A biography for Lee Granthasn’t been written yet.
“I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world. I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then.”
“I find that the stuff on television is more exciting than the films, which are for teens almost.”
“I started writing to reassure myself that I was still all here.”
“Usually, the worst films become cult films.”
“People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.”
“My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.”
“I was 22, and 40 was old. To be 40 again!”
“The best actors just stay in the moment,and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what's going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don't know if you're going to survive.”
“I was such a Jewish princess. My whole life was leading up to marrying a rich man and living on 48th Street.”
“A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer's name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.”
“I am proud of Kirk. I think he drums to his own drummer in every way.”
“I pretty much always stuck to the most interesting part I could play.”
“When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.”
“Kirk is a man, and he loves it. He loves women.”
“Since I'd developed this fear of not remembering my lines, I took 'Mulholland Drive' as a test for myself. It was a long monologue: no one else speaks.”
“I don't think I fit the Marilyn Maxwell mode.”
“What goes on between a father and a son, which is usually such a private matter, is that they are able to be honest with each other, and be honest with me, as a director. It's just remarkable.”
“I was 24 when I was blacklisted. I was 36 when I got off the blacklist. How much of a life does an actress have in L.A. past 25? ... I was really scared of having producers know that I was on my way to 40.”
“I was such a New Yorker, I hardly knew what the Oscars were.”
“I know what you go through when you learn someone close to you has died.”