[msb-alumni] Shirley Knight, Oscar-nominated actress, has died at 83 on April 22, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 16:49:15 -0400
BlankShirley Knight, Oscar-nominated actress, has died at 83.
LOS ANGELES -- Shirley Knight, the Kansas-born actress who was nominated for
two
Oscars early in her career and went on to play an astonishing variety of roles
in
movies, TV and the stage, has died. She was 83. Knight passed away Wednesday at
her
daughter's home in San Marcos, Texas, according to her daughter Kaitlin Hopkins.
Knight's career carried her from Kansas to Hollywood and then to the New York
theater
and London and back to Hollywood. She was nominated for two Tonys, winning one.
In
recent years, she had a recurring role as Phyllis Van de Kamp (the
mother-in-law of
Marcia Cross' character) in the long-running ABC show Desperate Housewives,
gaining
one of her many Emmy nominations.
Knight's first Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress came in
just her
second screen role, as an Oklahoman in love with a Jewish man in the 1960 film
version of William Inges' play "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs."
She was nominated for best supporting actress two years later for her role as
the
woman seduced and abandoned by Paul Newman in the 1962 film "Sweet Bird of
Youth,"
based on the Tennessee Williams play.
As success beckoned in 1960, she told columnist Hedda Hopper that she was
struggling
to keep on an even keel and keep bettering herself as an actress.
"So many actors, once they became famous, lose some beautiful inner thing,
something
they should try hard to keep," she said. "They begin to think too highly of
themselves and success."
For a time, she lived in New York, where she studied with Lee Strasberg. She
turned
down an offer to play Ophelia to Richard Burton's Hamlet, preferring to appear
on
Broadway in 1964 with Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley in Anton Chekhov's "The
Three
Sisters," a play directed by Strasberg.
Her beauty helped bring her roles in such films as "The Group" (1966), based on
Mary
McCarthy's novel about the lives of a group of college girls, and "Dutchman"
(1967),
from Amiri Baraka's explosive one-act play about a middle-class black man and a
sexually provocative white woman.
After playing a pregnant woman who runs off with a football player in Francis
Ford
Coppola's "The Rain People," released in 1969, she wearied of the Hollywood
routine,
terming the studio bosses "blockheads."
Knight moved to England with her second husband, British playwright John
Hopkins,
with whom she had a daughter, Sophie. (Her first husband was producer Gene
Persoff,
father of her older daughter, Kaitlin). Over the next few years, she raised her
daughters and did needlework.
"But I decided that acting is what I do best," she said.
The family moved back to the U.S. and she returned to films in "Beyond the
Poseidon
Adventure." She also appeared in such films as "Endless Love" (as Brooke
Shields'
mother), "As Good as It Gets" (as Helen Hunt's mother) and "Divine Secrets of
the
Ya-Ya Sisterhood."
Meanwhile, she thrived on stage and television. She won a Tony award in 1976 as
best
featured actress in a play for Kennedy's Children. Knight played, in the words
of The
New York Times review, "a very tart tart with an ambition of gold."
She was nominated for another Tony in 1997 for best actress in Horton Foote's
"The
Young Man From Atlanta." As the Times put it, "the splendid Ms. Knight, who
doesn't
waste a single fluttery gesture, brings an Ibsenesque weight to a woman frozen
in the
role of petulant, spoiled child bride."
Knight became active in television starting in the '80s and was nominated for
Emmys
eight times from 1981 to 2006. She won a guest actress Emmy in 1988 for playing
Mel
Harris' mother in Thirtysomething, and then won two Emmys in the same year,
1995: one
for a supporting actress role in the TV drama Indictment: The McMartin Trial,
and a
second for a guest actress role as a murder victim in NYPD Blue.
She was born Shirley Enola Knight on July 5, 1936, in the Kansas countryside,
10
miles from the town of Lyons. Her family was musical and she learned to sing,
tap
dance and play instruments. She was the first in her family to enter college,
winning
a scholarship to a church college in Enid, Oklahoma, then moved to Wichita
State
University. She appeared in 32 plays in two years and did two seasons of summer
stock. She aimed to become an opera singer, then switched to acting when she
saw
Julie Harris in a touring company of The Lark. She traveled west to study
acting at
the Pasadena Playhouse. Warner Bros. signed her to a contract.
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