’60s icon Lee Grant, who was born in the mid-1920s, had her movie debut in 1951’s Detective Story. The brilliant delivery of her role in the movie earned her a nod for Best Supporting Actress, and she went on to win the Best Actress Award during the Cannes Film Festival the following year.
Lee Grant’s career has been marked by controversies ranging from her communist connection to lying about her age. Hollywood blacklisted her in 1964 due to her political ideation, and by the mid-’60s, she fought her way back to freedom and started building her career again.
’60s icon Lee Grant shares her actual age
2003.
2/12/04
Lee Grant at “A Conversation about Love” presented by The Week Magazine.
(NYC)
Despite her thriving career and Hollywood success, Lee Grant’s birth date remained a decade-long mystery until recently when she revealed her age to be 98. Before the recent revelation, the actress told CBS Morning in a 2014 interview her thoughts about her age when she won her Oscar award for Best Supporting Actress in the 1976 movie Shampoo.
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“As I went up, something came over me of knowing that I was going to be too old for the kind of parts that I played, that I’d been running from disclosing my age, and knowing that age would always be against me,” she said. “This was it.” CBS’s Michelle Miller questioned her further about it, and the actress wasn’t still ready to divulge the secret, “What do you want me to say, Michelle?” the 98-year-old replied. “No! I can’t tell you that.”
Is Lee Grant really 98 years old?
Also, in an interview with Forward in 2023, Lee Grant told the interviewer that she was 97-and-half before joking that the reporter wasn’t taking her age reveal seriously. “Wait a minute, you’re supposed to react to that, kid!” she reacted. “You’re supposed to say ‘What?! You’re kidding!’ Do your part. You’re supposed to react to that.”
It seems the actress intentionally gave the information out, as it has now been confirmed that her date of birth is October 31, 1925. Grant also recently gave the nod to a post by IndieWire, which names her the Oldest living director in Hollywood, as she shared the link to the story and captioned it, “Well, look at that.”