Early success led to remarkable range of roles
Actress
SHIRLEY KNIGHT, a Kansasborn actress, was nominated for two Oscars early in her career and went on to play an astonishing variety of roles in movies, television and on the stage.
She died in Texas on April
22, aged 83.
Knight’s career carried her from Kansas to Hollywood then to the New York theatre 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 motherinlaw of Marcia Cross’ character) in the longrunning ABC show Desperate Housewives, which gained her one of her many
Emmy nominations.
Knight’s first Academy Award nomination for 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 Inge’s play
The Dark at the Top of the
Stairs.
She was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar two years later for her performance 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 continue 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, 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 oneact play about a middleclass 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, Knight wearied of the Hollywood routine, terming the studio bosses “blockheads”.
Knight became active in television starting in the 1950s 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 won two Emmys in the same year, 1995: for a supporting actress role in the TV drama Indictment: The McMartin Trial and for a guest actress role as a murder victim in NYPD Blue.
Knight is survived by her daughters, Kaitlin and Sophie Hopkins. — AP