striking Grant agonizingly conscious of her sell-by date.

She once nearly lost the chance to attend an Italian film festival because her passport had a fake age; she shouted “I’m an actress, goddamnit, I’ve lied about my age my entire life. Why can’t you just do this for me?” at a city employee.

Her face wasn’t the only thing Grant changed.

She was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in New York City in 1927, modifying her name to “Lee Grant” around the time she joined the famed Actors Studio. As a child actor, The New York Times had called her “precocious,” and Grant is candid about her relationship with her “new best friend, the mirror. Want me. Want me. Everyone.”

Lee Grant with her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in “Shampoo,” alongside presenters Madeline Kahn and Joel GreyGetty Images

But her relationship with her beautiful, neurotic mother, Witia, a sometime actress and full-time drama queen, combined with her unfortunate early marriage to screenwriter Manoff, led Grant to a life of saying yes — and making mistakes. After being fired by Burt Lancaster from the cast of “The Young Savages,” she says she didn’t get it: “Now I do . . . I have a lot of people to apologize to in my life. I wish I could have done it when I had the chance.”

Grant in 1970Getty Images

Once Grant had left Manoff (who died shortly thereafter in 1960 at age 51) and was removed from the blacklist in 1964, she “reclaimed the visibility and height” of her previous career, yet knew it couldn’t last. “My ingenue years were gone, and my leading-lady years almost over.”

She fell in love with a younger actor, Joey Fioretti, and with her daughter, Dinah Manoff, the couple moved to Malibu and created a sun-kissed lifestyle including Brenda Vaccaro and Michael Douglas, Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett, Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, just to name a few. Grant’s “In the Heat of the Night” role opposite Sidney Poitier brought acclaim; her work in “Valley of the Dolls” brought celebrity.

Grant spills on her peers, including a feud with Shelley Winters and the loneliness of Grace Kelly. “I was never invited to anyone’s house,” Princess Grace told her, adding that she had no friends in Monaco. “The only time anyone asked me anywhere was to some big function, where they wanted me with the ribbon across my chest!”

Grant with Princess Grace of Monaco in 1977Getty Images

She’s candid about her mistakes, which are many and include turning her back on Joe Papp and his Shakespeare company when she was at “the height of my acting powers” in order to join the cast of TV’s “Peyton Place.”

“Joe Papp didn’t speak to me for years, but I had to go,” she writes. “I was 34. I felt I had only till 40, six more years, to work in television and film before my age and looks caught up with me.”

As a director, meanwhile, she once turned down a chance to cast Christopher Walken. “The best actor in the world . . . did I learn my lesson? I’ve never learned my lesson. I’ve made similar mistakes in project after project and lost them because of it.”

Grant in 1990Getty Images

Grant is less candid about her romantic encounters, admitting to a “swooning romance” with Burt Bacharach in 1963 that sounds anything but: “All he ever wanted to do was play the piano, watch basketball and the TV, and go to bed.” Much more satisfying is her “romantic and passionate and clandestine” post-“Shampoo” entanglement with Warren Beatty — though she incredibly claims it only involved kissing.

At the height of her career, Grant began forgetting her lines — once on stage with Peter Falk in “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” — and took this as a sign to adapt. She and Fioretti (who also renamed himself) founded Feury/Grant Productions, making documentaries including “A Matter of Sex” about workplace discrimination, “What Sex Am I?” about transgender issues, and “When Women Kill” about female incarceration. Grant won the 1987 Academy Award for the documentary about Reagan-era economics “Down and Out in America.”

It’s been a successful career, and Grant seems happy — though forever unable to escape her obsession with time.

“In these last two years, Joey, now 74, wakes up and takes my hand,” she writes. “He doesn’t want to lose me. I worry about his hip. We both run from the inevitable. We’re so, well, alive, we’re so young . . .”

Grant in NYC in AprilWireImage